#171928

hi!

as you can see i’ve been all over the place but leon’s never far from my mind :) there’s a reason i’ve been a bit mattdrai-pilled lately and it’s because i’ve been writing the matthew encounters leon has. i was on the fence about keeping him in tbh but idk i feel like it does leon’s character a disservice to take a rivalry like that out. and also I’m writing winners room rpf like. it’s fine.

anyway, matthew and leon have three meaningful encounters—once right before leon and dylan have sex for the first time (the oilers were on a east coast roadie, played tbl, fla, car, before going to was, i think more but you get it), once during the 2024 cup finals, and at the olympics

i’ve said before mattdrai was my intro to hrpf so i do have a soft spot for them sorry lol point of contention for many i’m sure but i consider matthew at the very least a keystone in showcasing leon’s playful pest side as a character. there’s no real affection between them and i don’t ever even flashback to leon and matt meeting bc it doesn’t matter, but there is sort of a bedrock thing going on where i felt if i took matthew out completely, leon’s character would collapse idk 💀

but yeah, “always a bridesmaid never the bride, eh leon?” gets lethal when connor wins gold with his buddies and leon’s watching

also I’ve been having a lot of fun with rookie leon and his first room yay 🌚

here’s a tiny bit

“Yeah, no, I got it.” Drai says nothing about the admission, nothing about the fact that Dylan never RSVP’d—and that Drai definitely would have known that anyway. "

Something I wondered, rereading 171928: how much did Lauren need someone to talk to, to be telling Leon about inviting a guy she barely knows and assumes Leon doesn't? You gave us a couple hints about how Lauren feels about Connor and Dylan at the end, but I'd love the director's commentary about what she knows and how she feels about it (esp when she has a lifetime of double dates and group vacations to look forward to)

sorry I had to recover from a busy weekend :)

Lauren’s parts were something I had a vague idea in my head about and put hints toward but they weren’t exactly solid, sort of an open door for me to play with if I ever wanted to come back to it (like I am now with Leon’s pov). There’s a decent amount of her in Leon’s fic because I wanted them to have a strong relationship, but I’m still blocking a lot of it out so I might not have a clear answer for you

That one Connor/Giroux “wip” I mentioned does have a Lauren scene in it where they talk about marriage for the first time and it’s a bit of a coming out moment for him. He doesn’t directly name Dylan, but she asks enough leading questions to put together the mcstrome part

The whole edm polycule is together when Connor and Lauren are organizing wedding invites and Dylan’s name comes up (dw it’s a scene in Leon’s fic). Both Connor and Leon are weird about it, Lauren notices. Leon’s also weird at the wedding when Dylan obviously doesn’t show. Lauren guesses.

Note: She and Celeste are aware of Leon’s self-destructive fuckboy thing. They don’t know about the winners rooms.

Leon and Lauren butt heads a lot because they’re both headstrong, but they’re very protective of each other. When Leon goes to Washington, Lauren’s the one who pretty much covers for him until she can’t (this is one of the reasons he and Connor are arguing). She doesn’t really have an opinion on Dylan yet except for maybe wariness, curiosity. It’s not until Leon comes back a mess that it sort of sours.

It doesn’t stay that way, Connor does a lot of advocating on Dylan’s behalf. But I don’t want to say too much because I’ve barely gotten to the back half of Leon’s fic and I don’t want to commit too much yet.

In general, I think originally she was sympathetic to Dylan’s jealousy of her and Connor, but it largely went away after Leon got hurt. I think the second they all meet and Lauren gets Dylan alone, he gets dealt the shovel talk of the century and doesn’t get the chance to defend himself at all. They’re definitely a little petty, a little cold to each other at first. She probably pulls Leon aside when they get to Spain and asks him why he brought Dylan to their place (the polycule’s) and Leon has to defend his and Dylan’s relationship for the first time. I imagine Lauren and Dylan can be possessive in similar ways.

You know when you just put something off and keep putting it off and forgetting, and by the time you remember it’d just be too uncomfortable to say anything about it so you don’t? The man was busy…

I think whenever other people asked him about it, he said the right things and told the truth—that he was so happy for Dylan and over the moon, but he just forgot to tell Dylan that.

I spoil you 

They have a really complex and antagonistic relationship where Connor really does admire and look up to G as a player and on career level, but there’s the trauma of the first room and the reality of how G sees him. Claude picked Connor because he was a pest and because he knew it’d piss Sid off, because Connor was “off limits” then, and he would have been especially off limits to Claude (I’m so weak for cheesby if you can’t tell). It’s only after this that Claude realizes how special Connor really is, and they kind of trauma-bond. 

It’s not a relationship and it’s not steady, but there’s a certain expectation from G to Connor of “when I call, you come.”

When Dylan says—

He can’t see it, what Draisaitl was saying, what everyone else sees when they look at Connor—like he’s a trophy, the Cup given blood, life. Like if they got a taste of him, it’d bring them the real thing, if they broke him, it’d mean they could touch it. 

—it’s sort of G’s point of view eventually. Connor’s sort of his consolation prize in everything—almost above Sid. When Connor goes to him when he doesn’t know what to do about his contract, at this point in his career, Claude knows he not going to win a Cup, so Connor’s like, his next best thing. Connor goes to him for advice for this exact reason—because G likes that Connor’s the best and he likes that he’s sort of broken him. Winning a Cup will make him even better. (Dylan makes a few comments on Connor’s pride. Claude is a strong source of that.)

They do have a weird soft spot for each other. It’s all very blurry and complicated and toxic. There’s a very deep underlying “storyline” that’s sort of about the violence of “almost” Claude is perpetuating here, and in the wip I actually opened it with Connor taking a room with Macklin, who Connor is fixated on (loosely touched on in Leon pov), in a similar way G fixates on Connor (slightly less possessive/toxic and more “if I’m in my twilight years, you’re the next Me and I have to make sure you’re Good Enough”)

Connor does know about Mitch, yes. He doesn't find out until Leon comes clean about everything after the huge summer fight.

Mitch knows Leon is bi, and knows that he's having fucked up sex in and out of the rooms, and knows that he's messing around with another player. He doesn't know that it's Dylan until Dylan visits him in Vegas.