These photos of WillMack dev camp are burned into my brain.
Whenever I see them, I turn into that meme of Jennifer Lawrence on Hot Ones. Like, what do you mean—what do you mean—what do you MEAN they were like that after just a few days of dev camp? The excessive heart eyes on the ice?? The big cheesy smiles during face offs?? The soft, fond voices at the Giants game?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN MACK SIGNED HIS ELC TWO DAYS AFTER CAMP ENDED?
(crying, pleading, Carolina Repear hot sauce-induced tears in my big wet eyes)
Anyways here is the WillMack dev camp x “there was only one bed” trope fic no one asked for.
Three Days in July
Relationship: Macklin Celebrini/Will Smith Hockey
Words: 12k, one-shot
Tags: Getting together, pre-relationship, first kiss, fluff, there was only one bed
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!
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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!
I have a desperate request for the WillMack fandom.
I've been completely obsessed with these two for the past two months. I've watched all their games, the draft, podcasts, official videos, TikToks... my FYP is absolutely FULL of edits of them, and most importantly, I've been reading fanfiction.
Honestly, I haven't read that many truly memorable fics, but one absolutely destroyed me and left me completely OBSESSED. I'm talking about Fable by chaoticmultishipper on AO3, and please, if you have any recommendations, send them my way because I NEED more.
And I don't just mean fanfiction—I mean official content, articles I should read, interviews I might have missed, literally ANYTHING you think I should check out.
As for fics, I'm open to pretty much any recommendation, but I generally prefer longer stories that start with the BU/BC rivalry, with a good slow burn and maybe even some religious guilt thrown in.
Thinking about Good Catholic School Boy Jo being roadie roommates with Iconic Fuck Boy Nate.
Nate, who talks a lot about pussy and fucking it, much to the embrassment of Jo.
Nate, who likes to push and tease and bully Jo for being "such a fucking virgin."
Nate, who won't let it go, won't stop asking if Jo's ever even touched a tit before, if he knows what to do with a woman.
Jo, who has never even had his first kiss and tells Nate as much because he's honest to a fault;
"Seriously?! You've never even made out?! Come on, Joey, you gotta lie about shit like that, bro. You'll get fucking eaten alive if the guys knew that!" Nate says, batting at the back of Jo's head.
Jo flails his arms up to cover himself. "I can't-- Nate! Knock it off! Lying is a Sin!"
Which just makes Nate laugh harder.
And later, when they're in their room.
"Really, though? You've never like, touched anyone else?"
Jo shakes his head. They're laying flat on their backs, both on Nates bed. "No, it's, uh, it's supposed to be special, you know? Just, something I only do to my wife."
Nate props himself up on his arm. "How are you gonna make it special for her if you don't even know how to kiss, man?"
Jo rolls his eyes. Nate was always thinking with his cock-- Jo was always thinking with his Bible. It was a key difference between them.
"We'll figure it out together, it can't be that hard."
"Yes, it can be. You gotta practice! Learn to make it special for her!"
"And how to you suggest I do that, huh? Got a queue of girls right here for me to just- just- shove my tongue down their throat!"
Which is how they end up making out, Nate promising to teach Jo how to kiss. Maybe after a few weeks of practice Nate convices Jo that he needs to learn how to make someone else feel good, or how not to cum in 60 seconds, or that he should learn first hand how to get fucked, so he'll know how to make it good for his future wife.
It's not a sin if they're just practicing, after all.
