mascot antics (aka, punk bullying people in mascot costumes)

Random thought but if Kai was a professional sports player which sport would u pick for him??

Okay for the first time, I am high-key struggling with this. I used to play a number of sports in high school, and watched several in college, too, but looking at this question, my mind has just gone blank. But it's been sitting in my inbox long enough so I better answer it before I feel too bad. 😅

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about.

So, first I thought maybe soccer, because it's not too much contact but is still considered a contact sport. I feel like Kai's someone who's not a fan of his personal space being invaded, so I can't see him doing [american] football or anything like that. Plus, he's kinda a little guy, but not a delicate little guy, so he's capable of contact sports, but I can't see him doing collision-heavy sports like football.

Then I considered rugby, where there's more contact than soccer, but still not as much as football. I feel like rugby is a sport where fights break out a lot, and Kai would 100% be involved in a sports' related fight. Hockey, too, maybe, if we're taking fighting into account. 😂 And Oregon's relatively close to Canada, so hockey is probably at least somewhat prevalent.

If you didn't say professional sports player, I would've said track and field, and went with the storyline that his mom signed him up when he was in middle school and he got stuck in it. She wanted him to be amongst his peers but not in a contact sport, and decided that was the perfect option. He complained almost daily.

That, or in high school, he played basketball for the sole purpose of getting to watch cheerleaders. He'd be purposely bad so he'd always be out and could watch them instead of playing. But professionally, he wouldn't do basketball; I just can't see it.

Volleyball, I can see him playing professionally. It's fast-paced (as are most sports), but not so much that you can't catch your breath every once in a while. It isn't a contact sport, and requires a lot of reliance on your teammates. If Kai was a professional sports player without his trauma, he'd probably play this, although with his trauma, I'm not so sure.

Last but not least (I certainly didn't almost forget about this one), he might play baseball. I don't really know why, he just kinda has the vibes. Plus, baseball players tend to be the cutest of sports players, and he would much enjoy the attention he'd be sure to receive. Oh! And there's that detail where he had a backpack full of every Alex Rodriguez baseball card, so canonically, he's a big baseball fan.

Now...

Most likely NOT:

swimming - I read a fic awhile back that said he didn't know how to swim, yet in the '94 PW would keep going back in the ocean / water anyway & would continuously drown, and I feel like that's pretty on par for Kai

basketball - just seems too fast-paced, & I can see him doing it in high school, but not professionally

wrestling - just no... he likes touching people but not that much, 😅 or that could just be me, who absolutely hates wrestling

Most likely:

rugby - contact but not collision; he'd be a fight-picker

baseball - canonically a fan + the attention + vibes

Winner: Baseball

Once I remembered the Alex Rodriguez detail, it sold it for me. Plus you can't tell me he wouldn't just love getting girls' attention with that uniform. 😂 It's also not a sport that's too dependent on your teammates, and also not too much of a contact sport. Seems like a good middle ground for him.

eff one fandom (as in actual everyday sports fandom at large and not just teens online) is so fascinating sometimes because i think just the fact of it being a relatively "highbrow"/gatekeepy sport peddled for white europeans makes it so......... i don't know how to say this in a normal way but there are certainly nuances to how bigotry surfaces across mainstream sports products that i am occasionally made to reckon with when consuming it specifically. like why does it feel so lame at times to even acknowledge the existence of racism when it will always be vaguely or unintentionally misunderstood or regarded as plainly excusable... hm

i don't have time to formulate thoughts about literally anything these days (hopefully i will be normal next week. maybe. i don't know i'm tired) but i briefly reflected on a convo i had with h about sports culture earlier while brushing my teeth and it's so... occasionally fascinating to think about the conversations we have re: hockey's lack of "politicization" because in the end the more you try to rationalize systems of male violence it just becomes like is it better or worse when we insist that it's all a microcosm of real life and men are universally like this in practice anyway. or... i think it's weird for me sometimes because hockey as a cultural product, and then nhl players specifically as lionized figures and secondary actors in mainstream north american sports media, cannot be summarized by singular frameworks of recognition, and while there is an incredible amount of power and absolution present in the existence of a Successful Hockey Player from a purely cultural standpoint so much of that gets in a way tested when considered in the broader context of major league hierarchies and "marketability" disparities. but then it's also like.... ugh. [vaguely waves hand around at some dynamic triangulation of: Growing up even mildly good as a hockey player in canada inflates your ego by the time you're 13 years old x nhl players are literally the biggest losers in all major league sports in north america and the fact that there's any handwringing at all over tkachuk talking to shaq on an nba panel is fucking sad, man x even if you're an ahl scrub you can easily meet the My Dream NYC BF comp range everyone made fun of op on twitter for]

i didn't even think i was going to write a whole post about this lol sorry. i have more to say about the "morality" of a winning team but all of that is functionally useless so i will stop talking. only ambiguously related i have a team that i mildly prefer to win the cup but i do find myself returning back to my pessimism over the d*ly presser and how remarkably revealing the entire report procedure has been and what it says that ** will still get his cup day when all is said and done