#matthew and leon

[msmargaretmurry]

I NEEd to hear more about depressed collage au

anon it is truly just like, peak self-indulgent hurt/comfort chatfic from the minds of me and @hopetorun. the logistics don't make sense and we don't care. the premise is that matthew suffers a horrible injury in juniors and no one thinks he'll ever be able to play again, but he plugs away at his PT for a few years and an opportunity for him to try to play CIS arises so of course he going to take it, because he cannot conceive of a life where he's not a hockey player. so he ships off to attempt to play hockey at a university in. u guessed it. the scenic city of edmonton alberta. where it turns out his rehab was not as effective as hoped; he re-injures himself only a few weeks in and it's truly and deeply career-ending this time. but he can't stand the thought of going home a failure so he stays in school as a miserable depressed shell of himself who has no idea what to do with his life, and also meets leon, who is hot and funny and has the nhl career matthew always dreamed he would have, and obviously they embark on a turbulent relationship that is maybe not always healthy but they will figure it out in the end 🙏

[hopetorun]

🐀, 17

a kiss to distract

Matthew winces when Leon leans in to kiss him. It’s subtle, but Leon’s spent plenty of time having to read Matthew’s reactions through poorly lit FaceTime calls. He can recognize a reaction like that in plain view. Still, he doesn't pull back, kissing Matthew slowly and thoroughly. It's been too long, weeks that stretched into months between February and May. Leon doesn't want to stop kissing him yet.

Then Matthew hisses. It's barely audible but Leon feels it against his teeth, a sharp intake of breath. He can't help himself this time, pulling back abruptly. Matthew leans forward, chasing the kiss, even as Leon can see him grimace.

He groans when Leon touches his left arm gently. "I'm not going to break," he says. Leon just stares at him, the edge of the wrapping on his shoulder just barely visible at the neck of his shirt. The sling is on the coffee table, used as little as possible. Yesterday, Matthew tried to convince Leon to help him onto one of the pool floats just to lounge in the shallow end of the pool.

Matthew gives him a dirty look. "I'm not going to break more."

There's not much Leon can say without getting laughed at. Still, he isn't going to let Matthew hurt himself just to make out on the sofa. He sighs, watching Matthew's reaction—tired, annoyed, still in pain. And then Matthew is moving with surprising speed, getting one leg over Leon's, letting his weight settle onto Leon's thighs.

When he leans in this time, there's no new pain on his face. His mouth is soft, warm. His lips aren't chapped the way Leon is still used to them being from the long Alberta winters. He doesn't cup Leon's face or get his arms around Leon's neck the way he normally does.

"Come on," he says, low against Leon's unmoving mouth. "I can hardly do anything fun."

Leaning back, Leon looks at his face. The tension that's been there for days is still present, and there's something else under it, too. He's got plenty of practice reading Matthew's emotions now, even the ones he tries to hide. Matthew doesn't have to actually ask Leon to do something that'll make him feel normal. Leon can give him that.

[hunterrrs]

asdfghjk incredible…

[nottodayjustin]

February 12th 2025 best hockey tweet(s) of the day

Dunno if you’ve heard but 4 Nations are Facing off.

[cheddaryouthanme]

Hockey RPF writers being known across fandoms as literary masters

When I first started reading MattDrai fics on AO3 I remember thinking “wait what the HELL is going on why is this the most consistently well-written fanfiction I’ve read in any fandom? Is this a thing? Do people know??” And apparently it is and they do.

[jamingbenn]

year in review - hockey rpf on ao3

hello!! the annual ao3 year in review had some friends and i thinking - wouldn't it be cool if we had a hockey rpf specific version of that. so i went ahead and collated the data below!!

i start with a broad overview, then dive deeper into the 3 most popular ships this year (with one bonus!)

if any images appear blurry, click on them to expand and they should become clear!

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before we jump in, some key things to highlight: - CREDIT TO: the webscraping part of my code heavily utilized the ao3 wrapped google colab code, as lovingly created by @kyucultures on twitter, as the main skeleton. i tweaked a couple of things but having it as a reference saved me a LOT of time and effort as a first time web scraper!!! thank you stranger <3 - please do NOT, under ANY circumstances, share any part of this collation on any other website. please do not screenshot or repost to twitter, tiktok, or any other public social platform. thank u!!! T_T - but do feel free to send requests to my inbox! if you want more info on a specific ship, tag, or you have a cool idea or wanna see a correlation between two variables, reach out and i should be able to take a look. if you want to take a deeper dive into a specific trope not mentioned here/chapter count/word counts/fic tags/ship tags/ratings/etc, shoot me an ask!

