dear author letter (team usa exchange edition)
dear team usa exchange author,
firstly, SORRY ABOUT ALL THE SUPER OBSCURE PAIRINGS. but if we matched on a ship, you probably enjoy rarepairs as much as i do, so - thank you so much for signing up and writing something for me! i know i'll enjoy whatever it is that you decide to write ♥
general likes: i enjoy a lot of tropes, but the first things that come to mind are: team camaraderie/found families/families of choice, mutual pining, friends to lovers (and enemies to friends to lovers), magic incorporated in a mundane universe (i.e. urban fantasy, magical realism, et cetera), close-canon alternate realities of all kinds (basically what-if scenarios that tweak things about the world as we know it but stay in the canon universe, i.e. if one player wasn't a hockey player and the other still was), fake dating, woke up married. i love a good character study as much as any ship fic and i LOVE AUs. i love hitman/spies/espionage AUs, heist/conmen AUs, supernatural AUs where people are werewolves or vampires or shapeshifters or whatever, and when in doubt, set it in SPACE. I LOVE SPACE. i also love porn (preferably with a lot of feelings)!
general dislikes: i'm not a huge fan of most hard kinks (unless otherwise specified in the ship sections below), noncon/dubcon, terminal illness, self injury/mental illness/suicide, over-the-top angst, infidelity, and character death. basically relentlessly sad stuff! i am all about happy endings and people enjoying each other. BUT if it takes some angst to get there along the way, i am not opposed; i can also really get into melancholy/bittersweet relationships as long as the ending is hopeful!
on to the specific ships:
→→→ thatcher demko/john hayden:
hayds and thatch! i love hopeless romantic john hayden and aggressively affectionate thatcher demko. i also love college hockey, so anything set during their current years playing in the ncaa is catnip to me, but i also love how they played for team usa together, so ntdp stuff is also more than welcome! one of the things i like about them as a ship is the uncertainty of their futures moving forward (whether or not thatcher's staying for his senior year, being prospects for different teams, how long they'll be in the pipeline before making it in the show) and learning how to deal with the long-distance aspect of not living in the same city.
specific prompts:
1) road trips!!!! from the east coast to california! one of my fave things about road trips specifically is people being forced into close quarters for long periods of time and therefore being forced to confront their feelings, so anything along those lines would be awesome.
2) john hayden comes from a very long and illustrious line of new england werewolves. discuss.
3) i would definitely not be opposed to threesomes with dylan larkin.
4) in general i enjoy premises where thatcher is very physically needy and john is super emotionally needy, but i am super down for any and all inversions of this as well!
→→→ dylan larkin/zach werenski:
ahhh ok, dylan and zach. the hometown hero and childhood best friends narratives are just too good! i love how close they are and how dylan had to do some "good persuading" to get zach to come to umich with him, and that one of the PERKS the recruiting office used was that they could room together. i love that zach accelerated his high school career so that he could go to college as a seventeen year old and play with dylan!!! and that zach wore a red wings shirt that dylan gave him to dylan's first game as a red wing, AND THAT DYLAN AND HIS BROTHER WENT TO ZACH'S DRAFT. basically, they are married.
specific prompts:
1) anything to do with this particular season interests me: they're still living within a 50 mile radius of one another, but the demands of an nhl season are obviously a lot different than the ones of college hockey. i wanna see how they make it work!
2) i'd love an alternate reality where zach stays at umich for four years and signs with the red wings as a ufa after he graduates (sorry, cbj). in a similar vein to the first prompt, exploration of how different being in the nhl is would be fantastic, and by that time zach and dylan won't have lived together for three years, so learning how to be together when they suddenly see each other every day would be awesome.
3) SECRET VIRGIN DYLAN LARKIN, any way you can swing this.
4) alternatively, sex pollen?
