We learned this week on New Heights that Jason Kelce has a conspiracy theory that Gritty is actually a ripoff of himself, because a.) he was introduced after Jason made a big impression with his famous Super Bowl parade speech and b.) he has substantial eyebrows. (Travis doesn’t buy this theory because c.) literally everything else about Gritty’s appearance.)

Had this bombshell been revealed before Yuletide, I would have needed to do a fair bit of revision to incorporate it into my story, but since it wasn't, I shan't.

We also learned that, sadly, Travis has never taken Pat to a hockey game. This is the NHL’s fault for not maintaining a franchise in Kansas City, which would be the most convenient location for them to go on bro dates. Travis yearns to share his love of hockey!

…but when they do, they get fucking annihilated lmao fml

People thought that the 2024 Chiefs were frauds. People thought that Patrick Mahomes wasn’t a top three quarterback in the league and didn’t deserve to go to the Pro Bowl. People thought that Josh Allen was the dangerous one when he used his legs. People thought that this year could actually be the Bills’ year. People thought that their prayers to be spared seeing the Chiefs in the Super Bowl again this year might be answered by some kind of merciful deity. People thought a lot of things.

The Chiefs are going back to the Super Bowl. That's already farther than any other back-to-back winners have made it in the third year. Obviously I would prefer to complete the threepeat, but I think we're doing pretty okay so far.

Commanders @ Eagles — This game really got out of hand by the end and thus did not hold a lot of interest for the neutral fan. It did end up introducing quite a lot of more casual viewers to the concept of the palpably unfair act which is found in the NFL rulebook. Good times!

Bills @ Chiefs — People find it ridiculous when Chiefs fans say that the Chiefs will simply start playing better in the playoffs, but here's the thing: they legitimately do. They've adopted a paradigm whereby they play a twenty game preseason in order to prepare for a three- to four-game season.

This game was nothing like our regular season game against the Bills. Not that they wouldn't have liked to win that game, and they tried to win that game, but not the same way that they tried to win this game. It helped that we’d gotten various offensive and defensive players back, of course, but we were also doing things like calling Patrick Mahomes designed runs, which never happens in a mere preseason game. (I've seen fans of other teams not realize that Andy isn't calling any of these runs. Pat is just so good at reading the defenses and knowing when he can scramble successfully that it seems like it might have been designed.) Xavier Worthy made the Bills live to regret trading back with us to let us draft him. On the other side of the ball, Spags was calling blitzes so exotic that I think you might need a license to keep them. Genuine works of art.

They had to go ahead and be dazzling, because the Bills are a good team with a really good quarterback who happens to be living in his own personal timeloop hell. This is the fourth time in five years that he's had his postseason ended by the Chiefs and frankly he looked like a hollow shell of a man in the postgame. He seems like a pretty nice guy and it’s fun to watch him play, especially if I don’t need him to lose for seeding purposes, but honestly, I feel like it gives us an edge in each subsequent postseason game when he sees our uniforms and flashes back to the previous losses and that’s so helpful. Don't really feel bad for a lot of Bills fans, though, especially the ones who attacked our players with snowballs last year and hanged a Mahomes muppet in effigy. I hope they, specifically, never experience joy.

There was an adorable moment after Pat ran in his second touchdown when he tried to spike the ball and completely muffed it, possibly because Travis was all up in his personal space. I think he was just being proactive, lest any Bills players try to start something with Pat like they did when he ran in his first touchdown and Trav had to fend them off. ❤️

It's kind of wild that we’re rerunning our matchup against the Eagles after we already had a rematch with the 49ers last year. Jason has already committed to rooting for the Eagles against his own brother, much to Travis’s disgust. That subplot should be entertaining!

Another batch of six wild card games are in the books and five of them were blowouts won by the home team. Sure, that sounds boring and perfunctory, but when you bear in mind that the Chargers were two-and-a-half point favorites as the away team because everyone involved in setting that line apparently forgot that they were dealing with the Chargers, one third of the games were upsets!

Chargers @ Texans — it's a testament to how fundamentally cursed the Chargers are as a franchise that I'm incapable of taking them seriously as a division rival even when they find themselves in the playoffs. Watching them get absolutely buried by a Texans team that had been largely left for dead engendered more secondhand embarrassment than glee, honestly. Justin Herbert threw more interceptions in this single playoff game (four) than he did in an entire seventeen-game regular season (three). That fun fact will be the entire legacy of the 2024 Chargers.

This game caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth on tumblr, a bizarre pocket mirrorverse where the Chargers are one of the most popular teams in the NFL, second only to the Joe Burrow Bengals. This lies in sharp contrast to the real world, where a woman became a viral superstar for attending a Chargers game and being discernibly invested in the outcome and people suggested she could be a plant.

