I guess I'm on this hellsite now

2019 the absolutely terrible anaheim ducks draft trevor zegras at 9OA

2020 the absolutely terrible anaheim ducks draft jamie drysdale at 6OA

Trevor and Jamie become inseperable best friends. This is relevant for later. Trevor's flashy hockey style and hot head attitude make him an Anaheim fan favorite but also has him clashing a lot with the Anaheim coaching staff and front office.

2020 - 2023 Trevor and Jamie are the best of friends and Anaheim finally starts looking to improve their team and get a real rebuild going by drafting Mason McTavish at 3OA in 2021 and Leo Carlsson at 2OA in 2023. The Carlsson draft is #scandalous. No one had him going that high in the draft but GM Pat Verbeek (PVB) thought this was HIS GUY!!! #trust

However ☝️ in 2023 the PHILADELPHIA flyers draft BC legend, known Will Smith Hockey harem member, Cutter Gauthier at 5oa. Ok cool nice good job philly.

Then something weird happens.

Cutter does not attend development camp. He tells the Flyers he Does Not Want To Sign With Them. To this day, the public has no idea why. Cutter then ghosts the philly front office, doesn't attend 2023 rookie camp and refuses to negotiate. This drags in for all of 2023 and into 2024.

Meanwhile the summer of 2023 Zegras and Drysdale contract negotiations are a nightmare and drag into OCTOBER, even though bros were some of the best on the team but the Anaheim FO is notoriously cheap as hell!! This is also relevant for later!

BUT ☝️ they get it done.

Now it's early 2024 and Philly is like what the fuck do we do with Cutter Gauthier because we don't want to just let him rot and not sign him and get NOTHING, so they think aha ☝️ we will trade him!

Philadelphia trades Cutter Gauthier to Anaheim in exchange for Jamie Drysdale in January of 2024. To this DAY no one is quite sure why Cutter refused to sign with Philadelphia.

The meltdown begins.

It's the start of the 2024 season and Leo Carlsson is in Year 2 and he's fucking great. Trending upwards to be a wonderful franchise player. Cutter Gauthier is also here now!! He's a rookie and he's great for a rookie but not exactly putting up Calder numbers so atp everyone is thinking the Drysdale trade is just an ok trade on both ends.

But Philadelphia does not forget.

After Jamie's trade, Trevor Zegras, who atp is widely beloved by Anaheim fans and sells the most jerseys and has all the best highlight clips and blah blah starts to fall into a slump. Bro is depressed and lonely and it's making him bad at hockey. And then he gets injured. Trevor gets injured and he's sucking and known hockey terrorist Anaheim Head Coach Greg Cronin doesn't like him and they aren't vibing and Trevor is miserable and the Ducks!! STILL!! SUCK!!! AT!! HOCKEY!! They fire Cronin before the season ends in April of 2024.

Ducks go fuck it we're blowing it all up. In the offseason preceding the 25-26 season, they hire Head Coach Joel Quenneville, and they trade Trevor Zegras to Philadelphia (hey remember when we hooked you up with Jamie Drysdale when you wanted to offload Cutter well can you help US out now??) in exchange for Ryan Poehling and some picks.

Rumor has it the Zegras / Anaheim bridge was officially and totally burned. The Cutter drama AND the Zegras drama cement Anaheim and Philly as rivals whose games end in high penalty minutes and with fans who can't stand each other.

2025-2026 Season

In Philly: Trevor does really great in Philly. He heals and reunites with Jamie and clicks with the team style and system more than he did in Anaheim and they're happy.

In Anaheim: Leo Carlsson is clearly incredible. He's one of the ducks' most productive players and cements himself as their cornerstone piece.

Then Something Funny happens AGAIN. Cutter Gauthier, expected to be a top-6, really great player, absolutely EXPLODES in his softmore year. He is ELCTRIC. By the second half of the season Cutter is practically a goal-per-game player. He ends up with the highest amount of goals scored in a single season in franchise history at 41 goals. He's a monster.

Both the Ducks AND the Flyers exceed expectations and run-and-gun-hockey their way into the second round of a playoffs no one expected them to even touch.