5) best friends sexually experimenting with each other and then ~accidentally growing romantic feelings~
i am also quite fond of the most recent iteration of the university of michigan wolverines, so inclusion of any of those guys (jt compher, niko porikos, etc) would be super appreciated as well!
→→→ jack eichel/brandon fortunato:
hahahaha, oh boy. where do i begin. i love the boston university terriers. i especially love jack eichel's class of freshmen that came in the summer of 2014, as well as the current iteration of the team. i guess what i'm really looking for here is team ensemble shenanigans with some romance thrown in, though if you wanted to set this during their ntdp years i would definitely not be opposed (i really love that ntdp class as well). obviously i love the surface-level size difference, but i also love that they've known each other for so long, and that they like each other a lot! brandon is small and loud and jack is big and loud and they can be loud and obnoxious together.
specific prompts:
1) the bodyswaps trope could be really interesting for them, i think, not just because of the inherent size difference but also in terms of where they are wrt their hockey careers.
2) honestly i just want very self-indulgent fic where buffalo won the draft lottery and jack decided to stay at BU for a couple more years. maybe he wins the national championship with his boys. in some recent articles it's clear that he does really miss his old college team and being on the BU campus so anything that plays into that would be great.
3) animal transformation fic where brandon fortunato regularly turns into this baby pomeranian when he is stressed out/frustrated/angry and jack thinks it's unbearably cute.
4) crossdressing/feminization kink would be 💯 (see: the ladybug halloween costume)
5) in a similar vein, bfort is noted as one of the worst dressers on the team, so anything where jack dresses him/buys him clothes/makes brandon wear his own clothing would also be appreciated. (clothes sharing!!! the best.)
6) SEX BETS.
→→→ jt compher/kevin lohan:
my other wolverine children ☺️ jt compher is a dad and kevin lohan is lindsay lohan's cousin. they are very, very cute together. the height difference, as you can see, is quite excellent. last year they were roommates! they were both juniors this past season; jt was captain, and k-lo only played two games of the year, sidelined by an injury for the rest of it. (he was, however, zach werenski's d-partner last year.) you can do a lot of different things with the college hockey setting (true of most of these ships), so honestly, go wild.
specific prompts:
1) anything about this year and umich's defensive woes weighing heavily on them would be great. k-lo's frustrations with not being able to play, jt dealing with the pressure of being captain. idk what their living situation at school was this past year, but having them stay roommates is perfectly okay with me.
2) animal transformation fic! jt's called him big cat, but anything you choose i would be down for.
3) accidentally dating/everyone around them thinks they're dating. their sisters have joked about them being married on instagram, so.
4) fic where they go on a cross country road trip together for jt's 21st birthday (slash their honeymoon???)
→→→ matt grzelcyk/jimmy vesey:
sons of boston! matt and jimmy are childhood friends, and this article is basically a shipping manifesto. the bottom line: they've been friends since they were six, have played on various teams together and against one another till now, and they're college seniors about to embark on their professional careers. matt was drafted by the bruins in 2012 and subsequently played four years with boston university, and jimmy was drafted the same year (during his second year of eligibility) by the nashville predators, and went on to play four years for harvard. if you've been paying attention to college ufa season at all, you'll recognize jimmy's name because he recently announced that he wouldn't be signing with nashville and would instead be looking to sign as a free agent come august 15th, once nashville's rights expire. toronto's been thrown around as a possibility (his little brother nolan was drafted by them in 2014, and their father is a boston-area scout for the leafs), but the other team that people feel have a ~stake~ is, of course, boston.
matt signed with the bruins last week. YOU DO THE MATH.
specific prompts:
1) MARRIAGE PACT TO THE BRUINS, OBVIOUSLY.
2) anything about their four years playing college hockey in boston! i'm very fond of the terriers and don't know too much about the crimson, so if you wanna go for ensemble shenanigans with any one team, i'd probably prefer BU, but you could definitely make a case for the harvard kids as well!
