The Airing of Grievances

[Gustav 6,139]

Happy Festivus! It's over, because I'm slow, but I started writing this on everyone's favorite holiday, so that's what counts.

 

 

As anyone knows, the tradition begins with the AIRING OF GRIEVANCES, and since I don't have the energy to write about how much I hate the VHLE or something similar, I'm going to do something a bit simpler and roast every team's logo. Yes, this is me trying to be funny. We'll see if that works.

 

 

 CALGARY WRANGLERS 

Honestly, I think the greatest disrespect here is that the new logo was never made into a forum emote and I still have to use derphorse. How successful was the rebranding, really, if we weren't excited enough to make our forum logo up-to-date? Anyway, it's a little bit sad that everything we hated about derphorse is still present in the current logo: the grimace, the weird eye shadow thing, the mane that looks more like an emo haircut, and the horseshoe that doesn't even really look like a horseshoe. I'm not convinced that we didn't just draw derphorse again and try to pass it off as a new product. We're like Apple! The only thing that's changed is that derphorse is now wearing reins, which could be nothing but the league expressing its shift towards authoritarianism and total mod control. I see how it is.

 

 CHICAGO PHOENIX 

There's only one phoenix in mythology, which leads one to wonder: which player is the phoenix? It's probably one of the 15 S73s that just retired last season, because I find it hard to imagine current Chicago having an all-powerful mythical being and losing as much as they do. But if that player is gone, then the name is meaningless. Or are all the players collectively the phoenix? That name is meaningless as well, because Chicago has no players. As for the logo: imagine you take Toronto's logo, stretch it vertically, invert its color, draw an absolute shit ton of lines on it, and then add the worst, most what-in-the-name-of-Fred-Flintstone-is-this possible text over it unnecessarily. You've got Chicago! 

 

 D.C. DRAGONS 

D.C. is the only VHL team with punctuation in their name, and they're the only team whose location has been reduced to two letters. They had the chance to go full Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and call themselves the Washington, District of Columbia, Dragons of Arlington or something way cooler, but instead "D.C. Dragon" sounds like a rapper who never got famous. The logo also just looks like someone took something they shouldn't have taken, traced over the Seattle Kraken logo, reflected it, and did whatever they did to Chicago where they drew a ton of lines over it and stuck a big block of text in the middle unnecessarily--so the dragon can hide itself behind something far less important and act like that one thing has enough to make the whole design great (much like the team did with Groovy Dood for 8 seasons). If you look really hard and up really close, too, you'll see that some of the teeth are a bit off, including one that's practically on the dragon's nose. 

 

 HC DAVOS DYNAMO 

Davos has the league's only logo that's an actual shape. And it's one of just a few that actually works as a hockey logo. Imagine trying to stitch the absolute monstrosity that is the DC logo onto a sweater. There's also only one color, not counting black and white--none of that silly gradient stuff or that wildly unnecessary "we need 50 shades of red in this one part of the logo" stuff. And yes, there's text on the logo, but it works--you see the picture and notice that the team name happens to be there. You don't read that the team name is the HC DAVOS DYNAMO and then just happen to notice that maybe there's some mountain picture with half a box of crayons melted onto it somewhere in the background. The worst part of this logo is simply that it's too perfect to be messed with, and the VHL should be ashamed of itself for letting such perfection exist unchecked.

 

 HELSINKI TITANS

I find it funny that the forum emoji abbreviation for this logo isn't "HSK" like we see in trade threads. Instead, it's "HEL", something that aptly describes what playing for the Titans is like recently. I also find it funny that Helsinki's current GM is the former GM of Oslo Minnesota Oslo, and both of the logos are just...some dude with no real connection to the team name. It's not even an accurate depiction, either. Look up any portrayal of a titan, so long as you're prepared to see a lot of pictures of naked people, and you'll see said naked people fighting each other without a helmet, in the style of good old-fashioned hockey. So it's just some dude on the jersey, who probably isn't a titan at all. But let's say he is--are you also aware that the Greek gods we think of, the ones who had all sorts of terrible relationships with anything that could walk, defeated the titans in battle? That's right, a big part of the story of the original titans was that they lost. Some team!

