My Top Hobbies Are Shame And Embarrassment But I Also Occasionally Dabble In Envy

Don’t think about malnourished baby Sammy. Don’t think about little four year old Dean begging his Dad to buy formula instead of ammunition, of four year old Dean burning himself trying to warm up Sammy’s milk. Don’t think about Dean waking up every couple hours after crawling into Sammy’s crib to make sure he was still breathing. Don’t think of little four year old Dean who used to beg to feed his little brother his bottle, now not having another option. Don’t think about baby Sammy getting sick and Dean begging John to make him a doctors appointment to make sure he’s okay. Don’t think of baby Sammy learning to walk with his older brother holding his hands, of baby Sammy crying when he sees John because he doesn’t recognize his own dad. Don’t think of baby Sammy calling Dean dad, or the fact that Sam’s first steps were towards Dean. Don’t think about the fact that the doctors were worried about Sam’s weight at that doctors appointment, and ever since, Dean has made sure that Sammy always had enough to eat, even at the cost to his own health.

Don’t think about twelve year old Dean collapsing on the first night of a hunt because he hadn’t eaten in four or five days, because Sammy needed the food. Don’t think about John yelling at Dean asking what the hell is wrong with him etc. and Dean just shrugs it off. Because he’s fine. And he ignores it. He shoves the aching for food way down and ignores it. So, when they go back into town because they hit a dead end, and get food at a diner, Dean gorges on the food, and eats half of John’s too. Don’t think about John seeing this, having a flash of worry but ignoring it because “it’s Dean he’s always fine.” Don’t think about Dean worrying the first time Sammy called him Dad because “no, no, no, Sammy, I’m your big brother Dean.” Because he’s worried that his Dad is going to freak out if he hears Sammy calling Dean dad.

Don’t think about the fact that Sam probably didn’t learn the word Mom until he was at school because it wasn’t something his dad and Dean said. Don’t think about Sam driving alone for the first time and hitting a dear and calling Dean because he didn’t trust that his dad would answer. Don’t think about Dean, sitting in some motel at 23 years old after a fight with his dad who stormed off debating calling Sam because he’s the only one who would get it.

Don’t think about the Winchester brothers as little kids left alone in motel rooms for too long, underfed, and unsure of when their Dad was going to be back.

Fox: I am very busy, do not disturb me.

*locks door*

*dials comm chain link*

Fox: You got time? I really need to vent.

Grievous: *cough* go on, what did he do today?

Fox: So Palps wants this police state thing and its a lot of work...

Grievous: How ANNOYING! He wants me to attack Kamino for the gene code instead of just stealing it.

Fox: Yeah we know. Good luck. Do me a favour and aim at the long neck scientists but avoid my brothers.

Grievous: Will do. About that police state thing - does he at least pay you for the extra hours?

Fox: Don't even get me started.

Grievous: uh! *cough cough* besti! He does not know your worth!

They descend

So today, in a conversation about some older hrpf fandom lore, I got asked if I could talk about Sid’s public image and fandom interpretations and Nate’s influence on him over the years. And I said, boy, can I.

So to start out, it really cannot be stressed enough that pre-2015-ish, Sid’s initial public image and his characterisation in fandom was pretty hard on the babygirlification and leaned hard into spacetoaster (the original “hockey robot” trope). this was due to a number of factors, mainly:

he was a very young and chubby-faced player in the league (and there weren’t any twinks around)

he was exceptionally good at hockey and the youngest captain to ever win the cup

he notoriously never, ever, ever gave away even a hint of his personality in front of a camera.

Sid was media trained to the gills at a really young age. some of the first articles about him in local newspapers appeared as early as ages 6 and 7, and by the time he hit around 14 and it was clear that he’d stuck with the course and was pretty set to play in the NHL at some point, more and more media attention swung his way. His first endorsement deal I think happened at age 15 or 16. After Gretzky retired in ’99, —and especially after the lockout in 2005, to this day the biggest lockout in North American sports history— most hockey fans were hungry for The Next One. Jágr and Yzerman were still around for sure, and Mario un-retired in 2000 to save the Pens from bankruptcy, but they were aging, and they weren’t Gretzky. No one was. And there were few players that seemed as promising as Sid.