3) fic where jimmy defies all odds and does NOT go to either toronto or boston, and they have to make long-distance work while also trying to break into the nhl.
4) any hypothetical where both of them are invited to play for team usa at some point in time; matt was an ntdp kid, and jimmy played for the 2013 world junior team that won gold, but i don't think they've actually played an international tournament together (yet!) so that could be fun! (eta: for verisimilitude, matt was actually in the initial wjc roster for the 2013 tournament but was cut the last day before prelims started. sadness.mp3)
6) summer road trips, always.
7) off season fic in general, really; they're both boston kids and used to play a lot of street hockey together (and won a kitchen cup championship)!
→→→ justin faulk/noah hanifin:
i love hero worship, and noah/jfaulk is a super great ship for it: noah admiring how great a defenseman justin is, noah not knowing if he wants to fuck justin or be him, et cetera. justin can be a bit of a cipher but he is lowkey hilarious and seems like a pretty fun, laidback dude who loves minnesota, jt brown, and scoring power play goals. he is also super thick, and noah is tall and weedy, so do with that what you will.
1) i'd love fic where age isn't necessarily the issue, but ~responsibility~ is? like, justin has an A, he's supposed to be mentoring the rookie and being a good person, but noah keeps lounging around looking appealing, super eager to please, and it is Very Hard To Resist.
2) SECRET WEREWOLF JUSTIN FAULK
3) noah constantly bugging justin when he was injured earlier this year; teenagers can be so annoying but justin is weirdly charmed by noah's persistence?
4) fic where they go to iihf worlds together! "it's basically a summer vacation in europe," says noah. "no, it is not," says justin, but they go tanning on the beach in france after the tournament anyway.
5) this is a ship where i would be super down for sketchy porn, so go wild, tbh.
please feel free to mix and match any of my likes and dislikes with any of the prompts listed above! or if you have an entirely different idea that you've been wanting to write about any of these ships, i am totally down for that as well. thanks again for signing up and writing a story for me; i'm super pumped to see what you come up with! ♥
love,
gdgdbaby
firstly, SORRY ABOUT ALL THE SUPER OBSCURE PAIRINGS. but if we matched on a ship, you probably enjoy rarepairs as much as i do, so - thank you so much for signing up and writing something for me! i know i'll enjoy whatever it is that you decide to write ♥
general likes: i enjoy a lot of tropes, but the first things that come to mind are: team camaraderie/found families/families of choice, mutual pining, friends to lovers (and enemies to friends to lovers), magic incorporated in a mundane universe (i.e. urban fantasy, magical realism, et cetera), close-canon alternate realities of all kinds (basically what-if scenarios that tweak things about the world as we know it but stay in the canon universe, i.e. if one player wasn't a hockey player and the other still was), fake dating, woke up married. i love a good character study as much as any ship fic and i LOVE AUs. i love hitman/spies/espionage AUs, heist/conmen AUs, supernatural AUs where people are werewolves or vampires or shapeshifters or whatever, and when in doubt, set it in SPACE. I LOVE SPACE. i also love porn (preferably with a lot of feelings)!
general dislikes: i'm not a huge fan of most hard kinks (unless otherwise specified in the ship sections below), noncon/dubcon, terminal illness, self injury/mental illness/suicide, over-the-top angst, infidelity, and character death. basically relentlessly sad stuff! i am all about happy endings and people enjoying each other. BUT if it takes some angst to get there along the way, i am not opposed; i can also really get into melancholy/bittersweet relationships as long as the ending is hopeful!
on to the specific ships:
→→→ thatcher demko/john hayden:
hayds and thatch! i love hopeless romantic john hayden and aggressively affectionate thatcher demko. i also love college hockey, so anything set during their current years playing in the ncaa is catnip to me, but i also love how they played for team usa together, so ntdp stuff is also more than welcome! one of the things i like about them as a ship is the uncertainty of their futures moving forward (whether or not thatcher's staying for his senior year, being prospects for different teams, how long they'll be in the pipeline before making it in the show) and learning how to deal with the long-distance aspect of not living in the same city.
specific prompts:
1) road trips!!!! from the east coast to california! one of my fave things about road trips specifically is people being forced into close quarters for long periods of time and therefore being forced to confront their feelings, so anything along those lines would be awesome.