They both exit the playoffs with fans pretty satisfied with how far they've both come.

2026 OFFSEASON

It comes out in the media that Anaheim isn't worried that they haven't come to a deal with RFAs Leo and Cutter because they'll "match any offer" for Leo. He's their guy. Their favorite child. Their extra special boy.

But, remember, Philadelphia does not forget.

Capitalizing on the fact that Ducks GM PVB always drags his feet in contract negotiations, and who had yet to sign his two best players: beloved franchise darling Leo Carlsson and new fan-fav Cutter Gauthier, Philly offersheets Leo a whopping 18mill x 5 yr contract. If Anaheim agrees, half their cap space is eaten, fucking over any money Cutter Gauthier and any other young Ducks talent might have asked for. If they refuse, they lose one of their best players they rebuilt around, setting back their now 7-year long rebuild, fucking over the franchise.

That very same franchise Cutter Gauthier chose to play for instead of Philadelphia.

Leo Carlsson (F)

Cutter Gauthier (F)

Pavel Mintyukov (D) - young forward. headed into 3rd year in nhl. trending upward. great player.

was mack mad at will in the first clip lol mack looks up at will twice and shakes his head disappointedly

I’ve been apart of SO many BL fandoms since 2020 and maybe that my problem, but like damn there’s so many of them and none of them know how to act. I truly do not know why but out of every fandom I’ve been in/come across from anime to rpf I’ve just never seen anything like it, except maybe BTS lol sorry yall. It’s just annoying to see the way A03 been found by so many people, firstly skipping the wattpad phase, which is critical for your fanfic etiquette development. So there’s people COMPLAINING to the authors in the comments, or using Ai to write their shit (literally makes me nauseous don’t wanna talk about it) And then posting shit where the actors themselves can see it. Of course they’re weird people like that in every fandom, there’s even people on this tag that do it. But i feel like majority of that fandom don’t understand rpf rules, and how to act like a normal human.

So sorry about this rant, maybe Im just being a brat about A03 becoming mainstream, but like if my friend who knows nothing about this side of social media asked me what A03 was the other day, then I don’t even want to think about WSH finding out about it.

I’ve watched heated rivalry a good few times when it came out I’m not gonna lie. And before that I’m also not gonna lie to you, I never was a huge rpf shipper for anybody 😭 willmack are the first I fear. I never read fics ever on ao3 or had tumblr until after heated rivalry. But even then, i genuinely don’t understand where the whole “rpf on main” thing seems to not be a problem for soooo many people. Every time i make an edit, i ask for it not to be posted on twt and recently ive started putting that in my videos because my videos have gotten posted on twitter multiple times even when i said it in my post. I genuinely cant understand for the life of me why people do that. The thought of one of them seeing my edit potentially freaks me outttt and I think the people who rpf on main either: don’t care if they see it (????) or, don’t think they’ll see the video. Especially on TikTok I know there’s a lot of great willmack edits on TikTok but bro there’s nooooo way chronically online Will hasn’t stumbled upon the willmack edits. Even a video with 200 likes for example can stumble upon anyones feed. He literally said that the pens game was “all over his TikTok”

Anyways, I think it really just depends who you’re talking to. Yes you’re right, ao3 has gotten more popular with heated rivalry and willmack. But 3/4 of the people who write willmack fics at least lock down their fics or a good bunch of people. I’m not too sure about the Hudcon rpf side of things, because I don’t partake in that lol but for the majority from what I’ve seen, ao3 keeps it pretty good 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

I agree with your point partially, because I also think that there are some heated rivalry fans who know common sense😭. i think to say “heated rivalry fans scare me” is a little too broad idk. Yes I completely understand your point but it’s the same as people saying “oh well you’re just a sharks fan because of Will and Mack” bro I can tell you for certain, if I was just a sharks fan for Will and Mack you would not see me yelling at me tv last season almost every game.

Honestly as I’m typing this I’m not too sure why you came to my blog to say this LOL like I totally get what you’re saying but also like, if people respect the rpf, heated rivalry fans or not, then I don’t think a03 becoming more popular needs to annoy you. But I totally get that people need to NOT RPF ON MAIN 😭😭. It’s too far gone people are just gonna keep doing it but I am just so shocked about it.

