Heated Rivalry's Author Clears Up The Claim It Started As Marvel Fanfic
“I desperately wish I’d never posted that fan fiction."
The new Heated Rivalry TV series has only just scratched the surface of the ice so far. Fans of Rachel Reid’s hockey romance novels know the lore runs deep, including a particularly beloved fandom in-joke about the time one of the books was technically Marvel fan-fiction. While it’s true one of Reid’s earlier works was a love story between Captain America and the Winter Soldier, she’s now clearing up that her characters were never actually based on those superheroes.
Reid’s history as a Stucky writer (the ship name for Marvel’s Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes) resurfaced after Episode 3 of Heated Rivalry spotlighted the romance between hockey pro Scott Hunter and smoothie shop worker Kip Grady. The episode completely adapted Reid’s 2018 novel Game Changer, the first in her six-book hockey romance series. But, there was a time when Scott was actually Steve Rogers and Kip was Bucky Barnes — though Reid clarifies now that they were never really those superhero alter-egos. The reason she changed her original characters’ names was because of a rule she believed about the popular writing site Archive of Our Own (or AO3).
“I didn’t realize you could even post original work on AO3. I thought it had to be fanfic,” Reid told Salon. Because of that, she changed the names of her protagonists from Scott and Kip to Steve and Bucky when posting the story in 2016. “Honestly, I felt bad about it,” she said. “I knew this wasn’t what Game Changer was.”
The author now regrets ever sharing that iteration of the story, not only because of the Marvel makeover, but also due to the quality of writing. “I desperately wish I’d never posted that fan fiction,” Reid said. “I know it’s still circulating, and it’s bad. It’s so embarrassing. I hate thinking of people reading it because I just rammed a bunch of extra Marvel characters into the story for no reason.”
Thankfully, Reid has a ton of success she can instead focus on in the present, as Heated Rivalry becomes not just a literary obsession, but a huge television moment as well.
