“I felt bad about it”: The complicated origins of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series
How are we doing in the wake of episode five, Heated Rivalry, fans? Only one more episode of season one to go, and thank goodness we have the news of season two being greenlit to buoy our spirits!
The Crave Original series adapted Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels for television and has aired weekly on Fridays since late November, and was picked up by HBO Max for distribution in the U.S.
One of the hot topics since the show started airing has been the origins of Game Changer, the first book in the series, and the misinformation that it began as a Stucky fanfiction is...complicated.
Heated Rivalry and the Crave Original series
The TV series, adapted by out gay director Jacob Tierney from Rachel Reid's novels, focuses mainly on rival hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, played by Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, respectively.
However, episode three, titled "Hunter," shifted attention to the pairing from the first novel, Game Changer. This story follows Scott Hunter (François Arnaud), captain of the New York Admirals, and Kip Grady (Robbie G.K.), a smoothie barista trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life while living at home with his parents after undergrad.
The show took liberties with Scott and Kip's love story, condensing the majority of the novel into one episode and leaving their Happily Ever After (HEA) for three years later in episode 5.
Because Scott and Kip starred in Reid’s first Game Changers book, longtime readers paid close attention. Soon after the episode aired, fans revived an old theory, claiming that the romance novel began as Marvel fanfiction, specifically between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.
Reid addressed the rumor directly before the Montreal premiere, telling Salon, "I did everything wrong with Game Changer." She started drafting the story in 2016 and turned to Archive of Our Own, known as AO3, to ease her anxieties about writing a novel for the first time.
"I was so nervous. I’d never written any fiction or shown anybody something I’d written before," she told Salon. "I didn’t realize you could even post original work on AO3. I thought it had to be fanfic."
How the original book came together
Reid adapted her original novel into a Stucky fanfiction, turning Scott Hunter into Steve Rogers and Kip Grady into Bucky Barnes, but only in name. "I never changed a thing about [Kip]," she said.
However, Reid felt that it was disingenuous to post Game Changer in this way. "Honestly, I felt bad about it," Reid said. "I knew this wasn’t what Game Changer was."
At the time she was writing Game Changer, it was very common for a lot of male characters in literature to resemble Chris Evans, and even her publisher mentioned it. The fandom has also always joked about Scott being a Captain America-type good boy.
Eventually, Reid pulled the fanfiction-ized version of her novel from AO3 and stripped away all the Marvel elements to begin shopping it around to publishers.
Looking back, Reid felt conflicted. "I desperately wish I’d never posted that fanfiction," she said. "It’s bad. It’s so embarrassing." She also regretted removing it from AO3, calling it "really bad fanfic author behavior."
While Reid feels that way about removing her fic from the internet, it is common for writers who transition into traditional publishing, especially those whose novels began as fanfiction, to remove the fanfiction from the internet for legal reasons.
Look at Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis, for example. Still, this should lay to rest the idea that Game Changer started as a Stucky fanfiction, no matter how convoluted the path it took to get here.
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