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Krack My Back: Booktok, The Seattle Kraken, and Why You Shouldn't Turn Real People Into Your Playthings
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Krack My Back: Booktok, The Seattle Kraken, and Why You Shouldn’t Turn Real People Into Your Playthings

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | August 2, 2023

Alex Wennberg Getty.jpg
Header Image Source: Christopher Mast // NHLI via Getty Images

Fandom is a complicated thing. For many, it can be a safe space, a community of creativity and solidarity where you find new ways to enjoy your favourite things. It can provide solace, inspiration, and even family, often being a place for marginalized voices to find some comfort and support. I've certainly had those experiences with fandoms in the past. But, of course, there are darker sides to fandom, and many people have been on the receiving end of its wrath. We could be here all day listing examples of misogyny, racism, queerphobia, bullying, and truly baffling scandals that have become the stuff of internet lore. Today, however, we bring our focus to TikTok, ice hockey, romance, and what happens when you break down the fourth wall.

BookTok is the name given to the casually tied-together TikTok communities and accounts dedicated to books. It's a vaguely defined ecosystem that encompasses as much as the written word itself does. If you love books, you can find BookTok subspaces on any genre, style, or author you so desire. Romance (and romantic stories of all kinds) has become a large part of BookTok's public image, with many authors seeing their sales skyrocket thanks to popularity on the platform (see Colleen Hoover, Ali Hazelwood, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and Sarah J. Maas, to name but four examples.) Hockey romance is a big part of the sports and contemporary romance subgenres. And it's not hard to see why: it's a sport with a very macho image, populated with a lot of good-looking (mostly white, it must be noted) men who inspire interesting stories about dedication, teamwork, stoicism, and sexy angst. I just got into ice hockey this year so I totally get it (go, Dundee Stars!)

BookTok loves hockey romance, which is often spicy and full of punny titles such as Taking a Shot and Pucked. A big part of this community quickly latched onto the Seattle Kraken, an NHL team full of some admittedly attractive men. One such player is Alex Wennberg, a Swedish professional who has played with the Kraken for a couple of years now and is very pretty. BookTokers gravitated toward him, and soon the Kraken's own social media team began playing up the dynamic with some thirst traps of Wennberg and other players. It became a news story. The team even invited one influential BookToker named Kierra Lewis to a game, giving her a customized jersey. She held up a sign that said 'BookTok sent me #krackmyback.' She also posted videos of herself chanting this at the game. It's become an especially popular motto among BookTok fans of the team, and its implications are evidently sexual.



Wennberg and his wife Felicia played along with it for a while, but it seems that things quickly became too uncomfortable for them. Over the weekend, Felicia took to her Instagram account to share a couple of Stories to express her increasing discomfort with the way that many BookTok fans talked about her husband. She talked about not minding the jokes at first but that there had been 'videos and comments that [has] crossed the line of what it means to fancy someone and when it actually sounds pretty predatory and exploiting.' Wennberg, who wrote her dissertation on topics of consent, noted the double standard of the situation, with deeply sexual catcalling of men in their place of work by women being normalized when we rightly decry the opposite. She shared one TikTok comment where someone talked about wanting Alex Wennberg to 'score in all 3 of my holes.'



It all seemed pretty understandable. It must be deeply uncomfortable for anyone to go to work, have people screaming their sexual demands at them, then log onto their social media and see those same desires repeated in every comments section. It quickly spiraled into hell from there. That BookToker I mentioned earlier, Kierra Lewis, took offence because her name could be seen in one of the stories Wennberg shared. She made a series of videos defending both her and BookTok in general's actions. She started by saying that the people involved initially enjoyed the attention she brought, and that it was all fun and games. Then she made another video wherein she got mad that the Seattle Kraken social media teams had unfollowed her, and made it clear in the comments that she blamed Felicia Wennberg for it. In other videos, she refers to Wennberg as 'this Felicia chick' and claims she is using BookTok for clout. Then, as things got even more dramatic, she tried to imply that Alex Wennberg, the man she'd spent multiple videos thirsting over and demanding she 'krack my back', was cheating on his wife.



Many of Lewis's fans then swarmed the comments sections of both Wennbergs and the Seattle Kraken, claiming that Felicia was a bully, a racist, and a clout chaser who was jealous. THEN Lewis made a video claiming Felicia had slandered her, while taking credit for over 60,000 followers of the Kraken's social media following. In her most recent video, she cries that BookTok is being thrown under the bus and that the real responsibility lay with them because they posted all the thirst traps. The Kraken have deleted a lot of said content.

It reached a new pinnacle of drama when Felicia issued another statement clarifying matters, then Alex Wennberg himself had to comment to assure people that, yes, he stood by his wife and was uncomfortable with being so heavily sexualized by this subset of fans.