Steelers @ Ravens — I had hoped that something interesting, maybe even an upset, might happen here, purely because this was a divisional matchup and sometimes those can get weird, but nah. Just another blowout.

Broncos @ Bills — The seven seed is an abomination. The Broncos did not belong here at all and it showed. I did enjoy seeing them get demolished, though. That is a true division rivalry, where hatred springs eternal.

Packers @ Eagles — You know this was not an entertaining game when it causes concern that the Eagles offense didn't do more in a game that they won 22-10. Again, seven seeds simply should not be here. I do also hate the Packers so I didn't totally object to seeing them lose.

Commanders @ Buccaneers — This is it! The game that was exciting for a neutral fan! The Commanders upset the Bucs by a field goal that doinked through the uprights as time expired. It could hardly have been any closer, and since I was quite neutral, I was entertained.

Vikings @ Rams — I don't know why I ever bother to get even a little bit invested in a Vikings team. All they ever do when they do well is find new ways to disappoint. I have to say, going 14-2 with a chance to seize the one seed and the bye in their final game only to get blown out, stuck in the five seed, and get blown out again in the wild card round was certainly new. I have to say, it was very considerate of Sam Darnold to turn back into a pumpkin in plenty of time to avoid creating a quarterback controversy. The most fun Vikings team to make an improbable run behind an unexpectedly-elevated backup quarterback before ending their season in a playoff blowout is still the 2017 Case Keenum Vikings, anyway.

It's been twenty long days since I saw a meaningful snap of Chiefs football. I can't wait for Saturday afternoon.

This year the Chiefs gave me the delightful gift of a non-stressful win for Christmas. No one-score margins of victory, no wacky antics as time expires, just a nice 29-10 stomping of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who are a playoff team, even, although I think they were already fading down the stretch before we got there, but whatever.

With Hollywood Brown back, we've finally realized the vision for what the offense was supposed to be, albeit with DeAndre Hopkins filling in for what Rashee Rice would have been doing, and that trade didn't even cost us that much. If we'd had this offense all year, those games wouldn't have been so stressful to watch in the first place. Regardless, we went 15-1 and locked up the one seed, even though the schedulers absolutely tried to kill us with the excessively-early week six bye and the late three games in eleven days gauntlet, and it's not like the wins count any less if they're crazy and stressful. Now with nothing left to play for until the divisional round we have a ton of time to rest our starters, get healthy, game plan, etc.

This must be absolutely infuriating to watch if you're a fan (or a player, or a coach…) of another team. It's so much fun for me, though!

The good news is that the Chiefs improved to 13-1 and still control the one seed! The bad news is that my poor baby Pat has sprained an ankle again. We already had one ankle scare a month and a half ago against the Bucs, although he refused to come out of that game and afterwards Andy told the media that he has, and I quote, “the loosest ankles in America,” which honestly sounds like an old-timey way of calling him a slut. This time it was bad enough that allowed himself to be removed from remainder of the game, albeit ungraciously, but he says that it’s not as bad as the sprain in the divisional round against the Jags in 2023 that he played through in the AFCCG and then the Super Bowl.

The most annoying thing is that it didn’t need to happen in the first place, like, at all. The Chiefs were already playing with a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency offensive line with Joe Thuney sliding over to left tackle because all the actual tackles are too hurt or too untrusted at the moment. It was suboptimal, but combined with some nifty play calling that had Pat constantly dancing out of danger, they were definitely getting away with it in the first half. It helped that Jameis, being Jameis, absolutely could not stop turning the ball over, so while the Chiefs offense was literally being pressured, in the larger, more metaphorical sense, there was very little pressure on them at all. In the second half, even though the Browns defense clamped down on the run and Pat was dropping back a million miles, chucking incompletion after incompletion and getting knocked around constantly, the Chiefs were still up 21-7 with five minutes left to play when Andy made the fateful decision to go for it on fourth and three. Pat dropped back to attempt yet another pass and got folded up like an origami crane.



He wants to play on Saturday because of course he does. It's not like I don't believe he can play through a sprained ankle, because, I mean, I've already seen him win a Super Bowl on a sprained ankle in 2023. I just didn't particularly want to test whether that feat was repeatable, especially since we're already rerunning the minimum viable receiver talent experiment of 2024. Doing both at once feels…challenging. Especially since then we have the accursed Netflix Christmas Day game on an even shorter week.

I'm not going to lie, I was a little concerned on Tuesday when the Yankees remembered how to hit. Not that Dave Roberts didn't do the right thing in game four—given the very limited pitching that he had to work with, he was 100% correct not to spend any of his high-leverage arms there, and it's easy to swallow a loss when you're up three games to none. Still, when the balls really started flying and the Yankees started feeling themselves, I could see where this might escape the confines of game four and spill over into games five+.