˚　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　 　˚　　　　 . ★⋆. ࿐࿔

with that all said and done... let's dive into hockey_rpf_2024_wrapped_insanity.ipynb

BIG PICTURE OVERVIEW

i scraped a total of 4266 fanfics that dated themselves as published or finished in the year 2024. of these 4000 odd fanfics, the most popular ships were:

Note: "Minor or Background Relationship(s)" clocked in at #9 with 91 fics, but I removed it as it was always a secondary tag and added no information to the chart. I did not discern between primary ship and secondary ship(s) either!

breaking down the 5 most popular ships over the course of the year, we see:

super interesting to see that HUGE jump for mattdrai in june/july for the stanley cup final. the general lull in the offseason is cool to see as well.

as for the most popular tags in all 2024 hockey rpf fic...

weee like our fluff. and our established relationships. and a little H/C never hurt no one.

i got curious here about which AUs were the most popular, so i filtered down for that. note that i only regex'd for tags that specifically start with "Alternate Universe - ", so A/B/O and some other stuff won't appear here!

idk it was cool to me.

also, here's a quick breakdown of the ratings % for works this year:

and as for the word counts, i pulled up a box plot of the top 20 most popular ships to see how the fic length distribution differed amongst ships:

mattdrai-ers you have some DEDICATION omg. respect

now for the ship by ship break down!!

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#1 MATTDRAI

most popular ship this year. peaked in june/july with the scf. so what do u people like to write about?

fun fun fun. i love that the scf is tagged there like yes actually she is also a main character

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#2 SIDGENO

(my babies) top tags for this ship are:

folks, we are a/b/o fiends and we cannot lie. thank you to all the selfless authors for feeding us good a/b/o fic this year. i hope to join your ranks soon.

(also: MPREG. omega sidney crosby. alpha geno. listen, the people have spoken, and like, i am listening.)

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#3 NICOJACK

top tags!!

it seems nice and cozy over there... room for one more?

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BONUS: JDTZ.

i wasnt gonna plot this but @marcandreyuri asked me if i could take a look and the results are so compelling i must include it. are yall ok. do u need a hug

top tags being h/c, angst, angst, TRADES, pining, open endings... T_T katie said its a "torture vortex" and i must concurr

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BONUS BONUS: ALPHA/BETA/OMEGA

as an a/b/o enthusiast myself i got curious as to what the most popular ships were within that tag. if you want me to take a look about this for any other tag lmk, but for a/b/o, as expected, SID GENO ON TOP BABY!:

thats all for now!!! if you have anything else you are interested in seeing the data for, send me an ask and i'll see if i can get it to ya!

[sara-likes-things]

[adelphenium]

aucember day 2: mattdrai + corporate au 📈

[ijustdontlikepeople]

NHL x Internet 6/?

[intheupside]

@TheFourthPeriod: The Amazon NHL docuseries, “Faceoff: Inside the NHL”, premieres Oct 4.

Season 1 has six episodes. Some of the featured talent includes Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, William Nylander, Quinn Hughes, Matthew Tkachuk, Jack Eichel, Filip Forsberg, David Pastrnak & Jeremy Swayman (among others).

Paul Martin, Executive Producer of Drive to Survive, is also an EP for Faceoff.

They started to meet & chat with the NHL athletes in Feb in Toronto during All-Star Weekend. They’re going to show a type of authentic access we don’t often get or see.

[msmargaretmurry]

I’m rotating Matthew Tkachuck in my head right now and trying to figure out what’s an interesting direction to take him in, in general, in a post SCF win world. Real Matthew is obviously living his best life right now but I feel like there’s interesting things to explore with fanon Matthew. What angst avenues remain after he’s reached the dream of every hockey player in the show, fulfilled the expectations put on him by putting the tkachuk name on the cup? I’ve always liked stories that explore characters after they reached their ultimate goal and the ‘now what?’ question that they have to answer, I’m having trouble figuring what that ‘now what?’ is for Matthew beyond play more hockey and win more cups. As the foremost Matthew Knower I know, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

(Also needless to say i’d love hearing the extra mattdrai take on this too, either already established pre-SCF, broke up before SCF, or never even got together yet)

