A personal bound copy of Whatever Promises I Made by @puckthisshift.
Bound in May of 2026
This was typeset and made with Author permission.
This bind took a couple months of working on it on and off. It's also one of my favorite Mattdrai fics so when binding it I wanted to do my best to get it done on the first try.
It's a total of 762 pages which is the largest fic I've bound so far. It's crazy to think it took me almost the same amount of time to typeset this whole fic as it did for me to read it.
This volume is both works in the Promises series with a German to English translation page. It also has been custom airbrushed on the top and bottom to match the Oilers Home Jersey for the 2016-17 season.
further to this, i do wonder if there's a general lack of understanding of just how crazy intense off-the-charts insane your chemistry has to be in order to get an enemies to lovers hrpf ship off the ground. the fact that mattdrai is as big as it is is completely unprecedented. the next biggest enemies to lovers ship is my beloved cheesby which finally cracked three hundred fics after about fifteen years. it's a quirk of hrpf that enemies to lovers ships just don't tend to pick up much traction
a factor I definitely saw described here on tumblr and didn't save so am plagiarizing now is also this: in order for a pairing to really be ship-able, there needs to be a sense of shared commitment to the bit between them. The bit can be romance, it can be a grail quest (this is why there's so much HRPF out there), or it can be total devotion to haterism.
Even people who don't ship mattdrai (or cheesby) acknowledge that they're out there having so much fun loathing the *shit* out of each other. I've never seen any indication that Hagel particularly enjoys how Matthew makes him lose his temper. Meanwhile Matthew is chirping Leon at the Olympics and Leon is laughing about it.
Completely agree with everything that has been said above.
It's also important to note that if you want people writing for Hagel/Matthew you need to be the one to make it a thing and establish a sense of reality mixed with personal fanon for people to build on.
MattDrai has Red Deer, the first hook up at the 2020 All-Star Game, and the make up or break up of the past two playoff series. Which is all fanon.
There are also many real things that keep happening that keeps the ship alive and kicking. The olympics this year with Matthew's Bridesmaid comment that he's integrated into his podcast with his brother, their goal at the All-Star Game, their lack of acknowledgment of one another unless directly asked.
You need to write what you want to see and just hope that people can see what you see on the ice. Build your ship from the ground up so other people can engaged with your ship and maybe even share headcanons with you.
saw an elderly woman walking around with a tote bag whose design were the four AO3 fic category squares and she very excitedly asked if i was a reader or a writer bcs nobody else at the con had recognized it, and after telling her that i've been writing fic since fanfic.net, she solemnly nodded and explained that she'd been reading fic since "the days of personal websites" but that she only started writing fanfic when she was 47 and oh my god when i tell you that i genuinely teared up on the spot!!!!! like!!! HELL YEAH???? LITERALLY NEVER TOO OLD TO START WRITING. NEVER TOO OLD TO WRITE AND SHARE YOUR FIC.
her enthusiastic "i'm a very nice and bubbly person, i swear! but i love writing angst and major character death :)" nearly took me the fuck out.
icon. legend. diva. i wish her nothing but a kajillion million comments and kudos. i hope her fic updates crash AO3. i hope she knows i'm promoting her to my personal patron saint of AO3.
do fic readers know that their comments actually influence the course of the story sometimes? i don't mean in a "you need to write it this way because i say so đĄ" type of comment, i mean when people are asking questions or really engaging with the plot and the themes in the comments they sometimes bring up things that i didn't even think of, or dig into parts of the story that i've overlooked, or get really interested/fixated on something i was going to just kind of glance over--and it has me going 'oh wait that's actually really interesting, that's a good point' and fully adding or tweaking or changing things about the story going forward. i'm literally adding an entire additional chapter to something right now because someone's comment had me like "oh i didn't dig into that as much as i could have." you have impact!
A personal bound copy of The President Wears Prada by @spine-buster.
Bound in March of 2026
Thank you so much for giving me permission to bind this fic! I've been thinking about working on this project for a while and I'm so happy that it came out as great as it did.
đ The inner typeset mimic's the original trad published novel just with a slight change in font from Bodoni to Adobe Garamond Pro. The dust jacket cover is a call back to the 2006 movie poster.
đ The typeset is in full color from the text messages, to all of the Tweets that I reformatted to fit the size of the page. There are also specially selected fonts for Willy and Aberdeen's handwriting.