Fortunately, although the Yankees may have remembered how to hit, they fully abandoned all ability to field. I have never experienced anything quite like watching that fifth-inning five-run game-tying disasterclass meltdown. It reminded me of Hosmer's mad dash from the 2015 World Series, another clinching game five for the away team in New York City, except that it was a series of three increasingly baffling defensive miscues where what should have been routine became impossible. I didn't need the Dodgers' scouts to tell me that the Yankees don't prioritize defense when either selecting or preparing their players because I've watched them play and I have eyes, but stringing errors together like that is a whole other level of anti-clutch.

Before the fifth inning, I was still pretty sure that the Dodgers were going to win the series, but after the fifth inning, I was pretty sure that Dodgers were going to win the series in this game, which indeed they duly did. Even when the Yankees were up 6-5, I was like, yeah, nah. Bringing in Walker Buehler to close is the kind of bold move that has become low-key routine in the playoffs, so I wasn't particularly surprised when it happened—if I had been familiar with the backstory of how he'd been pitching himself to Andrew Friedman and Dave Roberts as an option out of the pen all day and getting the brushoff until his teammates played themselves into the exact unlikely scenario that required him to be in the bullpen and sent himself there, I would have been even more impressed.

A few minutes later Prior called Buehler on the bullpen phone.

“How do you feel? Did you throw today?” Prior asked.

“Yeah,” Buehler said. “I feel good.”

“I lied,” Buehler said. “I hadn’t thrown yet.”

He's ridiculous. If that was his last appearance in a Dodger uniform, it was 100% peak Walker Buehler and it was beautiful.

Freddie Freeman as the World Series MVP was obviously a given and could hardly have happened to a nicer person, but I absolutely can't believe that it turned out that he was secretly nursing even more injuries than the ones we already knew about. Absurd. I kind of wish he hadn't barely missed that home run in the last game to keep the streak alive as a cherry on top, but you can't have everything.

I love this time when the championship is decided and it's all celebrations and post mortems and inside stories, but I also really miss baseball already.

I definitely feared the worst when Shohei Ohtani was lying on the ground in pain last night after attempting to steal a base, but luckily he just subluxated his shoulder and it’s not impossible that he will actually be completely fine?? The day off today and the 2-0 series lead are both helpful. Get well soon, Shohei!

Edit: Dave Roberts is already saying that Shohei will definitely play tomorrow. Seems early, but okay!

Dear Yuletide author,

I am so pleased that we share an interest in one of these fandoms and I can’t wait to read whatever you write for me this Yuletide!

I enjoy a wide variety of stories, all year round but especially at Yuletide. I love short, punchy stories and longer, plotter stories, explicitly smutty and/or kinky stories and coy stories that are all about the teasing and the implications, stories with some kind of meta angle to them and stories that engage with the source material 100% on its own terms, stories with ships that are canon and stories with ships that aren’t.

I am mayhap on AO3 as well. I have checked to make sure I have gifts enabled.

2024 National League Baseball RPF / Baseball RPF
Shohei Ohtani
Tyler Glasnow

I really love both of these guys as players and as personalities, and since they both ended up on my National League team this year I’ve enjoyed seeing them encounter each other, a little like a pair of unlikely animal friends. I first linked the two them together specifically because the broadcast happened to capture Tyler holding out his hand and getting Shohei to place his hand up against it for comparison in the dugout during a spring training game [Tumblr gifset], and that kind of encapsulates the vibe for me here. I’d love a fic that puts them together, in any sense of the word. It by no means has to be anything particularly serious between them.

I’d been familiar with Tyler as a pitcher with the Rays, but I only discovered Tyler as a raconteur once he came to the Dodgers, and I’d been missing out because this man is wildly entertaining whenever he opens his mouth. Not only will he turn an unforgettable phrase like “I’m a little radar slut, anyways,” [Instagram clip, YouTube full episode] or cheerfully volunteer that he wakes up four times a night to pee, he just generally has a propensity for striving to characterize himself and relating his backstory like he’s the first-person narrator of the novel of his life that absolutely delights me. I also love the way he talks about his pitching, including all those numbers that he loves, and assuming the risk of getting hurt, which of course, unfortunately, he is again.

Shohei’s approach to his self-presentation is virtually the opposite, presumably due to some combination of his natural inclinations and the relentless media coverage he receives. I was charmed by the way he handled the respective rollouts of his dog and his his marriage this season, both clearly quite considered and controlled introductions. The Ippei gambling debt bank fraud scandal breaking was something completely out of his control, which sucked, although as a silver lining it did give the Dodgers organization the opportunity to rally around him really early on, like an unplanned team-building exercise. It did not at all stop him from having a truly incredible season as a hitter and a baserunner while still rehabbing his pitching arm, which is bonkers. By all accounts and appearances, he’s had a lot of fun this year, including winning at least one playoff series at the time of this writing. The world had been deprived of postseason Shohei for too long!

