Black Rose

All told, this was a really fun exchange to end my year on, and I'm happy it got off the ground. My gift fic was for my home team OTP, and it's hilarious and sweet and full of idiot boys being idiots about each other. One of those fics that's fun because you can tell how much fun the author had writing it. 

Resistance is Futile by teacups_masala, T, Brad Marchand/Tyler Seguin

Brad Marchand assimilates Tyler Seguin to the gay. At least that what he thinks.

Inconveniently, this coincides with the 2011 playoffs.

I did not manage any treats, sadly, but here's my assigned fic:

Touch Therapy, T, Tanner Pearson/Tyler Toffoli, Martin Jones/Tanner Pearson/Tyler Toffoli

Tanner Pearson is catnip for tactile empaths. It has its downsides.

This is not the fic I mentioned struggling with in my last post--that fic is something dark, kinky, and difficult that I still plan on finishing. The above fic is something I wrote in the twenty hours before the deadline, with no advanced planning whatsoever, for a ship I didn't offer. 

Because I had less than a day to plot and write a postable fic, I made up most of the worldbuilding as I wrote, with only a couple basic ground rules. Quickie is a blood empath for the sake of a goalie weirdness joke (and because I've written another fic where Quickie has a weird thing for blood), but because it's right in the beginning, I had the whole rest of the fic to flesh out his abilities and his relationship with Joner. Ask me about any other kind of psychs and I'll come up blank.

I put so little work into the worldbuilding that I'm slightly amused by how much people liked it, but vague implications tend to work better for these kinds of AUs. But there was a lot of stuff that grew in the background of the fic, and Tanner is an unreliable narrator who can only think about his crush, so maybe I'll put together some tidbits from around the psychic NHL. 

Lucic is...a surprise, to say the least. Someone on deke_dangle put it wonderfully: he may be a piece of shit, but he's our piece of shit. Every hockey fan in the world hates him except for Bostonians, which is making me more upset than it probably should. Please take care of him, LA, I promise we'll get some new adorable rookies for Jones to have sexual tension with.

Hamilton isn't as surprising, given the Bruins' track record, but now I have a defunct 27 jersey. Someone get on that Thornton/Kessel/Seguin/Hamilton orgy fic stat.

Instead of working on my shipswap assignment, I spent half of last weekend writing college hockey A/B/O with original characters. I spent the other half watching my real life college hockey team win a divisional title, which is what put me in the mood for pack cuddling and team dynamics and youthful enthusiasm (they're the youngest team in the division, and holy shit, if you thought hockey hugs in the NHL were adorable...)

I forgot how much fun it is to write the hockey part of hockey fic. There's an essay I may write someday about gendered language and trope trends and the difference between women who found hockey through fanfic and women who found fanfic through hockey, but the short version is that as a lifelong sports fan, my tastes don't overlap much with hockey rpf fandom. Sometimes that makes me want to flood AO3 with nitty gritty game details, and sometimes it makes me want to salt the earth and spend several months in tiny book fandoms. But there really is nothing like hockey for violence and intense homoerotic intimacy and aggressive male social behavior (gee, I wonder why I imprinted on The Raven Cycle so hard). It's always frustrating when fandom is on a totally different wavelength than you are, but if you love the source material enough, I think you can always make it work.

Unsurprisingly, when I write A/B/O, it's from the POV of a squeaky clean alpha with hidden anger issues falling for a snarly, insubordinate omega. I don't think I would've started reading omegaverse if not for hockey fandom, because omega hockey players by necessity have to be stronger and meaner than delicate wilting flowers. The twink/uke/mewling omega aesthetic really doesn't do it for me, but I like the animalistic power displays and uncontrollable primal urges. High protocol in regular BDSM is a big turnoff, but somehow it really works when it's such a normalized part of the culture that your coach might put you on your knees if you're craving domination (mmm, clinical public use of nervous college boys by their handsome coaches For Their Own Good). Organized sports are a great background for submission that isn't tied with how tiny and pretty and effeminate the sub is, and the kneeling trope is pretty much my favorite thing fandom has ever produced. If it trended a little less towards kink-as-trauma-therapy and OTPs and a little more towards dubconny male power struggles and whole team dynamics, I'd probably never leave the fandom again. Well, that and if they stopped writing my team as evil abusers who only exist to make Tyler Seguin cry.