Dog6. Gouache Watercolor Painting On Coaster. One Of My Coasters For 'salut 9' At Nucleus Portland

and speaking of stanford era dean i think he 100% talked to sam like he was still there. full send in a restaurant booth by himself holding a one-sided conversation and the waitress is pouring his coffee, eyeing him sidelong like. what the fuck. out on a hunt about to shoot a ghost full of rock salt, “ready, sammy?” and the ghost is like. what the fuck. accidentally slips up one time in the car with john, “sam, look at that billboard” and john nearly runs off the road, oh fuck, got one kid left and now he’s losing his marbles too?

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)

that one line from bobby's hunting guide or whatever, about how john picked up dean one night on the side of the road after dean had gone out looking for him... in my gut I know john was a "get out of the car; you're hoofin' it from here" kind of parent. a "quit that right now or you're walking home; hope you can find you way" kind of parent.

so I need sam waiting on tenterhooks in the motel room of the week, up way past midnight waiting for john and dean to get back from a hunt. for him to breathe deeply for the first time in what feels like days when he hears the rumble of the loudest car in the universe rolling into the lot, and for john to give the special knock at the door and sam's so relieved to let them in, equilibrium resettling, all three of them together under one roof.

only dean's not with john.

he's not out under the weak light of the parking lot sodium lamps. he's not crouched over the back seat of the impala, rifling through the footwell. he's not unpacking gear from the trunk or coming back from the bank of vending machines with condensation-wet cans of squirt jammed in his pockets or leaning bloody and spent against dad's shoulder.

he's not. fucking anywhere.

I need sam losing his absolute shit, zero to feral in six-point-three seconds flat. screaming and scrabbling at john, "where is he where is he where the fuck is he?!" I need sam just sobbing with his whole chest because it finally happened, this is his nightmare, his literal worst fear realized because dean's dead out there somewhere and knowing dad, he's probably already salted dean down and soaked him in gasoline and lit him up, a tragedy with no loose ends.

I need sam just wailing, can't catch his breath crying, the ugly snotty gagging kind of crying as john finally just manhandles him back into the room and tries to tell him, "jesus, sammy. he's fine. thought it'd be a good idea to run that smartass mouth of his on the way back, so he's taking a little time to himself and walking the last stretch here."

I need sam who looks at john with more disgust and visceral loathing than a twelve year old should be able to manage. who grabs his coat off the bed and his knife from under the pillow and is out the door into the night before john can get a hand on him. I need sam sprinting down the busted concrete drive to the main road and taking off along the sloping gravel shoulder in the oh-dark-thirty blue-blackness, still crying but trying to get his breath back so he can holler for dean.

(I need dean trudging along in the pre-dawn dark, pulling up short when he hears the slip-slide of running feet on gravel headed towards him and his name screamed into the dark. dean who takes off at a dead run because sammy sammy sammy sammy shit-fuck sammy what's the matter)

(I need sam who launches himself bodily at dean when he finally gets close enough. who lets his heart pound rabbit-quick against dean's chest through their jackets. who's probably too big to be picked up and held like this, really, but who can't won't let go once he's got dean wrapped up in his arms. who slides around to dean's back and pulls dean's collar aside so he can put his ear to dean's pulsepoint as he's piggybacked the rest of the way back.)

anyways... john pretends to be asleep when they make it back to the motel. they know he's awake, he knows they know he's awake, but no way is he gonna look at sam's face again without at least five hours of sleep under his belt.

(nobody says a word about it when they pack up and check out in the morning. nobody says a word about it, ever.)

strawberry winter

Ayo are there any shotgunning wincest/weecest fics on this fine 4/20? Because that sounds hot. Dean letting Sam take muted drags from his lips. Sam getting fuzzy headed and pliant and needy. Give it to me.

Dinosaur, Richard Siken

© light beyond the frame

look at these chemical romance doodles boy

my christmas present this year was the chance to draw this commission, thank you santa (ˊ̥̥̥̥̥ ³ ˋ̥̥̥̥̥)