So technically, I'm a fandom newbie. I've only been an active participant in fandom since 2021ish, when The Locked Tomb and KJ Charles novels rammed into my id like successive freight trains. And by active participant, I don't mean "be a fan creator," although I'm definitely that. I mean someone who actively sought out fan spaces to hang out in and build a community with. These fandoms are pretty small; KJ Charles probably qualifies as a micro-fandom, especially if you treat each of her books/series as a separate fandom unto itself. I was fully resigned to loving and creating for itty bitty niche queer fandoms...

And then Heated Rivalry the TV show came out (ha) and flung me right into the soup. Baby's first mega-fandom!

But that doesn't mean I'm new to fandom! Thing is, I've been on the close periphery for over 20 years. A very good friend of mine was active in SGA and LoTRiPS, and I was friendly with people who were big into X-Files, Batfam and Supernatural (back when Wincest was the only ship, lmao). I was there when omegaverse was born, wriggling and writhing in a thick layer of slick. I've seen fandoms come and go (talking of Michelangelo...occasionally), observing all of it with great and semi-professional interest: I wrote about it on a pretty popular blog I co-founded, and waded into some deeply stupid online arguments with anti-fanfic people. (They were stupid, I was correct.)

So even though I'm technically a fandom newbie (especially for things like fests and exchanges), I've actually watched modern fandom develop from the front row seats. Friends of mine told me about this radical new thing that was being developed—a fanworks archive that would own their own servers and wield its own legal advocacy arm. I've witnessed the advent of Johnlock, Destiel, MCU + Stucky, Reylo, and a whole bunch of other megafandoms I can't remember. So it's with that depth of perspective that I'm here to tell you:

Heated Rivalry is behaving pretty much like how any giant fandom does when it takes off rapidly, BUT with one really notable exception, and that exception is the existence of gen AI.

It's hard to overstate how much AI has fucked up fandom, especially ones that take off overnight like Heated Rivalry. We used to see regular degular plagiarism scandals, with an occasional faked serious illness or death for spice. Now we have the ability to commit plagiarism and burn up the planet at a mind-boggling scale, while also fostering distrust and paranoia in the fanbase! Exactly what the doctor ordered!

It's kind of wild to see how the tandem ascendancy of Heated Rivalry and commercially-available LLM models has thrown into stark relief all the friction points and vulnerable spots of fandom. AI slop proliferation isn't unique to Heated Rivalry by any means (the number of AI-generated fics I've encountered in willmack...truly distressing) but it's most visible in HR because it has the most fans, and it's catapulted a few writers into BNF status pretty much overnight—one of whom has been pretty comprehensively revealed as a liar, fraud, and manipulator. (OpalApparition, I'm talking about OpalApparition.)

So no, regret to inform, people are really great and people also really suck in pretty much exactly the same ways they always have. It's just that we now have a shiny new tool with which to perpetrate the terribleness! Heated Rivalry fandom isn't uniquely bad. Don't fall for that; you sound like your parents bitching about how kids these days don't know how to act right and listen to noise instead of music. You get to see all of HR's badnesses blown way the fuck up because it's so big. You gotta also remember that as much as Heated Rivalry has attracted new fans, it's also drawn in a fuckton of existing fans from all kinds of fandoms and a ton of people who hadn't done fannish things in a long time, only to find the siren call of Canadian hockey yaoi too much to resist.

As for RPF: RPFers have unfortunately always behaved with extremely variable courtesy towards the objects of their affection! If y'all think willmack and HudCon fans lack manners, let me point you to Larry Stylinson fandom. The most rabid members straight-up ruined Louis and Harry's friendship. Like. Larry stans stalked and harassed a journalist simply because he shared the same last name as Louis Tomlinson's girlfriend at the time. You can learn about his experience in this iconic Reply All episode: This Proves Everything. I genuinely live in fear that willmack and HudCon fans will perpetrate something similar; all I can hope is that these boys will do the sane thing and tune the noise out as much as possible.