Would you entertain the idea of a matty/ritty rat fic? Or is that your notp? Or do you just have your heart set on matty/jake and elias/ritter? Like they're already obsessed with each other, they're super adorable, cuddle lots, and maybe it's really easy for ritter to assimilate into the culture? Maybe part of his family turn into bats or hares or lemurs or something.
I don’t know why people seem to think I’m so anti-Matty/Ritter. I love Ritter, I love their hugs, I love their Skip the Dishes vid. Writing one Elias/Ritter fic doesn’t mean I don’t like Matt/Ritter. (Insert “Ritter has two hands” meme here.) I don’t do OTPs; I have favorite players and I then ship them with everyone (I do this in every fandom; back in SGA fandom I shipped McKay with literally everybody). It’s why I end up with OT3/4 fics so much. It’s why I ship any variant of Paulie/Nealer/Dicky and I headcanon that Mario Ferraro is banging all the Sharks vets in a really tender and committed way.
Basically never assume that just because I write fics of a certain pairing means that I’m totally averse to shaking it up.
RE: Ritter and Matt, it did actually come up before. I tend to lean towards Matty/Jake in this instance just because that’s part of the written “canon” of it now (as opposed to, say, TK/Nolan is something that’s been talked about but never written into fic so it’s less concrete). So I’d probably end up calling it an AU to the original, which isn’t the first time I’ve written something like that because I’ve done it with the wolves a bunch of times.
I think Ritter is the type of goalie-weird that he wouldn’t know Matt was a rat at first but he believes Matt when Matt keeps telling the team, so he isn’t totally shocked when he sees Matt shift for the first time. Matt outright asked for his dryer lint a long time ago so Ritter’s been giving it to him for months before he actually sees what it’s for.