 

 LONDON UNITED 

United? United for what? London came into the league less than six months after Brexit, and I'm sure being thrown into the European Conference made a lot of British people mad that they were being thrown into the European Conference. Imagine if the New York Americans tried to change their logo by keeping the current logo but throwing Mount Rushmore over it and two giant bald eagles behind it (and maybe sneaking in Guy Fieri somewhere). You'd have a super stereotypically American thing that most Americans would just find funny--which is exactly what the VHL thought would be a nice little official logo as a British equivalent. That's not even to mention that the UK flag on the logo is distorted and misshapen, just like the London roster this season.

 

 LOS ANGELES STARS 

This logo goes beyond "the text is too big" and goes right into "the logo is the text", something I wish I would never see outside of baseball. Speaking of baseball, this is just what happens if you take the Dodgers logo, bend the L a bit, change the colors, and put a star in the middle. Enough about the text, though, since that's boring. We'll talk about the star instead. The star in question is gray. No stars are gray. At first, I thought I could say that it's a neutron star and make fun of the fact that it's got no energy source and it's starting to lose its power, but then I realized that it's more of a white dwarf, which isn't even powerful enough to become a neutron star, also loses its energy over time, is also quite dense, and isn't very bright. Why a team would choose to advertise those things about themselves is beyond me.

 

 MALMO NIGHTHAWKS 

Oh look, the forum emoji doesn't have text on it. It's almost as though having a giant block of text on your logo is not a good thing! I wonder if the league realized that officially--oh wait, no they didn't. The bird has to sit behind some letters that explain what the bird is, because we're too stupid to know otherwise. It's also one of the logos that follows the "generic blob with a ton of different colors scribbled on it" trend--I thought I'd seen enough shades of green highlighter in my overly organized friend's pencil case, but I hadn't seen anything until I saw this thing. If they're "night"hawks, too, shouldn't they be stealthy and mysterious? Imagine getting mugged at 3 in the morning by the Nickelodeon slime bird.

 

 MOSCOW MENACE 

Anyone remember the Duck Dynasty guys? They aren't very menacing, they're rednecks. Same with ZZ Top. The only difference between that and this is that this guy is wearing a crown and he seems to have a case of yellow fever. Again, much like Helsinki, the logo is just some dude. He's not menacing at all. Imagine what he'd look like if he shaved! You can tell by looking at him that he's got no chin and he's trying to cover it up...which he does by completely obscuring his mouth. Maybe if the logo looked like this:

Spoiler

...I'd look at it and not wonder how much food is stuck in his beard.

 

 NEW YORK AMERICANS 

Wow, so American! So much more than LA or Chicago or D.C., THE NATION'S CAPITAL! This logo takes the flag and destroys it in such a way that from a distance I thought I was looking at the cow-catcher on the Cologne logo. Way to be respectful! It also has the exact same sticks-and-puck clipart that graces the top of the Davos logo, something I'm sure is representative of the baseless hope to even begin to approach the greatness of the Dynamo. This logo is also one of many in a disturbing trend of "logos that look like shields", which expresses not only a severe lack of creativity among VHL leadership but also an unsettling subconscious message in the same spirit as the Calgary reins. Just like it was in medieval times, when shields of this sort were used, league leaders see themselves as monarchs and us as serfs, and DELIBERATELY mock us in this manner through logo design.

 

 PRAGUE PHANTOMS 

The abbreviation for Prague is "PRG", which is, coincidentally, the noise I would make if I were ever drafted by Prague. It's also a nice abbreviation of "purge", which, on top of being what I would do to my stomach upon being drafted by Prague, is a nice thinly veiled threat that the common member will be IMMEDIATELY PURGED from the community if they dare to speak out of line. But I digress. Apart from being yet another "unnecessary text with a side of highlighter" logo, I think it just looks like Zubat. 40 HP with not much attack? That would at least explain a lot.

 

 RIGA REIGN 

I was a little bit surprised to see that Riga's rebrand has been added as an emote--the disrespect to Calgary!--but looking at said emote makes me realize how terrible it really is. It somehow participates in two previously-mentioned trends without fully committing to them, those being the shaped-like-a-shield overused thing and the way-too-much-detail overused thing. Surprisingly, it's not a highlighter logo, but that somehow didn't stop us from using 50 different colors and enough lines to make a printer run out of black ink anyway. I do appreciate that the mouth is visible, unlike Moscow, and that the teeth are reasonably placed, unlike DC, but I can't get past the fact that we sacrificed a bright orange blob for a dark orange blob. Also, what's with the red hair? I hope we're at least recycling our supplies a bit after we killed derphorse.

