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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Serena who is a fanfic writer, Heated Rivalry TikTok content creator (@subspacekaroke) and long time reader of Rachel Reid\u2019s Game Changers novels, there’s a reason people have been falling for this lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOkay, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
“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\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2018Game Changer\u2019 which is the exact same title as Reid\u2019s first published novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is the AO3 summary: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSteve 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s standalone episode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So when we say Heated Rivalry is rooted in the fanfiction world, it can\u2019t just be because Rachel Reid\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Serena explained there is a distinct way fanfic people approach a story. “It\u2019s very character driven, relationship driven and really focuses on dynamics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Serena that secret sauce is an intense focus on the interior lives of the characters. “It\u2019s dialed into their emotions. You deeply understand them and you see yourself in them. That\u2019s why people latch onto these characters and it is why fanfiction is so popular.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take Ilya\u2019s monologue for example. It\u2019s 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\u2019s head and it\u2019s exactly where we want to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s all because of the pacing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “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.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve been trained to look for at 3am when we\u2019ve clicked on the next fifty chapter fanfic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s just like any other fanfic on the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The POVs are insane.” Poppy points out. “Even during the sex scenes, it\u2019s always one of their points of view instead of the other. In the second episode when Shane meets Ilya outside his apartment, it\u2019s all from Shane\u2019s POV. You don’t really see Ilya a lot in those first episodes, you just see Shane. You\u2019re able to understand his thoughts and feelings better because there\u2019s no background character noise.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I feel very confident in saying that the creative direction of the show is a direct result of Rachel Reid\u2019s fanfiction roots. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you get into the nitty gritty of the show you will notice that Heated Rivalry follows many of the classic fanfic tropes. It\u2019s something that Poppy couldn’t possibly ignore, especially when the show leaned into the “injured vulnerable” trope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOh 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\u2019ve seen that so much in fanfiction.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n With fanfiction this scene of vulnerability is a staple. Poppy recalls a Jujutsu Kaisen<\/em> fic where the reader is looking after an injured Sukuna who is one of the series’ villains. “He\u2019s high out of his mind in pain and so disoriented that he\u2019s saying, ‘You need to come home with me’ and ‘You’re so pretty I want to spend loads of time with you.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019re high, saying ‘You\u2019re my boyfriend!\u2019 and then they go, ‘Wait, no you\u2019re not but I want you.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s complete fluff which is always needed to help balance the angst before a reader falls into a complete depression hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Heated Rivalry, the high at the hospital scene is the catalyst for the fan favourite Cottage episode. Shane\u2019s injury caused a sort of \u2018truth serum\u2019 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 \u2018Hurt\/comfort\u2019 AO3 tag. It\u2019s just yet another instance where you can tell Reid is a fanfiction writer at heart who knows how to get an audience hooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n TV Networks are waking up to the fact that these \u201cniche” stories actually have some of the most dedicated audiences. We got the Game Changers<\/em> adaptation because the industry realised that queer joy, complex POV angst, and slow-burn intimacy don\u2019t need to stay as internet tropes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We\u2019ve all binged Heated Rivalry at an alarming rate and this is a safe space to admit it. But the reason you can\u2019t drop this show isn’t because of the attractive leads or the rise of the BL genre, it\u2019s because the series follows the fanfiction blueprint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":911,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,20],"tags":[37,32,23,30,31,34,35,36],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thats-hot-posts","category-thats-hot-top-story-posts","tag-ao3","tag-connorstorie","tag-fanfic","tag-heated-rivalry","tag-hr","tag-hudsonwilliams","tag-icehockey","tag-icehockeyfanfic"],"yoast_head":"\n