đ The end pages were made for me by someone in a binding server that Iâm in and the Maple Leafs charm I used was taken from an old charm bracelet that I had.
mattdrai i love you dearly i want to DIE. (ofc i dont support fucking matthew do you think a man with pronouns bisexual and transgender would support this man? no)
multiple songs inspired this stupid drawing like um.
super psycho love by simon curtis, pork soda by glass animals, you oughta know by alanis morissette, she lives in my lap by outkast and the ballad of mona lisa by panic at the disco were literally the only songs i would listen to while drawing this bro so enjoy
I know youâve largely moved on from 1386 (as we all probably should) but I wish there was someone else to pair Nico with. I donât want to give him up but he doesnât have a will to his mack anymore đ. Idk I just needed to get that off my chest I guess. It feels silly to worry about this given everything but I donât know man I just want to see Nico happy in fics still
Oh anon I'm so sorry you're grieving this. It sucks so much when something happens irl that affects your love of someone who was mostly important to you as a fictional character -- but also not, right? There's always bleed in both directions, and that's what makes this so tough.
I will say, I don't think there's a "should" about moving on from 1386. It might not feel good to you to engage with them right now or ever again, and that's totally fine. But the idea that we should only write RPF about hockey players who haven't shown themselves crossing a line of acceptable moral behavior is a house of cards. It's more about virtue signaling than actual morality. It doesn't really hold up, and it doesn't need to, because at the end of the day, we write HRPF because the NHL is a heteronormative patriarchal nightmare.
(This is getting long so I'm putting the rest under the cut. Also, anon, you might not be the person who needs to hear all this today. But it seems like I needed to say it, so here we go!)
I'm not saying that there are no hockey players who believe in things I would agree with. I hope there are! But that's not a precondition to me writing about them. The NHL is such a good substrate for the stories I want to tell because it takes these boys and gives them enormous amounts of privilege while also subjecting them to constant pressure to conform with unspoken but rigid social norms. @demotu gave me the phrase "homophobic + homosocial" and it's such an accurate description of the toxicity of the environment. Fellow sports bros are the only people who are really people but also you can't fall in love with them! Have to fall in love with a skinny probably-blond lady with beachy waves and lip fillers! And if you do fall in love with your bro and manage to notice it through the cloud of heteronormativity you've been breathing your whole life...well, you'd better hide it. Can't become a problem in the room. Can't become the gay face of the NHL.
I imagine there are some guys who come through that environment with other values intact. There's surely a range of how much these guys are kind and thoughtful and considerate of non-sports-bro people in their daily lives, and of how much they consider non-sports-bro people in their politics. But the environment isn't really designed for that, and so the assumption that these guys are acceptably progressive until proven otherwise is just fundamentally implausible. You talk about Nico having a Will to his Mack -- but do we really think Will would have refused to go to the White House if he'd been on that Olympic team? We don't know that he wouldn't, so we can comfort ourselves with that belief if we want to, but it's basically saying "I like this person so they must be an exception." It's wishful thinking.
And I would argue that we don't need to engage in that wishful thinking. It's actually okay to write about guys who are probably or even definitely problematic! To me, it's a tangle of a few different things:
Support
The strongest moral objection, I think, is that writing about these guys constitutes giving them support. It's tricky, because they are in a field where public support means something to their careers--not everything, but it's a factor. But I would argue that hockey fandom and HRPF fandom are not the same thing. This is not where teams are looking to see how their players are being received. This is not where players are hoping they'll blow up. This can be frustrating when we're doing things like excoriating the guys for going to the White House and we know they don't care about our opinions. It can also be comforting when you're like, wait, will writing Matthew Tkachuk getting fucked in heat make him think I support his membership on that blue ribbon commission or whatever? Trust me, it will not.
There is, however, bleed over. Shipping two players might not make YOU want to go to their games and buy their jerseys, not if you also know they're people you don't like irl, but maybe it'll do that for the people who read your fics. You're still participating in an ecosystem that's boosting these guys, even if not very directly.
If that's a hard line for you, I don't think there's any part of men's hockey RPF that's safe from it. Like I said, I think the reason most of these guys haven't gone to the White House is that they haven't been invited. The NHL is a deeply problematic institution that's covered up sexual assault and banned pride jerseys and employed Carter Hart, and you can't pick and choose the parts that haven't shown themselves to be overtly problematic yet without both endorsing it all and setting yourself up for disappointment. There's no ethical consumption under NHL patriarchy, and the only way to win is to opt out.
(The person who introduced me to hockey RPF did that, actually, after the Pens went to Trump's White House in 2017. I understand that decision, even though I made a different one. We still talk every day.)
Feelings
I said above that you can't pick and choose among teams and players and feel like you're being morally pure. You can, however, decide that you don't want to engage with certain teams or players for any reasons you want -- because they make you feel gross, because you're disappointed in them, because they aren't who you thought they were. Fandom is supposed to be fun, and there's no point in writing or reading about someone who gets in the way of your enjoyment.
