The NHL’s Seattle Kraken embraced the horny BookTok and was met with controversy

Last spring, during the Seattle Kraken’s first appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the 2-year-old franchise found itself with an influx of new fans: readers pouring in from the BookTok community on TikTok. How did it happen? Months earlier, in February, a hockey romance book called Icebreaker, by Hannah Grace, made the New York Times bestseller list and has been there ever since. Like the novels of Colleen Hoover, Icebreaker became a viral hit on TikTok, loved by fans of the hockey romance subgenre popular on the platform.

Then that fandom started watching hockey, probably thanks to the timing quirk of Icebreaker‘s popularity leading to the NHL playoffs. BookTok clung to one team in particular: the Kraken.

It was a fun club to follow. The Kraken went on a surprise playoff run in their sophomore season, knocking out last year’s Stanley Cup champions, the Colorado Avalanche, in the first round. From there, the Kraken took the Dallas Stars to a thrilling Game 7 before finally being defeated. Everyone loves an underdog, and the Kraken are a flashy new team that’s fun to watch. That’s part of the appeal, but BookTok also stuck with several conventionally attractive players – namely forward Alex Wennberg – and their spinning warmup stretches. When the Kraken’s social media team realized that people were making fancams of Wennberg and other players, it started playing on the fandom and making its own fancam-like videos of its players’ arena entrances.

BookTok’s whirlwind hockey obsession drew positive attention to hockey as a sport, inviting fans who might not otherwise have known they’d be interested. But a handful of fans have gone too far by treating players as if they were abstract characters, not real people. That’s how we came to the controversy that has gone viral over the past week.

What went wrong with the Seattle Kraken and BookTok?

No doubt the trouble started when a small minority of BookTokers started sexualizing hockey players and associating them with their favorite romantic characters. And the Kraken’s own social media team fanned the flames. It felt similar to other high-profile parasocial relationships, like when the internet was thirsty The last of us actor Pedro Pascal – the fixation on Pascal as “daddy” often turned into uncomfortable territory.

While TikTokers became fans of the Seattle Kraken, “some BookTokers — which is similar to fancasting — claimed Wennberg and other hockey players for the character of Nate Hawkins in Icebreakeras well as characters in other hockey novels.

This kind of behavior started to spiral when Kraken’s social media team made a post at at thirst content about the players of the team. While other hockey clubs did post BookTok-specific content, the Kraken were by far the most aggressive. Team social media managers have more access to players and their likenesses, and there is an assumed level of trust between a player and their organization to use that to promote the team. When a team’s social media manager posts even vaguely sexualized content about their players, it can be taken as a kind of consent – and can lead to that kind of behavior, and more, online.

Emily Rath, author of the Jacksonville Rays hockey romance series, explained in a 10 minute TikTok video why this kind of player abstraction, especially by social media teams, is a problem. “You shouldn’t treat your employees with the same level of abstraction as the fans,” she said.

Last week, Alex Wennberg’s wife, Felicia Weeren, posted Instagram stories about the sexualization of her husband and other players. Weeren said that while she herself has made fun of Wennberg’s TikTok fandom online, she feels some people’s comments and videos have crossed the line into “predatory and exploitative” territory. “What doesn’t sit well with me is when your desires are accompanied by sexual harassment,” she wrote. Wennberg later released his own statement about the backlash Weeren received for writing about her discomfort with the situation.

“The aggressive language about real players is too much,” Wennberg wrote. “It has grown into daily and weekly comments on our personal social media. This is not something we support or want our child to grow up with. All we ask is a little respect and common sense to move forward. We can all take a joke and funny comments, but when it gets personal and becomes something bigger that affects our family, we have to tell you we’ve had enough. Enough sexual harassment and harassment of our character and relationship. Thank you for your understanding.”

The Kraken have now removed all references to BookTok from their TikTok page; it’s unclear when this happened, but it appears to have been done in response to players’ discomfort with the messages. The organization did not respond to Polygon’s request for comment.

How has BookTok responded?

There is no representative for BookTok, nor is there a representative for its subset of hockey romances. But it seems that this behavior comes from a loud minority of the overall fandom. Rath said in her 10-minute video that she estimated the sexual harassment involved 1% of hockey romance fans on the app, while 99% of the fans are normal people who like hockey romance — many of whom are like a hockey lover also brought sports.

One particular BookTok influencer, Kierra Lewis, has been candid about her part in the Seattle Kraken controversy. She was airlifted to a Kraken playoff game and given a shirt marked “BookTok,” with her content seemingly endorsed by the club’s social media team. In a TikTok posted after Weeren published her initial statement, Lewis accused the Kraken and others of using BookTok to promote themselves and “gain clout”, only to later denounce the community. She added that she was upset to find out that Kraken’s social media team has distanced herself from her, seemingly because of her overtly sexual content about hockey players. (Lewis was photographed during the game wearing a sign saying “Krack my back”, for example.) Lewis also said that everything she has posted is a joke.

There is a subset of BookTok who defend Lewis’s role in everything – claiming that the Kraken owe their success to BookTok – while some people say they are uncomfortable with its content, as well as the sexualization of athletes by others . The debate is reminiscent of that surrounding the ethics of fanfiction with real people. Hockey players don’t have the same celebrity as, say, top basketball players, but they are used to some notoriety. This notoriety makes it easy for people to engage in parasocial relationships – and the alleged endorsement of organizations like the Kraken only adds to that.

Whatever your feelings, the Kraken BookTok controversy has proven that at least some pro athletes are uncomfortable with the sexualization of their likenesses, and that some of the fandom has crossed a line. Any permission, perceived or not, has been revoked, at least by some players.