Ptolemaea — Ethel Cain I Am The Face Of Love's Rage

it's time to talk about leno 😈

first of all an abriged timeline of what we know about the alleged beef (creds to @moondoggiestyle for the reference, also some of my own additions): 

may 29, 2024: will signs with the sharks

summer 2024: leno and gabe both remain at BC

oct 31, 2024: will scores his first nhl goal, leno posts about it

jan 20, 2025: sharks play the bruins in boston, all the bc buddies attend including leno

jan 21st, 2025: leno's bday - no post from will, though in previous years he did post, and typically posts for everybody's bdays

jan 24-24th, 2025: BC beats BU in back to back games. leno gets a hatty in one of the games, his first. wait for it...

jan 28, 2025: jersey bet. that's fucking right. those were the games - leno's five point weekend - after which mack shows up to walk ins in will's fucking tarp. credit to @aquilotti and @loganes for this diabolical realization. so who cares about leno's hatty when INSTEAD we can talk about mack in will's jersey! SICK and TWISTED!

jan 29, 2025: mack and leno follow each other on insta, leno has been up in mack's likes, mack not so much. according to rumor, mack follows leno first, leno follows back right after (ty @loganes again!!!)

feb 10, 2025: the beanpot, bc and bu play each other, leno and gabe are on the team, mack and will attend together in fucking matching black outfits, bc loses to bu, will and mack fuck off to arizona to reenacg magic mike or whatever

march 17, 2025: will's bday - no post from leno, posts from all their buddies (voter, gabe)

march 31, 2025: leno and gabe both sign to their respective nhl teams, will reposts both posts, leno is the only buddy to not get commentary on the repost

april 4, 2025: leno scores his first nhl goal (empty net 🙄), no post from will

extremely early may: mack uses leno's number 9 for his initial team canada jersey number, THEN doubles down and adds will's 6 (insane btw)

may 7, 2025: gabe's bday - posts from both will and leno

may 29th, 2025: leno makes his farewell bc insta post and completely leaves will out of it

also let it be noted all year will has been all up in gabe's comments, nada for leno

now, for part 2 - the insta post

5 slides

slide 1: the cover photo and also the most insane photo to have possibly chosen. leno and gabe exactly mirroring the pic of mack and will that will posted on the second slide of his year one sharks dump. i dont wanna cornplate too hard yet before i get the facts down, but it's a clear duo picture. hes saying this is my guy! not a whole pic of the team, not a pic of just leno, no it is a duo pic with gabe that is quite literally an exact copy of will's duo pic with mack

slide 2: leno in the middle of posma and powell. posma is a senior, powell is a grad student, both older, neither of them appear to be in will's in crowd

slide 3: line pic with gabe, stiga, hagens, and gustafsson. interesting to me that he doesnt tag hagens here and instead waits for slide 5, which....see below

slide 4: walk in pic with will vote. from insta we know that will, gabe, leno, and vote were kind of a squad, and will leno and vote also all lived together for the development program. unsuprising inclusion.

slide 5: an absolutely insane pic of leno literally lying on toppp of james hagens and grinning. hagens was a freshman and was essentially will's replacement in the gabe will leno line. warning for early cornplating but in my head this is like The Replacement Pic.

finally part 3, i put on my little tin hat and run around in the wild going insane.

‼️warning‼️ cornplating starts here 📌

okay. leno posting for will's first goal - first of all, leno stand uppppp, second of all, w the way that boy has been acting all up in insta likes, i dont think it's fair to assume that no falling out has happened yet. and if it has happened, it was likely leno at fault because why would he be gassing will up if he was mad?

then to january, leno attends the sharks game, but the NEXT DAY, will doesnt post for the bday. meaning sometime in fall '24, there was an initial conflict. leno still shows up with all the boys, but he isnt in the group pic, and he isnt getting posted. this further solidifies my theory that in at least the initial conflict, wherever it started from, leno was at fault. 

just a week later, mack and leno follow each other. the sharks were in between a home game and a game in seattle, so it's likely mack and will were together in san jose that day. okay, so what happened here? between the weird boston/bday tension, and then will's new number one guy following will's old number one guy on insta?? hmmm

now - the beanpot. will and mack show up together to watch a game extremely important to leno and gabe, a game that very much matters to will's two best friends, and they show up in fucking matching black outfits, zero allegiance showing. mack is reading the lineup, waving a bu flag, will not so much. whats more is as far as im aware we have no evidence of will actually hanging out with his bc boys after the loss or while he was in boston at all. im not saying they didnt, but they didnt post about it! says something idk what but something!

