Bingo: 26, as this fic was started right at the start of 2026!
I am way behind in my reading for this year, and it’s obviously because I have spent many hours consuming many hundreds of thousands of words of Heated Rivalry fanfiction. It happens to me, every so often, that I end up really into a specific pop culture property and then just ~*nip*~ over to AO3 (or, back in Ye Olde Days, FF.net and LJ) to see what’s there and, like, ooh here’s a few nice little one shots that satiate the itch. And hmm okay, here are some slightly longer but still manageable ones. Maybe one–just one??–longer one? BLINK and find that years have flown by. Hanahaki! Soulmarks! Missing scenes! AUs! Time loops!
Hello, old friends.
As even I refuse to include AS many as I have read, I will focus on one in particular that sort of kicked off the whole shebang: Change Your Win Conditions by Vee (Vera_DragonMuse). This was indeed the first “long story” that I read, and I balked at it for a while because it starts off with (what I felt was) a pronounced power differential, and that’s one of the few tropes/plot set ups that I really dislike. Probably why I do like HR as much as I do, it feels like both characters are balanced in their strengths and weaknesses.
But I’m glad I did read it, although my TBR would disagree!
I’ll assume you all know the plot of the queer hockey show by now (#1 and #2 hockey players are closeted and in love), but the conceit here is that in lieu of the whole tuna melt / reconciliation plotline, Ilya Rozanov suffers a career ending injury and never hears from Shane Hollander, who has already had a little panic and run away. He picks himself up, gets on with a new career coaching the Centaurs…and then Shane shows up on his team.
The story weaves and moves towards a reconciliation that feels earned and paced in a way that the show and books aren’t, namely because it’s about 100,000 words which is way more than any editor would countenance for a trad pub book. Everyone is a little older, they’ve made more mistakes, and they have to find their way back to one another through apologizing and communicating, two things that we love to see in our romances 🙂
What also really delighted me was the online discourse around this fic, which has never devolved into some of the AI discourse that other fics have faced. Everyone on Threads who’s into HR fic recognizes “Hi, coach. Sorry, I’m late.” And we all know that that comma is no typo 😉
All in all, I do love getting into a fanfic rabbit hole and finding the gems (hidden and not-so-hidden) that are mined out of pure love of the game. For the first time too, there’s an entire genre of ‘old man yaoi’ that I’ve delighted over–what if we’re not talking about people in their 20s but people in their 50s who’ve made many more mistakes and have much less flexibility and wiggle room?