It sounds like that's where you are with Jack Hughes right now. Tbh, I'm not sure where I am on him. I do feel disappointed and hurt by what happened, even though I know on a logical level that this was a very predictable outcome of a U.S. win. I didn't have any active plot bunnies for him and Nico -- I've already covered them in my two main universes, and I have so many others to catch up on -- so this is mostly a theoretical feeling. If I did have stories in mind for him, that might be enough to make me decide I'm willing to separate the real person from the fictional version and forge ahead. I don't think it would be wrong for me to feel either way. Feelings are what they are and they aren't the same as ethics.
Social approval
This is where I think the strongest "should" tends to come from. Part of the reason people might shy away from writing Jack at this point even if they'd still like to is because they don't want other people to see it and think it means they endorse the things he's said. I would like to stress that this is a valid reason to choose not to do something. It's not WRONG to avoid writing or reading about someone because you think other people would come after you for it. But it's not wrong to decide to ignore that social pressure, either. Social pressure isn't the same as a moral imperative.
I think also we can get into bubbles on Tumblr where we think the social pressure is greater than it is. People are still reading my 1386 fics. They're showing up in my kudos emails. I suspect we'll see the pairing drop off, but maybe not entirely. I kind of hope not entirely, because it's one I've loved. If it does die off, it's not a moral victory. If it doesn't, it's not a moral failing. It's just a read on where the fic community has landed, emotionally and culturally, on the desire to engage with these people as characters.
If you do want to engage with the characters, I'd invite you to remind yourself that virtue signaling isn't the same as morality. I also suspect, based on my long experience writing unpopular characters, that you'd find the fallout to be less than you think. But if you find it less fun than it was and would rather not, that's a totally fine conclusion to come to.
The actual morality of it
I guess I'll conclude by saying: this can all feel really complicated. At the end of the day, though, this is one of the least morally weighted things any of us do with our lives. How we treat the people around us, what causes we choose to support with time and/or money, those are so much more important than what hockey players we read and write smut about. Which means that how you respect other people's decisions to engage or not engage with a given piece of smut is more morally important than the smut itself. We do have opportunities in fandom to show our values every day -- it's just not about which hockey players we support. It's about being kind to the people in the fandom trenches community around us.
All right, that was a very long answer that only partially addressed your original ask, anon. I don't have an easy emotional answer for what to do about Nico! But fandom is ever changing, and we have so much latitude to do with it what we want. I hope you'll find your answer.
YOUR FAVOURITE PLAYERS ARE NOT UNIQUELY VIRTUOUS AND MINE ARE UNFORTUNATELY NOT UNIQUELY IMMORAL ATHLETES ARE SOMETIMES BAD PEOPLE AND ALSO SOMETIMES NOT IM NOT THRILLED ABOUT IT EITHER BUT I TRY TO FIND ENJOYMENT WHERE I CAN ok now i gotta save this in a way that letâs me reblog this every time someone wins something
just started rewatching downton and i can't stop thinking about the profound loneliness of the end of the grand finale. it happens so gradually over the course of the series that you almost don't notice it; sure, there are fewer unnamed servants in the background, and we lose the whole genus footman, but it happens so slowly. upstairs, edith gets married and leaves and tom starts his new life, but that's the natural order of things. the deaths of sybil and matthew and violet are devastating, but there's sybbie and george and rose, so the show is focused more on the absence of sybil and matthew and violet themselves rather than the concept of loss.
but when the series begins, the house is alive. there is constant motion, constant noise, people constantly coming and going. there are servants whose names we never know, but who are always in and out of the frame, working in the kitchen and going up and down the stairs. upstairs, the family is whole and intact; the house is a home, where people live. there's the revolving door of suitors and parties and distant relations who come and go.
and that shot of mary at the end of the grand finale, standing alone under the portrait of violet, literally surrounded by ghosts, is so deeply sad. not just because we, the audience, are sad that the franchise is over and that sybil and matthew and violet are dead, but because the house no longer feels alive. it's now just one sad woman, her voiceless children, and a few servants left. it's a shadow of what it was. it's tragic and haunting. the estate is intact, and mary has inherited all, and the original problem they had been trying to solve since 1912 is happily resolved. but what's the point? what is the point of the estate being intact and owned by the crawleys if it's lifeless and empty? what is the point of downton if it is no longer a pillar of the community, offering employment and benefits for the village? what is the point of protecting downton for the future when it is so obvious it is a relic of the past?
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