This month’s hottest club is the new queer hockey series Heated Rivalry. It has everything: tension, longing…and Marvel origins? Yes, you’ve read that right. It has been speculated that the Canadian-produced show–airing on HBO Max–had origins within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically with Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, known on the internet as Stucky.
“I did everything wrong with Game Changer,” author Rachel Reid said while speaking with Salon ahead of the premiere in Montreal. 2016 was when she began drafting Scott and Kip’s romance. At the time, she was reading a lot of fanfiction, especially on Archive of Our Own (AO3).
The allure of a website like that, which values anonymity and can give writers instantaneous feedback through comments, made it feel like, to her, a space to build her confidence as a writer. “I was so nervous. I’d never written any fiction or shown anybody something I’d written before. I didn’t realize you could even post original work on AO3. I thought it had to be fanfic,” she said.
Using AO3, Reid shared Scott and Kip’s romance through the lens of Steve and Bucky, crafting an alternate universe (AU) fic where Steve Rogers, the “superstar captain of the New York Rangers,” falls in love with Bucky Barnes, who is a barista at a smoothie shop in Manhattan.
“Honestly, I felt bad about it,” she admitted. “I knew this wasn’t what Game Changer was.”
Fanfiction is still, frankly, just as good as published fiction
Eventually, by the end of 2016, Reid took the story off AO3 and rewrote it, and submitted it to publishers. Six months after that, she received a revise-and-resubmit request.
There are real differences between the two forms, she said, saying her publisher found that first draft a little “fanfic-y.” With the fanfiction sphere, the world is already baked in. You write assuming readers know the characters, their descriptions and the settings.
“You don’t do as much world-building because it’s already done,” Reid said.
Though she has since seen success with her works, and is able to introduce a whole new world to the real Scott and Kip, she wishes she’d never published it as a fanfiction.
“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.”
When you think to franchises like 50 Shades of Grey, which originated as a Twilight fanfiction, the journey of Game Changer is a fascinatingly inverse one. And it is also a reminder that fanfiction is still fiction. Just because it is about preexisting characters does not diminish its potential impact.
So, if you read a Stucky fic in 2016 about hockey and baristas, come and get it in its final form.
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