So, given that Sid was drafted in the mid-2000s before social media was rampant, and celebrity information still came out mostly via wildly invasive tabloids, Sid’s early career was marked by a notorious lack of personal information about him. Basically a perfect breeding ground for fanon interpretations to run rampant, but they weren’t entirely unfounded either. Sid was clearly an absolute freak of nature (affectionate) on the ice, and some of the early information (mostly via PR obligations and PensTV) that leaked out over the years gave fans little crumbs of his personality that basically amounted to: loves being chirped; his teammates call him “Creature”; likes his fun-loving teammates (mostly the pranking ones, like Flower and Max Talbot, but Sid was never caught helping with pranks by media); is an excellent Captain; and (via whispers and rumours floating around from people that had been there to see it) he seems to be an upstanding guy that’s really involved with a shitload of charity work on the down low. A lot of this info also came after the fact via articles and short PR videos. For example, turns out that Sid personally pioneered the Little Penguins with his own money, which ultimately kickstarted league-wide initiatives for kids’ programs to learn hockey and for teams to donate equipment. In an article years after the fact, it came out he fought for some tickets to his Juniors games in Rimouski to be set aside for a cheaper price so low-income families could attend.

So that was what we knew until around 2010. He won a cup in 2009 and very little footage of those celebrations leaked out, and he won an Olympic gold in 2010 and became Canada’s Golden Boy. He only did the bare minimum of PR, and never attended the All-Star Game (10 bucks says mostly to avoid the PR there, too). It’s genuinely hard to overstate how much he avoided the public eye.

Then came the concussion years. The first injury happened on January 1st, 2011 in the Winter Classic against the Washington Capitals. It’s pretty wild to look back on it now, but Sid’s injury and everything around it ended up doing a lot of legwork towards taking concussions more seriously in the league. While the NHL still won’t admit to the long-term harm of concussions and concussion syndrome, it’s hard to describe just how long of a way they’ve come in the last fifteen years. Concussion awareness and a tightening of the concussion protocols became more prevalent after The Face of The League was injured with one for so long— of course, it’s not something you can pretend isn’t a big deal when the league’s star player spends almost two years out of commission with one.

So Sid was essentially in and out of the lineup between 2011 and 2013, when he broke his jaw. He recovered from the concussion in time for the 2012 playoffs, but in 2012/13 the half-season lockout happened until January of ‘13, and his jaw injury was sustained at the end of March, right before the playoffs in 2013. He did play a couple games in a full cage, and he had excellent stats, but he was still injured that entire time. During his injured years there was medical information (there is footage of a really hard-to-watch press conference out there about his concussion, let me tell you) and some personal information that became known to the public, but it was kept as much on lockdown as the team could. I assume it was to give him as much privacy as possible. The big exception was, of course, his angry “I don’t like any guy on their team” monologue that burst out of him during a post-game during the 2012 playoff series against the Flyers. That was the most impassioned thing Sid had pretty much ever publicly said after years of spouting so much empty regurgitated hockey media bullshit otherwise. The media ate it up of course. In general both before and after that, there were a lot of press vultures circling during that time. After all, with all those injuries there was a lot of anxiety that, well: Sidney Crosby, generational talent and Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux’s spiritual heir, would never play hockey again.

That brings us to the summer of 2013. Nate gets drafted. Sid is looking at the starting line of his first full healthy season in three years. Now, Sid and Nate actually met for the first time in the summer of 2011 by all accounts (which is narratively interesting to me, personally), and the high-knees story is from then, but after Nate’s draft is when they really started growing closer and becoming friends. Apparently, the day after Nate’s draft is when the sand-dune story happened, and according to Nate, they didn’t really know each other much then. But it seems that since they’d been in each-other’s orbits for a while (since Nate’s early teen years they’d shared an agent, Pat Brisson, and a personal trainer, Andy O’Brien), this is around the time they started becoming friends. I imagine it happened pretty organically. Who knows, there’s not too many details out there— but I like to think they gravitated towards each other the way only two maniacally obsessive peas in a pod can, that they took one look at each other and recognised oh, yeah, this guy’s the same as me. I like this guy.

For those first two seasons after Nate got drafted, Sid was mostly focused on silencing the haters who’d been banging pots and pans since 2011 that Sid needed to be taken to pasture at a farm upstate, and Nate was mostly focused on not being a first overall bust after media pundits were traumatised by the Oilers fucking up too many top 3 picks (RIP Nail Yakupov). There wasn’t a lot of information about them out there publicly. Same old hockey robot media trained stuff you could expect from “Face Of The League” Sidney Crosby. At the NHL Awards in 2014 Nate won the Calder and Sid won the Hart, Ted Lindsay, and Art Ross, and as we found out via Geno’s instagram in 2017, Sid has the picture of the two them from dinner that evening framed in his house (very casual, Sid).

