kdsburneraccount

Recently been thinking about how team sports are kind of like boy bands in the sense that you have a bunch of young (I guess) men all grouped together and made for perform in some way. Their masculinity is often scrutinized, especially on social media, and there are parasocial relationships created between fans and said performers. Admittedly, the demographics are different, but there are similarities. Oftentimes both boy band members and athletes are in advertisements. Their looks are scrutinized. Both are signed to contracts based on their performance, and if the performance is not met oftentimes they cannot have a career. So on and so forth.

I noticed that some sports tumblr fans had a kpop phase, or still were in kpop fandom, and it did make me think about the parallels between a boyband and a sports team. There are interpersonal dynamics involved, for sure, and those are often recorded by social media interns to foster goodwill in parasocial relationships. Or at least let fans get the feeling that they are getting to know the celebrity better.

I came across this thing called "bleak boyband bingo" while I was scrolling through a Hockey RPF blog. According to their carrd it was meant to summarize some shitty experiences of boyband life, and then came to summarize the general kpop idol experience. In the Hockey RPF blog, they modified it more to be about relationships, so I looked at the original bingo and found it to have a lot of interesting parallels to sports.

(A rundown, now)

Capitalism induced "found" family - I mean. Sports teams are built to be as good as possible. Whatever themes of male on male camaraderie are espoused in a sports team's social media do have the underlying message of "we need to win games." And that is sort of tied to capitalism because if a team is bad then how will it sell tickets...

Things that don't need much elaboration: age vs talent hierarchies, mixed talent levels, toxic rivalry, clout chasing friends from back home, intricate rituals to touch the skin of other men, inflated ego due to being smartest of the illiterates, members leaving and group continuing, last minute addition to group.

There's probably more, but I'm lazy. I might be generalizing but this reminds me of a Tumblr post I read about the state of Hockey RPF where op was talking about how "old school hrpf" wouldn't be afraid to go into the darker side of what being famous was like. Personally, I think a lot of fic is written just to have a nice little romance story in it. But I will admit that exploring the themes of the consequences of fame is pretty interesting. (Warning, generalization: I think some older fandom folk yearn for the early 2000s LiveJournal fic with internalized homophobia. At the same time, someone did point out that there is an undercurrent of misogyny in a lot of early Hockey RPF. So I dunno. I'm not super well versed in Hockey RPF, but that is the sports fandom with the most documented history.) Stuff like toxic masculinity can be explored in both boyband and sports fic, and yeah.