#also I had completely forgotten about that sid/ej fic and now i’m like 👀

[selkiefinalist]

for director's cut: you promised not to write me an essay about nate's complicated relationship to his selkie heritage, but if I asked you to write me that essay??? If you aren't up for that, talk to me about your ej/sid ficlet because I, too, have thoughts and feelings and brainworms about two first overalls who went on two very different trajectories and also nathan mackinnon was there. -patrichornkissed

@patrichornkissed i do this for you even though you know i struggle to articulate things well. but if we are going to talk about nate’s complicated relationship to his selkie heritage (in that fic anyway), then i think we have to talk about it in terms of control, vulnerability, sameness, and tradition; and how sometimes nate wants all of those things, and sometimes he wants some of them, but most of them he doesn’t want to want at all. and at least a part of that fic is nate letting himself want.

control is a theme that’s so central to how i write nate, because this is a man who has built up so much lore about controlling his own destiny. changed his training! changed his diet! changed his therapist/therapy! he’s an outcome-based individual, and he can be pretty ruthless (in terms of his own soft-wants) when pursuing what i’ll call a hard-want. no euphemism intended. like, he will ignore the soft animal of his body if it means getting that big silver cup, you know. and the thing about being a selkie is that, at its mythological core, selkies are always in danger of giving up control of their lives. someone steals your skin and you can’t find it: game over. your life is no longer your own. of course in our modern era, that’s no longer such a threat - so instead i translated that into a physical need. he needs to change periodically in order to stay healthy; his biology requires that he face his selkie nature. he can’t cut it off entirely and continue to perform the way he wants to as a player. and he hates that, being betrayed by his own biology. i think you can see that in how he forces himself through the change, when he could let it happen more organically/naturally - he’s like, this is gonna hurt but let’s just get it over with, pain is temporary. and you know i love setting up that kind of life approach because it informs his choice to go all-in on ej even when he knows from the outset that it’s likely not going to turn out the way he wants it to.

that segues into vulnerability, i think, because nate has to change - and, even though the likelihood of someone stealing his skin and trapping him in that salt-scoured shack by the seashore or whatever is very small, it still exists. any time he’s changing, any time his skin is exposed. there’s risk. i played around with the ending scenes a bit in the original outlining, and one of the versions of the end that just didn’t fit anymore by the time i actually made it there was a scene where ej steals nate’s skin in CA, and nate lets him. like, it was implicit that ej would give it back if nate wanted him to, but nate was like, ‘keep it, it’s safe in your hands.’ not to mention the moments where he’s actually changing, naked and in so much pain on a dark beach. not an elegant moment, not the way you want your partner to see you when you’re trying to seem sexy and cool! but he gives that to ej from the very first beach scene - just hands himself over. and at that point, ej definitely doesn’t know what that gesture means - i don’t think nate does, fully, either - but i am here to tell you that gabe wasn’t gently draping blankets over nate or tucking his own hat over nate’s cold little ears, and nate definitely wouldn’t have let him. it might be fun to write that scene, actually (“fun,” lol, punch me in the face please) - from a previous season, gabe taking him out. just to see the differences! of course i told you this already, but that progression of car scenes and beach scenes, and having to painstakingly layer in growing intimacy until we get to that vancouver beach where nate’s like “you should watch me,” and ej finally does. tricky to execute but i do think i did okay with that. MY POINT IS, clear to me from the beginning that nate really wants that vulnerability - he literally gives ej shit about not looking at him in the first scene - even if he hates the implications of being vulnerable. he’s seeking it out from ej specifically because he trusts him not to use it against him. WAAH

sameness is really just in relation to hockey culture; nate’s not the only selkie in the league or the only two-natured, but the league enforces certain privacy standards not just to protect players but to keep that otherness from making any one player stand out too much. all nhl hockey players, at least to some degree, have to buy into that homogenous presentation. and for nate, the chips are already stacked a bit against him, because he’s not the same. more of an undercurrent in the fic but another complication - physically being a selkie can create issues with his play, socially it sets him apart from the team (his pod), and professionally could be seen as a liability from the league.

finally, tradition. on a side note, i’d say world-building in general is one thing i’m actually good at, and i was drafting (early draft) that trip back to cole harbour for christmas and realized i had done almost nothing to actually build out selkie culture. so i had to invent the chest and robe stuff really quick and then go back and insert that lore into other scenes. those symbols ended up working well, i think, but were certainly not part of the original outline.

okay, back to tradition. idk this is going to be a mess, but selkie tradition in this fic is very much draped in privacy, secrecy, and following the rules. how not? if a literal stranger can steal your entire life, you gotta be careful about things. but they live separately versus communally, and are pretty tight-lipped, even with each other. insulated, kind of. and i think like any young person, some traditions are more meaningful to nate and some just seem like a pain in the ass, especially when you know he’s not necessarily the biggest fan of his selkieness to begin with. but traditions also hold a lot of weight, at times. and so nate has to kind of negotiate for himself and within himself which he wants to keep, or at least acknowledge he’s not as detached as he thinks he is (that moment on New Year’s Day when he thinks ej’s about to hit him with a robe, for example). and you know, when he gets to see ej’s whole-hearted acceptance of him, sees ej start to engage in those traditions in his own way, he lets those traditions take a bit bigger foothold i think. also i just wanna cry a bit about baby nate carving little pine trees and stuff on his own chest, putting shells and pucks and dog collars and other important mementos in there :(((((( ok, sorry. if this is a fic about nate growing up, which at its core it really is, then part of it is that moment we all reach as adults where we get to choose what’s important to us or what parts of our histories we want to honor and what we want to let go of, and who gets to be part of that future.

i could go on and on and on and probably point out more things every time, like that meme with the guy and the pictures and the connecting lines but. here you go, fwiw <3