 

 SEATTLE BEARS 

Unnecessary text. Looks like a shield again. We're already off to a bad start. But honestly, how different is it really from the Riga logo? Weird red hair for no reason, fully white eyes, and the same facial expression. The thing that gets to me more than anything else, though, is that the teeth are bad. And I mean BAD. Those are some human teeth right there. Bears eat meat, and I don't see a single fang in there. Aside from just not looking too vicious, it just looks unsettling. In fact, here's a real-life example of what the Seattle logo looks like. Intimidating? I think not.

 

 TORONTO LEGION 

Fun fact: I had no idea what this logo even was until I was in the league for a few seasons. I'd only ever seen it from a distance, and the ridiculously small head didn't make it very clear from such a distance that I was supposed to be looking at a bird. I did, however, notice the obnoxiously large text directly over the logo, telling all of us idiots that we are in fact looking at the TORONTO LEGION logo, because we wouldn't ever be able to tell otherwise. This is the complete anti-Chicago, really. You don't like the bird squashed horizontally? Cool, let's stretch the shit out of it. You don't like the million different shades of orange with the lines everywhere? Cool, you get one block of blue with no detail whatsoever. You don't like the bird looking right at you? Cool, you get to spend a couple months figuring out that the bird even has a head in the first place. Is it any better? No.

 

 VANCOUVER WOLVES 

Oh, look, another one that looks like a shield. And it comes after the Legion, one of the few teams I'd actually excuse that for and one that doesn't go down that road. There's something else I have an issue with, though, as usual. The implication here is that the wolf happens to be howling, and the implication with that is that there happens to be a moon present. But the way this logo would be set on a player's jersey, the wolf is going to be howling at that player's heart. What does that mean? Of course, it means that the player's heart is round, cold, cratered, and devoid of human life, just like the moon. It's also what a player's heart needs to be to fully embrace the latest meta. Do the math.

 

 WARSAW PREDATORS 

I will forever not understand why this logo is liked by anyone, and that's something I'd say outside of this thread as well. What kind of predator is this even supposed to be? A fox? A dog? A jackal? It doesn't look like a large animal, more like a smaller pack hunter type. It's also got some horrendously clashing colors, with blue and orange being direct opposites combined with pure black and white. This is the kind of thing you'd see spray-painted on the side of a bridge somewhere, not carefully stitched onto a hockey jersey. And if you look at it long enough, maybe squint your eyes a bit, the white patch that's supposed to be this thing's ear kind of starts to look like a second eye, making the logo look like this more than anything facing to the side. I'm not a fan.

 

 

/thread

 

 

2,396 words, somehow. See you in a month.

[Ahma 1,292]

Davos logo is perfection. It is perfect. I agree %110.

 

[Beketov 8,654]

8 hours ago, GustavMattias said:

Honestly, I think the greatest disrespect here is that the new logo was never made into a forum emote and I still have to use derphorse.

I fixed Halifax, Mexico, and Riga, I knew I was forgetting one.

[Shindigs 1,771]

10 hours ago, GustavMattias said:

Of course, it means that the player's heart is round, cold, cratered, and devoid of human life, just like the moon.

Whoa, what's with targeting @Moon. Dude's already in Gulag, isn't that enough?

[Moon 550]

7 hours ago, Shindigs said:

Whoa, what's with targeting @Moon. Dude's already in Gulag, isn't that enough?

Lol

[Gustav 6,139]

Week 2

[Doomsday 4,043]

Review:

 

Oh hell yeah, this is totally getting a review. Why read about something serious when I can read about the VHL logos being roasted instead? When I was a grader back in the boomer days of the VHL, I looked forward to articles like this because they're so fun to read. Oftentimes, they generated great discussion, since of course Discord wasn't around yet. I wasn't disappointed, this was a great read and I don't know how it took me this long to notice it. 

 

I really couldn't find anything wrong with it either, seeing as you clearly took the time to edit/proofread your work, and the formatting using the logos as emojis is spot on. It even raised awareness to the fact that one was missing! This article got more work done than Congress lately.

 

10/10

[Gustav 6,139]

Week 3

[Gustav 6,139]

WEEK 4