OK HI ANON i am so sorry for taking so long to answer this! and thank you for sending such a fun and interesting question!! as usual this got long so i'll put it under the read more.

so first of all i've definitely seen people say that matthew is less interesting to them fannishly now that his narrative is "over" — he won the cup, he's getting married, he's got his ideal happy ending, etc — and i do understand that, both theoretically and having seen it happen before in fandom (after the caps finally won the cup fannish hockey interest in them seemed to drop off SO abruptly at the time, lol). which is fine! if the thing someone was most invested in was the narrative and the narrative concludes, if the tension they were interested in is no longer there, it's natural to move on to new victims players of interest.

however, anon, i like you am for better or worse still invested 😂 and despite writing almost nothing this past year (i cannot express enough how burnt out grad school had me, but i have WAY better plans for stress management this year, hooray for having writing time again) i have been rotating our beloved rat boy CONSTANTLY on the gas station hotdog roller in my mind. he is one those players who obviously i enjoy him as a real person and a hockey player but for fanfiction purposes i find him so interesting for his potential as a character, and that character is only very loosely tied to his real life circurmstances and is a separate, totally fictional entity from the real guy. so while the real matthew is living the dream, and i am so happy for and proud of him, i still have fictional matthew in my head like, well i can do whatever i want with you, lol.

so i think what maybe makes it more difficult for people to stay invested fannishly in situations like this is the (understandable) tendency to set "canon" fic (fics that aren't full AUs) in the here-and-now, and matthew's here-and-now, like we said, just doesn't have that much obvious tension and conflict, and the tension and conflict are what make for great stories! so i take a few different approaches here, and hopefully you will find one or some of them interesting or useful.

firstly i totally agree that "what now" stories are great. you've achieved everything you ever dreamed of — what now? well, as a writer, you figure out why that wasn't enough and then you send your character on a journey to figure that out, too. and honestly a lot of the time this is just about making shit up! like, in haw matthew is such an anxious character — obviously matthew in real life is not anxious like his haw counterpart, but haw!matthew has something real matthew doesn't have: his big gay secret that is constantly weighing on him and stressing him out, so the anxiousness (hopefully) makes sense, character-wise. with matthew as a character i am almost always ignoring his real-life love life (i have just never been a person to include real wags in my fic in any major way) so my immediate thought is: if he has the cup, but not the engagement, how does that make things different? is he lonely? does he need to admit to himself that he's lonely, or is he already aware and making a choice to stay that way? or, maybe he uses the cup press as a way to come out, and he's dealing with all of that? maybe he gets caught putting his tongue in some guy's mouth during the drunken cup celebrations and he's dealing with that. (insert matthew pairing of choice into any of this, obviously.)

or maybe we want a fic that lets him have the whole happy ending, cup and wedding and everything. fast-forward five, ten, fifteen years, and how has that happiness lasted? like, he's pretty young, he has a lot of career ahead of him! will he be content as his career winds down if in all those years he hasn't had another sniff at the cup? does his (fictional) marriage last (obviously not, if we're going to have him sucking dick in a supply closet or w/e, but ykwim)? does he get to end his career on his own terms? there are whole worlds of futurefic out there for exploring what happens when all your dreams come true so young and so you spend the rest of your life chasing that high.

and then there is like, we can write fic set in the past! we're allowed to do that! if we still want to write about calgary matthew or pre-cup matthew and explore the conflicts and tensions in those parts of his life, we can do that! i think that his first two years in florida are SO ripe especially for like, matthew/sasha or matthew/benny or other fic with his teammates culminating in that cup run. like with good romance novels, knowing it has the best possible ending doesn't make the journey less interesting. we love that real matthew has his real happy ending; it could be really fun to recreate that journey for him with bonus matthew/[insert hockey man of choice here] content. (obviously i love matthew/leon, but i really will read anything 😂 so this is me encouraging all pairings.)

and then for ME there is a particularly delicious option, one of my favorite types of of hrpf fic in general, with the canon divergence au. we have seen matthew live his dream; what happens if something in his life happened that derailed his path to it? how does he reach that level of joy and contentness and peace with himself if his perfect cup/engagement summer is taken out of his reach? i'm talking your classic career-ending injury aus, something else happens to derail his career aus, etc. maybe not for everyone and maybe not quiet what you're thinking about with a "what next" type of fic, but i love this shit so much, so i have to include it here.

