"What a bust": Character selection and the possibilities of failure in hockey RPF

Increasingly popular since the upload of the first story on the Archive of Our Own (AO3), hockey real person fiction (RPF) plays with traditional media coverage of athletes' personal lives. We investigate fans' reading of former National Hockey League (NHL) player Nolan Patrick to better understand how he became such a prominent protagonist of slash fan fiction. We argue that RPF reimagines traditional media narratives to portray new configurations that escape heteronormative constraints and subvert their function. In this context, slash fans' selection and rewriting of this character appears to reveal fans' commitment to cripping the hockey narrative and to finding transformative queer potential in sporting failure.