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Before Heated Rivalry, Rachel Reid turned her original hockey romance into Captain America fanfic just to post it on AO3
The story that would become Rachel Reid's Game Changer book was a Stucky hockey fanfic published on AO3, but she never intended it to be a Stucky story
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AO3, also known as Archive of Our Own, is a place where fan fiction legends are born. Or in the case of Heated Rivalry author, Rachel Reid, AO3 is also where romance book legends get their start. As it turns out, the first book in Reid's Game Changers series (aptly titled Game Changer) spun out of a hockey-themed Stucky - Captain America and Winter Soldier - fanfic she published on the site in 2016. And while fans have speculated that the story of Game Changer was originally conceived as a Stucky fanfic, that isn't actually the case.
In an interview with Salon, Reid revealed that while the first version of Game Changer was published on AO3, she retrofitted the story of Scott and Kip onto Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes because of a misunderstanding. "I didn’t realize you could even post original work on AO3. I thought it had to be fanfic," she said.
Changing the story to fit the parameters of a Stucky fanfic didn't sit well with Reid: "Honestly, I felt bad about it. I knew this wasn’t what Game Changer was." That's because the character of Kip, who works as a barista at a smoothie shop just like Bucky's character in her original fanfic story, was never conceived as being Bucky in her mind.
Reid would later remove the fanfic from AO3 at the end of 2016 and would fine-tune the story before sending it off as a manuscript to publishers. She regrets taking it off of AO3, stating that "it's really bad fanfic author behavior" to do so. "All these people gave me lovely feedback, and I enjoyed it, and then I just took it away like a jerk to make money."
"I desperately wish I’d never posted that fan fiction. 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," she told Salon.
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