finally, OBVIOUSLY, the matthew and leon of it all!!!!! like, man, WHAT a wrench to throw into our beautiful wonderful made-up mattdrainiverse. i think there are such fun possibilities in every version of the scenario like you mentioned — established relationship, broken up, not together yet, a fourth secret thing, etc. for established relationship, the question of, does this break them up (and then you the writer has to get them back together) (if you're feeling nice)? if not, how do they get past it? if they're exes, does it weirdly ignite something between them again, and how does that go? and honestly my favorite might be the "not together yet" option, just because the journey for leon getting over that resentment and growing feelings could be soooooooo good.

and i think maybe that is the key to post-cup fic for them, for me, if the fic is going to end with them happy together? is, whatever their relationship, taking leon's feelings about the cup seriously — his resentment, his pain, his annoyance, what have you — and showing me that journey of processing those feelings and getting to a place where even if he's not happy for matthew, he is happy with him. and on matthew's side, his own feelings — refusing to be sorry for winning, refusing to tamp down his joy, etc — are obviously also important, and i think there could be some really good conflict there as they butt heads and work through all that.

but every fic doesn't have to deal with that whole-ass emotional journey, obvs. not every fic has to be a 60k feelings journey 😂 one-shot encounters, hate-fucking pwps, whatever, they can all be delicious. (unsolicited fic rec, @hopetorun recently wrote me this matthew/leon post-cup fic that packs a punch in 10k.) for me though i think these feelings about the cup need to be centered in the post-cup era, even if they don't get nicely resolved. even if it's set 15 years in the future, those feelings are still going to be there, and whatever happens between them is going to be messy and complicated. and we all know i love mess 🥰

anyway, i'm not actually sure if i answered your question here but i hope it did! regardless, i had fun thinking about all this, and that's the most important thing!

[hopetorun]

for the ship kiss meme, number 28 for matthew and leon, please 😘

a kiss as a lie

Matthew drives the three hours up highway 2 because unpleasant as a fractured hand is, it’s nothing on a high ankle sprain. The road rolls by, less familiar the farther he gets from Calgary but still somehow basically the same. His hand throbs where he’s clenching the wheel too tight, and somewhere in the outskirts of Edmonton he has to pull over and peel the brace off to stretch it.

It’s a long time to listen to himself think, especially since he’s trying not to do that too much right now. Too many moving pieces to make any decisions. Johnny hedged when Matthew talked to him two days ago. Dad equivocated when Matthew asked for his opinion. He didn’t even bother to ask anyone else, but Mom had some input anyway, maybe the most helpful of the bunch—there’s no objectively correct answer, so Matthew just has to pick what he wants.

Leon lets him in, limping obviously. There’s a pair of crutches leaned up against the wall by the kitchen that Matthew looks at and then decides to ignore. The silence is heavy, Matthew not asking about his ankle and Leon not offering anything to fill the space around it.

“Sorry about the sweep,” Matthew says finally.

Leon shrugs. He steps into Matthew’s space and kisses him, and Matthew melts into it immediately. That’s what he’s here for, after all.

It’s good, being kissed like this. Getting his hands on Leon’s skin and Leon’s mouth on his neck. Leon touches him carefully, even though Matthew’s not the one who’s limping through his own house, and kisses him with an edge of desperation, and murmurs Matthew’s name when Matthew presses into him.

After, Leon tucks his face into Matthew’s neck. “Only three months until the preseason.”

There’s always Flames-Oilers in the preseason. Matthew just doesn’t know if he’ll be playing in those games yet. He nods anyway, chin knocking against Leon’s forehead once, and then he nudges Leon’s head up.

“Yeah,” he says softly, a simple statement of fact. Not a promise. Not anything.

He kisses Leon before either of them can say anything else.

[acekazoo]

nhl as textposts.. offseason is driving me crazy

[mikkolas]

i think matthew would be scared of furbies. i think he'd see one and go oh gosh oh what IS that while laughing nervously and looking side to side like he's in a locked room with an ambiguously aggressive dog and not a toy made up of fluff and plastic. god forbid he finds out you can learn the language. | don't know what all that was, sorry man, anyway, hashtag rewind?

[maxz-b]

how would you feel about part 19 out of ???

[nottodayjustin]

June 6th 2024 best hockey tweet(s) of the day