A lot of BookTokers and supporters of Lewis in particular have lambasted the Wennbergs for their responses. They've said it's all a joke so Felicia shouldn't complain, that BookTok helped bring online clout for the Kraken team so they should be grateful, and that all of this should have been dealt with privately. A lot of the defences here feel horribly familiar to anyone who's dealt with a toxic fandom experience, especially the notion that, because the Wennbergs were okay with some of this rhetoric for a while, they've no right to push back against it now. A reminder: you're allowed to revoke consent at any given time. Neither the Wennbergs nor the Seattle Kraken 'owe' Booktok anything. No amount of extra TikTok followers create consent for you to fetishize a bunch of athletes to their faces.

Just to reiterate: this is not about just one fan. Lewis is a prominent player in this story and has made herself such, so it's why she's centred so heavily. But there are oh so many people on TikTok and Instagram who are not only denying the Wennbergs their feelings on this issue but insisting that they're owed the right to engage in this behaviour. It's not on. When someone says they're uncomfortable, what you do is stop your bullsh** and move on. You apologise and get on with your life. You don't dig in your heels, say that they essentially asked for it, and start throwing around speculation about their marriage in the process. It shouldn't be tough to understand why a man and his wife would not want to be bombarded with sexually threatening rhetoric all dang day. It's not the mystery of the year to question why having someone yell about having all their holes filled would make them unhappy. I know we're not this dense as a species.

Thirst can be fun. Being horny on main is often liberating, a joyous expression of sexuality that can be shared among those you trust. I'm no stranger to it, as anyone who's read my work over the past several years can attest. But I'm also of that era of fandom where 'don't touch the poop' was rule one. Don't cross the streams. Don't break the fourth wall. Fandom is your space, not theirs, and you don't poke at the actor/singer/writer/etc to acknowledge your zealotry, performative or otherwise. Fans who cross the line is, alas, nothing new. We could list decades of fans storming stages, stalking celebrities, sobbing in their presence, and so on. It's arguable as to whether the perennially online era of celebrity has made this worse, but I do believe it's amplified the most toxic elements of it all. You want to thirst over your favourite hockey player? Go for it, but don't be surprised when you face pushback for tagging them in your explicit rants, clogging up their own comments sections, and turning them into profit-ready content.

We're also too used to this kind of fandom being pandered to by the mainstream. The Seattle Kraken reached out to Lewis after her extremely uncomfortable 'fill my holes' TikToks and brought her to games. They clearly saw this strain of BookTok as something to market to and did so for months. How many times have you seen a brand suck up to the loudest and most annoying fans? There's a whole field of sociological study to be done on how K-pop brands and corporations encourage the most unhinged behaviour towards these singers who are ill-equipped to deal with it and told not to call out the pain it causes. Clearly, someone on the Kraken social media team got pulled up over this because a lot of the offending TikToks are gone. Perhaps there will be meetings over the appropriateness of such content and greater communication with players over what they do and do not want to be a part of. That seems like a sensible move going forward. It doesn't negate or justify a sizeable subset of fans treating these players like their personal puppets, or demanding that they and their spouses be okay with it. Again, imagine a guy making tons of videos about wanting to fill a female athlete's holes, then her team giving him the VIP treatment.



Fandom at its most unruly is dependent on the dehumanization of its subjects. It demands that you sand away or outright ignore the flinty edges that make a human being a living, breathing, complex creation, only to replace them with an idol of blind perfection. This also makes it really easy to steamroll over their own objections to your behaviour. Many celebrities have tried to speak out against their fandoms' worst excesses, from throwing things at them on-stage to harassing their spouses. The list of celebrity spouses who have been harassed, abused, and accused of abhorrent cruelty is far too long: Sophie Hunter, FKA Twigs, Jane Musky, Zawe Ashton, Olivia Wilde, Taylor Russell, Alexandra Grant, Meghan Markle, etc. This cycle is dishearteningly inescapable, so it seems. It'll take more than some deleted TikToks to combat it.

It doesn't hurt to remember that celebrities are, shock horror, people too, once in a while. Certainly, all areas of the ecosystem of fame could use that reminder. The Seattle Kraken social media team decided to play up some invasive thirst traps for promo, the BookTok fandom saw it as implicit permission to continue, and none of the players seem to have been asked their feelings on the subject. When one player's wife spoke up, she was lambasted for pointing out an obvious double standard that we often struggle with. No, men do not receive the same volume of harassment that women do, nor are they smothered by the threat of gendered violence every day, but that doesn't mean sexual harassment of men is non-existent. Healthy boundaries of consent and desire are something we should all strive for, and if the Kraken players don't want to deal with being screamed at by women to fill their holes, that shouldn't be seen as an unreasonable request. If fans and promoters find this too unfair then maybe they need a new hobby, preferably a solo one.