Feel free to include any other Dodgers teammates, coaches, etc. as additional characters if you want them there, or even write more of an ensemble fic if you should happen to so desire. Also, I know this is completely out of left field, but at the Dodgers Foundation gala, they made a funny video asking players which teammate they would want to have with them during a zombie apocalypse, and Shohei opted for Tyler because he’s “tall, big and throws hard” [Instagram video]. This has lived rent-free in my brain since I saw it. If you, by any chance, want to do anything with it, up to and including a full-on zombie apocalypse fic, I’d be very much down for that.

Bonus links! Here’s a representative video of them chatting together in the dugout and here’s a nice photo of them getting off the plane together when everyone wore matching Dodgers sweatsuits for the trip.

DNW: wives/girlfriends in shipfic (fine to mention, include or avoid them otherwise, totally up to you), AUs where Shohei and Tyler aren’t professional baseball players

Plain Girl — Virginia Sorenson
Esther Lapp
Mary

I love how delicately and yet powerfully this book explores Esther’s thoughts and feelings—about her family, the Amish community, their way of life, and of course about her new friend Mary, whom she finds so beautiful, not just for her pretty dresses, but also things like her silky hair and her dimpled elbows as well as her wonderful kindness and tact in welcoming her to school and becoming her bosom friend. It’s written as a seduction and that seduction is a good thing, a fountain that sends forth sweet water and not bitter. I see flashes of an eroticism as well, like Esther touching Mary’s hair and finding it so beautiful that a shiver goes through her fingers and her heart starts to beat very fast, or Mary showing Esther her petticoat when they’re planning to change clothes with each other, which I find really lovely.

Even though they don’t end up wearing each other’s clothes at school they must do it eventually, somewhere, sometime! I’d love for that to be explored in a story, at any age or perhaps more than once, as they get older. Anything exploring their relationship and how it develops in the future would be wonderful. There’s a lot of potential for angst and difficulty but also for love and sharing. Esther, of course, has her new sister-in-law and her brother in her corner when it comes to blending the old and the new, with her parents much more tentatively open, but Mary’s family is wide open for exploration, and so are the rest of their peers. I’d love gen or getting together or established relationship or pre-ship fic all equally.

The Professor — Charlotte Brontë
Frances Evans Henri
Hunsden Yorke Hunsden
William Crimsworth

I am fascinated the role that Hunsden Yorke Hunsden plays in this story, who is of the things that makes it different from Vilette, which is essentially a heavily-revised second draft of The Professor. From the beginning he alternates between needling William and performing these extremely thoughtful favors for him, although it's not always easy for him to get under William's skin as William perversely enjoys some of his bluntness. He brings out such an interesting side of Frances when he meets her, too—I love that promptly she gets into three arguments with him in a row, and the third time she doesn't even believe in the argument she's making; she just wants to fight with him!

I'm particularly interested in a story set when William and Frances are living in England and Hunsden is their neighbor. I love how he has apparently latched onto their family in lieu of starting their own, especially the way he seems to practically be a coparent to Victor when he’s at home. I would love more about their daily life as it's sketched all too briefly in that last chapter, or a story about something that happens as Victor gets older and goes to school, which William worries about.

I would also love threesome fic! William would be almost hopelessly scandalized by the prospect, I think, and surely Frances too, but then with the dynamic both she and Hunsden have with William where they love to tease him I can imagine it working out somehow. I do love stories where characters fumble their way into unusual relationships or sexual practices without quite knowing what they're doing or having the usual vocabulary to talk about it, which is sort of what I would picture here. But I absolutely would be just as happy with a story that explores the dynamic among them some other way.

This website attempts to ascertain your personal blue-green boundary by making you look at slight variations on the same greeny-bluey blue-green until you have the chromatic equivalent of semantic satiation and categorize them as either blue or green. It told me that my boundary is located hue 175, which is apparently bluer than 65% of the population.

My blue does not include Travis Kelce's eyes, which I have always held to be very obviously green. I may have even jested about the failing New York Times when they off-handedly referred to them as blue in their profile of the Eanes brothers. They possibly actually attempted some fact-checking, though, because it transpires that Donna Kelce is convinced that her son's eyes are blue.

This revelation caused enough of a kerfuffle that it worked its way back to the New Heights team and they addressed it in this week's No Dumb Questions segment. Jason agrees with me that they're green. Travis sided with all factions by saying that they change colors, but what he put on his (presumably now current) driver's license is green. Vindication!