There’s been whisperings on the internet that Heated Rivalry was originally a fanfiction and it’s the real reason so many of us are obsessed with the show but this a common misconception.
According to Serena who is a fanfic writer, Heated Rivalry TikTok content creator (@subspacekaroke) and long time reader of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, there’s a reason people have been falling for this lie.
“Okay, so I’m constantly correcting this myth. Rachel is a fanfic girlie. Before she was a published author, she was writing a lot of Marvel fan fiction.” Serena told me.
The confusion lies in how the first book in the series was shared with the world. Because Reid was primarily a Stucky (Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes) writer at the time, she used that framework to test her original story.
“She wanted to write a book.” Serena says. “She wanted to get engagement from the community and she wanted feedback, but she didn’t think that she could post her original work on AO3. And so she changed the names and converted them into Marvel characters. It started as an original story”
Now this immediately piqued my interest. If it wasn’t always a fanfiction and lived as its own entity before landing on AO3 then there must be another reason us fanfic readers resonate with the show?
In the name of investigative journalism I used the Wayback Machine and managed to find the digital ghost of the original story. Posted by the username EloiseReed, the fanfic was titled ‘Game Changer’ which is the exact same title as Reid’s first published novel.
Here is the AO3 summary:
“Steve Rogers is the superstar captain of the New York Rangers hockey team. Bucky Barnes is making minimum wage at a Manhattan smoothie shop… Steve lives most of his life in the spotlight, but there are a couple of things that not even his teammates know about him. Like the fact that he’s attracted to men. Specifically Bucky Barnes.”
This plot should sound familiar to watchers of Heated Rivalry. The smoothie shop romance that this fanfiction followed was displayed in episode 3 which was Skip and Scott’s standalone episode.
So when we say Heated Rivalry is rooted in the fanfiction world, it can’t just be because Rachel Reid’s original story was uploaded on AO3 and turned into a Marvel superhero AU. There has to be a shared experience and language between a fanfic reader and watcher of the show.
As Serena explained there is a distinct way fanfic people approach a story. “It’s very character driven, relationship driven and really focuses on dynamics.
It gives a lot of emotional fulfillment. Romance as a genre does that, but fanfiction does it in a particular way. If you know, you know.” She says.
According to Serena that secret sauce is an intense focus on the interior lives of the characters. “It’s dialed into their emotions. You deeply understand them and you see yourself in them. That’s why people latch onto these characters and it is why fanfiction is so popular.”
This intense character focus is exactly why the Heated Rivalry adaptation feels so revolutionary. By leaning into the raw yearning and internal struggles that most sports dramas ignore, the show perfectly mirrors the pacing of a classic slow burn fanfiction.
Take Ilya’s monologue for example. It’s heartbreaking and it provides the exact type of character intense angst that we as fanfiction readers live for. We aren’t passively watching, we are living inside that man’s head and it’s exactly where we want to be.
I spoke to Poppy, known online as @frogstolemywifi, who is a fanfic writer based in the UK. She’s dabbled in all sorts of fanfiction from Anime to Harry Styles. For her, reading the Game Changers series and watching Heated Rivalry felt so easy and that’s all because of the pacing.
“It was the pacing of the whole thing.” Poppy says. “The pacing of the book is identical to a 200k fanfic. I actually read with my mum and I told her, ‘You don’t read fanfiction, so you don’t understand but this is a copy and paste of exactly how a fanfiction would go.’”
According to Poppy, the show follows a very specific structural blueprint that AO3 readers recognise instantly. “You can see the start, you can see the angst and the tension. Then you can see it morph into comfort.” She explains.
The morph from high stakes tension to domestic comfort is exactly why the show feels so easy to watch for us fanfic readers. It doesn’t just give us a plot but it gives us the emotional payoff we’ve been trained to look for at 3am when we’ve clicked on the next fifty chapter fanfic.
Poppy also agreed with Serena’s take about how fanfiction is often very character driven. She told me Heated Rivalry as a show executed POV’s just like any other fanfic on the internet.
“The POVs are insane.” Poppy points out. “Even during the sex scenes, it’s always one of their points of view instead of the other. In the second episode when Shane meets Ilya outside his apartment, it’s all from Shane’s POV. You don’t really see Ilya a lot in those first episodes, you just see Shane. You’re able to understand his thoughts and feelings better because there’s no background character noise.”
I feel very confident in saying that the creative direction of the show is a direct result of Rachel Reid’s fanfiction roots. It’s also exactly why the show is so addictive. As a community we should probably all take some shared credit here. Our collective love for intense POVs and character driven storylines shaped the fanfic blueprint. It is because of that, we finally got a perfect POV driven show.
When you get into the nitty gritty of the show you will notice that Heated Rivalry follows many of the classic fanfic tropes. It’s something that Poppy couldn’t possibly ignore, especially when the show leaned into the “injured vulnerable” trope.
“Oh my God the injury!” Poppy said, pointing to the scene where Shane is drugged up and disoriented after an extremely dangerous collision in a hockey match against Ilya. “When Shane is high and tells Ilya ‘Come to the cottage this summer.’ I’ve seen that so much in fanfiction.”
With fanfiction this scene of vulnerability is a staple. Poppy recalls a Jujutsu Kaisen fic where the reader is looking after an injured Sukuna who is one of the series’ villains. “He’s high out of his mind in pain and so disoriented that he’s saying, ‘You need to come home with me’ and ‘You’re so pretty I want to spend loads of time with you.'”
Poppy has seen it in a lot of fluff fanfics, particularly the infamous wisdom teeth removal scenarios. “One of the characters gets their wisdom teeth out and they’re high, saying ‘You’re my boyfriend!’ and then they go, ‘Wait, no you’re not but I want you.'”
This injured and vulnerable trope appears throughout fandoms. The formula is always the same. A main character loses their self control, expresses themselves freely and slowly the walls within a relationship start coming down. It’s complete fluff which is always needed to help balance the angst before a reader falls into a complete depression hole.
In Heated Rivalry, the high at the hospital scene is the catalyst for the fan favourite Cottage episode. Shane’s injury caused a sort of ‘truth serum’ effect, allowing him to say the things his sober anxious brain would never allow. Rachel Reid did this to give readers the emotional payoff which you would often look for in a ‘Hurt/comfort’ AO3 tag. It’s just yet another instance where you can tell Reid is a fanfiction writer at heart who knows how to get an audience hooked.
It’s no accident that Heated Rivalry has resonated so deeply with the fanfiction community. The “Hollanov” tag is across 10,000 works on AO3 with some of the top fics boasting over 500,000 combined hits. These numbers can actually rival many mainstream bestselling novels. It’s clear that when the fanfic blueprint is used in mainstream media it becomes a global goldmine. But beyond the tropes and the yearning, there is a deeper reason why this story feels so special.
For decades, fanfiction has been a sanctuary for those ignored by the mainstream. As Serena puts it: “Fanfiction has always been for marginalised communities as a way to see themselves, express themselves, and to be heard in ways that they weren’t being heard in society.”
TV Networks are waking up to the fact that these “niche” stories actually have some of the most dedicated audiences. We got the Game Changers adaptation because the industry realised that queer joy, complex POV angst, and slow-burn intimacy don’t need to stay as internet tropes.
They embraced the fanfiction roots that Rachel Reid planted and the show has proven that when you write for the marginalised it has the power to touch many hearts.