The Seattle Kraken find themselves in a controversy that is very 2023.
The team has removed videos marketed toward TikTok’s “BookTok” community, where users on the social media network gather to discuss books, after center Alex Wennberg and his wife, Felicia, lashed out over the player allegedly getting sexually objectified on the platform, according to ESPN.
Some users in the community used Wennberg as a “proxy” for a character in a fictional hockey romance book, and that they were “fixating” on him, according to ESPN.
Kierra Lewis, who has more than a million TikTok followers, made particularly raunchy comments pointed at Wennberg,
She said, tongue-in-cheek, that she prayed to Jesus to turn her into ice, “’cause what I wouldn’t do to have this man glide on me” and urging him to “crack [her] back.”
The phrase “krack my back” apparently became a popular catchphrase in the community, and Lewis was even gifted a “BookTok” jersey by the team.
The franchise, which declined comment to ESPN, had appeared into the BookTok notoriety, posting a video of Wennberg and defenseman James Dunn strolling into games wearing suits, with the caption “when you accidentally become a BookTok account and now that’s all you can post.”
Felicia wrote on Instagram last week that this videos and comments posted about her husband “crossed the line of what it means to fancy someone” and went so far that they became “predatory and exploiting.”
“What doesn’t sit with me is when your desires come with sexual harassment, inappropriate comments and the fact that, with the Internet, we can normalize behavior that would never be OK if we flipped the genders around to a guy doing this to a female athlete,” she said.
Alex said in a later Instagram post that his wife had received vulgar backlash.
“The aggressive language about real life players is too much,” he wrote. “It has turned 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 for is a little respect and common sense moving forward. We can all take a joke and funny comments but when it turns personal and into something bigger that effects our family, we need to tell you that we’ve had enough. Enough of sexual harassment, and harassment of our character and our relationship. Thank you for your understanding.”
Author Emily Rath, who has written hockey romance books, told ESPN that “99%” of the BookTok community is “normal people that found a love for the game and a community,” but acknowledged the subset who had dramatically crossed the line.
“What we’re having is this very odd situation where a fandom was created around Alex Wennberg and they took it too far,” she said. “They weren’t treating him like a hockey player or even like a fictional boyfriend. You just saw them sexually fantasizing about him in crass and inappropriate ways in a public forum.”