Icebreaker, Offside, Collide: If you’ve been even a bit involved in the romance book scene in recent years, these books will probably sound familiar to you.
With the popularity of BookTok — a community on TikTok where users talk about all things literature — the romance genre has been given a platform like never before.
More particularly, an interest in stories involving a certain group of people has skyrocketed.
Avid readers (and BookTok consumers alike) have developed a collective liking for stories involving hockey players, so much so that “hockey romance” has become a sub-genre of its own. It’s even common for bookstores to have a designated section for this particular type of novel.
On TikTok, the tag #bookTok has 47.4 million posts, with #hockeyromance having more than 359,000 videos now posted to the app. Many posts under both hashtags have garnered thousands of likes.
Due to the increasing love for these novels, more of them are being made. There has been an increase in the number of stories featuring the rough-around-the-edges male hockey player and the strong, independent, “I can do it on my own” female character, who sparks an unexpected romance with each other.
Knowing they have such a large audience, authors will often expand their initial books into series, where each book follows the romances of different protagonists — the woman being part of her university friend group and the man being part of his college hockey team. An example of this is the Vancouver Storm series.
The adoration for these books is so mainstream that Elle Kennedy’s Off-Campus book series is even being adapted into its own TV show on Amazon Prime Video.
The Sexualization of hockey players
With all the public attention hockey romance novels are attracting, hockey players are aware of this sub-genre, too.
When it comes to the romance genre, male main characters are well-written, and it isn’t hard to fall in love with them. But when it comes to these hockey romances, what does this do for actual hockey players? It seems nothing good.
Unfortunately, these athletes have been subjected to harmful amounts of sexualization. The reason for this is that BookTok users have inserted real-life athletes into these fictional worlds and merged the two.
This comes in many forms, including fan casting, where fans assign a real-life person to play the role of a fictional character based on their preferences as a fan. Others include updating online lists of National Hockey League (NHL) players for romance book fans to keep an eye on and posting about specific book scenes alongside an image of a player.
The virality these posts would receive made this discourse so normalized that even official accounts of hockey teams joined in.
But no matter how light-hearted these videos are, they all give users the space to voice their thoughts, which — for a good portion — hypersexualize the players or mention something about their attractiveness.
In a TikTok showing the hair of a few players, user comments included “I need this” and “I have nothing appropriate to say,” while another TikTok showcasing a team stretching before a game had comments like “Why is this video six hours long” and “I’ve never wanted to be ice more.”
In 2023, this behaviour got so bad that Alex Wennberg, who played for the Seattle Kraken at the time, and his wife Felicia made public statements regarding the comments about him that went “too far.”
Despite their efforts to prevent these kinds of comments, the hockey romance community is as active as ever.
Another reason for its vastness may be the romanization of wives and girlfriends of athletes, more commonly referred to as “WAGs.”
These romances contribute to this idealization of a relationship with these athletes and make readers want to be with them, just like the characters they read about.
More than that, there simply seems to be an inexplicable fascination with WAGs in the sports world, which further promotes the hockey player agenda in society.
Any news on a player and his partner will find a way to surface online. Fans have even created social media accounts regarding the lives of certain WAGs, such as those of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The athlete’s limelight will probably never go out of style. There’s just too much allure and charm to them that people can’t look away from.
That, mixed with the characters, dialogue, and storylines created by authors of enchanting and page-turning romance books, gives way to an even bigger spotlight on these people that seem to only be getting bigger.
Other sports, like rugby, American football, and volleyball, are getting involved in romance plots, too. While readers can anticipate the tropes these new books will include, online users — both part of BookTok and not — should be wary of whether readers will cross similar lines with these new athletes, too.