2) john hayden comes from a very long and illustrious line of new england werewolves. discuss.
3) i would definitely not be opposed to threesomes with dylan larkin.
4) in general i enjoy premises where thatcher is very physically needy and john is super emotionally needy, but i am super down for any and all inversions of this as well!
→→→ dylan larkin/zach werenski:
ahhh ok, dylan and zach. the hometown hero and childhood best friends narratives are just too good! i love how close they are and how dylan had to do some "good persuading" to get zach to come to umich with him, and that one of the PERKS the recruiting office used was that they could room together. i love that zach accelerated his high school career so that he could go to college as a seventeen year old and play with dylan!!! and that zach wore a red wings shirt that dylan gave him to dylan's first game as a red wing, AND THAT DYLAN AND HIS BROTHER WENT TO ZACH'S DRAFT. basically, they are married.
specific prompts:
1) anything to do with this particular season interests me: they're still living within a 50 mile radius of one another, but the demands of an nhl season are obviously a lot different than the ones of college hockey. i wanna see how they make it work!
2) i'd love an alternate reality where zach stays at umich for four years and signs with the red wings as a ufa after he graduates (sorry, cbj). in a similar vein to the first prompt, exploration of how different being in the nhl is would be fantastic, and by that time zach and dylan won't have lived together for three years, so learning how to be together when they suddenly see each other every day would be awesome.
3) SECRET VIRGIN DYLAN LARKIN, any way you can swing this.
4) alternatively, sex pollen?
5) best friends sexually experimenting with each other and then ~accidentally growing romantic feelings~
i am also quite fond of the most recent iteration of the university of michigan wolverines, so inclusion of any of those guys (jt compher, niko porikos, etc) would be super appreciated as well!
→→→ jack eichel/brandon fortunato:
hahahaha, oh boy. where do i begin. i love the boston university terriers. i especially love jack eichel's class of freshmen that came in the summer of 2014, as well as the current iteration of the team. i guess what i'm really looking for here is team ensemble shenanigans with some romance thrown in, though if you wanted to set this during their ntdp years i would definitely not be opposed (i really love that ntdp class as well). obviously i love the surface-level size difference, but i also love that they've known each other for so long, and that they like each other a lot! brandon is small and loud and jack is big and loud and they can be loud and obnoxious together.
specific prompts:
1) the bodyswaps trope could be really interesting for them, i think, not just because of the inherent size difference but also in terms of where they are wrt their hockey careers.
2) honestly i just want very self-indulgent fic where buffalo won the draft lottery and jack decided to stay at BU for a couple more years. maybe he wins the national championship with his boys. in some recent articles it's clear that he does really miss his old college team and being on the BU campus so anything that plays into that would be great.
3) animal transformation fic where brandon fortunato regularly turns into this baby pomeranian when he is stressed out/frustrated/angry and jack thinks it's unbearably cute.
4) crossdressing/feminization kink would be 💯 (see: the ladybug halloween costume)
5) in a similar vein, bfort is noted as one of the worst dressers on the team, so anything where jack dresses him/buys him clothes/makes brandon wear his own clothing would also be appreciated. (clothes sharing!!! the best.)
6) SEX BETS.
→→→ jt compher/kevin lohan:
my other wolverine children ☺️ jt compher is a dad and kevin lohan is lindsay lohan's cousin. they are very, very cute together. the height difference, as you can see, is quite excellent. last year they were roommates! they were both juniors this past season; jt was captain, and k-lo only played two games of the year, sidelined by an injury for the rest of it. (he was, however, zach werenski's d-partner last year.) you can do a lot of different things with the college hockey setting (true of most of these ships), so honestly, go wild.
specific prompts:
1) anything about this year and umich's defensive woes weighing heavily on them would be great. k-lo's frustrations with not being able to play, jt dealing with the pressure of being captain. idk what their living situation at school was this past year, but having them stay roommates is perfectly okay with me.