But around 2015 something funny started happening. Sid went to Worlds with Nate, despite the fact that he hadn’t gone since 2007 (where Canada placed 4th. 10 bucks says that was a superstition thing too, like maybe Sid thought not medalling gives you bad mojo or something). After that, they spent three weeks in a condo in Santa Monica together (which we found out several years later in an article). They started wearing matching socks to go golfing. Nate and Sid started doing the Tim Horton’s ads together. Sid did the inaugural Hockey School at Cole Harbour Place and Nate helped him out. Nate took part in Sid’s birthday skate. PensTV was even allowed to come film them (something they hadn’t really done too much of before) to make a little documentary called There’s No Place Like Home With Sidney Crosby, which won him his first Emmy (I assume mostly because people were so gobsmacked by the concept of him talking about his personal life that that alone merited an award. It’s either that or the magical appearance of a hummingbird behind him like he’s a fairytale princess at the end, who knows). All in all, while nothing had happened much in the public eye between Nate and Sid (apart from some wildly embarrassing tweets and instagram posts, Nathaniel), there was evidence of something monumental having happened behind the scenes. It was wild. After years of iron control and media-trained-habits-only in public, Sid was letting his personality shine through on camera and in front of the media, and being affectionate with Nate in public (who was a giant goofball around Sid, of course). And Sid looked happier than he’d been in years! Admittedly, some of that was probably because the Injury Years also just sucked, but he was openly having fun hanging out with Nate on camera, saying yes to media engagements he wouldn’t have said yes to in a million years. Willingly! Not because it was a sponsorship or a team obligation! And it kept happening! In some more recent articles, we found out fun facts like that Sid cooks for Nate daily in the summer after they work out in the mornings (which, the fact that that information is publicly out there— wild).

In 2016, after he won the Cup again, he did another Tim Horton’s Ad with Nate. In early 2017 he attended his first All-Star Game in 8 years (and finally scored a point), and PensTV captured footage of Nate and Sid joking in Sid’s hotel room while Sid was getting dressed for an ASG event (??? WHEN will someone explain to me HOW they weren’t fucking beforehand?? WHY was Nate in Sid’s room while he was GETTING READY, I want ANSWERS—). And then, of course, the Pens won the second back-to-back and Nate fully BUILT A HOUSE almost on top of Sid’s and Sid willingly changed the build of his driveway for Nate to be able to build his house. Nate got a therapist in 2017-2018 and became a hockey monster, and then they did another Timmies commercial, yadda yadda, another million weird and codependent things have happened since then (yeah, I’m looking at the Buddy Basket for Avs’ Better Halves and the congratulatory vid for Sid’s 1000th game that was “too private to air” and the fact that Nate had to talk about Sid 0.5 seconds after winning the Cup). The point is that there’s a pretty obvious catalyst for all this shit happening, and his name starts with N and ends with athan Raymond MacKinnon.

And I know what you’re gonna say, there’s no proof Sid went to Worlds in 2015 or started being more open in public just because of Nate. They haven’t explicitly said that. But like. What else is there? Nate’s low-key been doing small local TV and media gigs since his teens; they even did matching His&His couples’ podcast episodes for Spittin’ Chiclets in 2019. You really wanna tell me that wasn’t Mr. Nathan I-Have-An-IMDB-Page MacKinnon? All I’m saying is that I only need to look at that blooper where Sid loses his shit just because Nate said “Sidney” to know that that’s love, baybey.

(i know that’s a gif from a different year, 2018, but i can’t find the right gif right now and sid cracking up because he thinks nate is thee most hilarious person on earth will always be great to see)

limonite mud and stalactites

-J.F.

someone just needs to tell dean winchester like. that is not how people behave. i genuinely don’t think he knows! to him that is how people behave!

one day, Cody embarrasses himself in front of his General badly enough that he decides the only solution is to fake his death, forcing everyone else in the battalion to refer to him as Commander Colby, Commander Cody's 'replacement'

little does he know that Obi-Wan can tell that Cody isn't really dead, but is just too polite to bring it up with Commander 'Colby' even though he doesn't quite understand why his Commander felt the need to go through this masquerade

until he accidentally reveals his knowledge a month later by accidentally referring to his 'new' Commander as Cody, then immediately recognizing his faux pas and apologizing profusely for 'dead-naming' his Commander

'Colby' is so mortified that his scheme was seen through that he immediately fakes his death again and returns as the miraculously-revived Cody, and swears everyone to secrecy about the matter

which, of course, means that the entire GAR knows about the incident within a standard week

while Rex is busy making sure that Cody never lives this down, Fox decides that the idea is genius and decides to replicate it himself on Coruscant whenever he thinks a Senator is starting to get too familiar with him

this is why there's so many different named Coruscant Guard Commanders: it's all Fox all the way down

the Chancellor is baffled by this, but can't let on that he's noticed Fox's charade without risking revealing that he can tell all of the 'different Commanders' he interacts with are the same man using the Force, so he is forced to play along

egamii. graphite

We should have some