no will bday post - silence is loud. he reposts leno's signing - he's being polite, but the distance is clear. will is notttt the type to be reserved about showing affection for his friends and fam, but not even an emoji....cold war happening 

then jerseygate: mack stealing leno's fucking number, no good explanation at all. THEN adding will's number too! so clearly will isn't even upset about it! mack is clearly involved in the will and leno war, at first one could speculate that he played a part but this is like direct involvement now. mack and will on one side, leno on the other. mack's out here wearing their matching numbers at worlds like he's fuckinh achilles dragging hector's corpse around, leno's gotta feel mocked, erased, and not chosen. he’s being publicly overshadowed, his identity stitched onto someone will now loves more.

the insta post now, no will. he's erasing him. and the hagens pic?? unreal. reads like, “you replaced me? i replaced you" except wayy more pathetic unfortch

so my main questions:

the mack following - who followed who first? leno, in some kind of testing the waters move? or mack, likely at will's prompting, or out of his own insanity? and why now? why not before or after the game, which is when they wouldve met up? they had a back to back and played the preds next day so ig wouldve been like coffee or something quick outside the locker room, but still.

‼️info update that mack followed leno first, leno followed right after. SINISTER given that this is occuring the DAY after jersey bet gate, where mack wears will's tarp to the rink based on a bet on games that leno carried. SINISTER!!!

the beanpot - i feel personally that the vibez took a turn for the worst here, but were already bad before. some kind of blowup? a real actual fight? was mack and leno following eo indicitive of some attempt to smooth things over, but then the scab got picked open at the beanpot? again with the way that leno has been grovelling via instagram, feeling like it's a him problem. but ALSO if leno did do or say something it wouldnt be entirely his fault or entirely too bad, given that it doesnt appear that sides have been taken within the core group. maybe leno said something? possibly about or to mack? possibly just to will? who knows! but after this, leno is no longer inner circle and will makes it clear. leno's sitting in a locker room somewhere refreshing will's story after his first nhl goal, and it's crickets.

post beanpot - has will been freezing leno out entirely now? and what role is mack playing, is he actively leaning into it? all signs point to yes. 

the way i see it, there's obvi endless possibilities, but my general mentally made up delulu timeline is this:

summer '24: will blindsides (to some extent) gabe and leno with leaving bc, leno takes it as a slight or a betrayal. he made sure to talk a LOT abt how happy he was that he stayed another year at bc, in this context it reads as trying to rub it in. tension is created, but nothing friendship ending yet

fall '24: something happens. will's probably drifting, pulling away, busy with the sharks and his new best friend mack. maybe leno's making comments, being passive aggressive, trying to ice will out a little bit out of hurt, jealousy, whatever. maybe he goes a little too far, will doesnt take it well, leno grovels a little. 

winter '24: by jan, it's cooled off a little, things are still tense. leno goes to the game, but the whole group is going, he cant NOT go, but they are almost certainly fighting or almost certainly have a fight here bc no leno bday post the NEXT DAY?? in my head theres a few scenarios, obvi have zero basis in fact, but i love a hypothesis so maybe something like will bringing mack along to a meetup, or texting mack while hanging w bostom boys, leno feels overlooked and replaced all over again right in front of his salad, says something nasty? who knows but it was enough for will to not post his bday! at the beanpot, there had to be something, some kind of fight, because its been a full on ice out ever since.

spring '24: will is done, checked out, he's picked mack over and over. leno is crashing out holed up in PLD's house shaking like a rabid dog. now he just wants to hurt will back, but at the same time he wants will back. he wants will to pick him but he wants will to feel as abandoned as he does. 

anyways. anyways!!

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)

Im fucking DRY HEAVING at the energy Nico brought to the paddock this week, he's airing everyones business. First it was "Flavio's ugly ass invited me to his fuckass room for negotiations" and then he LITERALLY JUST SAW JAMES VOWELS AND WENT "I call you Vowels bc u called me Rosberg when were teammates... how shockingly impersonal is that u fucking rat ???? [takes deep breath for terrifyingly detailed analysis] [James tries to defend himself] "yes BUT I was sitting at your table??? I was yOuR fRiEnD aNd tEaMmAte🤨"

how sad, how lovely - connie converse

One of my personal favs

is that a halo or a target on your back

i wanted to post all my gax pics over the past month this morning to celebrate pride month but then WHAT THE HELL ANOTHER GAX DIVORCE

nick heidfeld didn't post the most nick heidfeld tribute to seb for you lot to be ignoring him

Your reblog of the vintage F1 photos… one of those labels around the neck of an omega……..

This has been in my inbox for a while and couldn't wait to polish my little warm-up Logan Sargeant for it bc he was the one that immediately popped into my mind when i read it♡ in my omegaverse au Logan has to drop out mid-season because a certain nasty dog of an alpha knocks him up and effectively takes his seat for the next season ....

the last one is for me specifically