2) animal transformation fic! jt's called him big cat, but anything you choose i would be down for.
3) accidentally dating/everyone around them thinks they're dating. their sisters have joked about them being married on instagram, so.
4) fic where they go on a cross country road trip together for jt's 21st birthday (slash their honeymoon???)
→→→ matt grzelcyk/jimmy vesey:
sons of boston! matt and jimmy are childhood friends, and this article is basically a shipping manifesto. the bottom line: they've been friends since they were six, have played on various teams together and against one another till now, and they're college seniors about to embark on their professional careers. matt was drafted by the bruins in 2012 and subsequently played four years with boston university, and jimmy was drafted the same year (during his second year of eligibility) by the nashville predators, and went on to play four years for harvard. if you've been paying attention to college ufa season at all, you'll recognize jimmy's name because he recently announced that he wouldn't be signing with nashville and would instead be looking to sign as a free agent come august 15th, once nashville's rights expire. toronto's been thrown around as a possibility (his little brother nolan was drafted by them in 2014, and their father is a boston-area scout for the leafs), but the other team that people feel have a ~stake~ is, of course, boston.
matt signed with the bruins last week. YOU DO THE MATH.
specific prompts:
1) MARRIAGE PACT TO THE BRUINS, OBVIOUSLY.
2) anything about their four years playing college hockey in boston! i'm very fond of the terriers and don't know too much about the crimson, so if you wanna go for ensemble shenanigans with any one team, i'd probably prefer BU, but you could definitely make a case for the harvard kids as well!
3) fic where jimmy defies all odds and does NOT go to either toronto or boston, and they have to make long-distance work while also trying to break into the nhl.
4) any hypothetical where both of them are invited to play for team usa at some point in time; matt was an ntdp kid, and jimmy played for the 2013 world junior team that won gold, but i don't think they've actually played an international tournament together (yet!) so that could be fun! (eta: for verisimilitude, matt was actually in the initial wjc roster for the 2013 tournament but was cut the last day before prelims started. sadness.mp3)
6) summer road trips, always.
7) off season fic in general, really; they're both boston kids and used to play a lot of street hockey together (and won a kitchen cup championship)!
→→→ justin faulk/noah hanifin:
i love hero worship, and noah/jfaulk is a super great ship for it: noah admiring how great a defenseman justin is, noah not knowing if he wants to fuck justin or be him, et cetera. justin can be a bit of a cipher but he is lowkey hilarious and seems like a pretty fun, laidback dude who loves minnesota, jt brown, and scoring power play goals. he is also super thick, and noah is tall and weedy, so do with that what you will.
1) i'd love fic where age isn't necessarily the issue, but ~responsibility~ is? like, justin has an A, he's supposed to be mentoring the rookie and being a good person, but noah keeps lounging around looking appealing, super eager to please, and it is Very Hard To Resist.
2) SECRET WEREWOLF JUSTIN FAULK
3) noah constantly bugging justin when he was injured earlier this year; teenagers can be so annoying but justin is weirdly charmed by noah's persistence?
4) fic where they go to iihf worlds together! "it's basically a summer vacation in europe," says noah. "no, it is not," says justin, but they go tanning on the beach in france after the tournament anyway.
5) this is a ship where i would be super down for sketchy porn, so go wild, tbh.
please feel free to mix and match any of my likes and dislikes with any of the prompts listed above! or if you have an entirely different idea that you've been wanting to write about any of these ships, i am totally down for that as well. thanks again for signing up and writing a story for me; i'm super pumped to see what you come up with! ♥
love,
gdgdbaby