Bodychecks and pirouettes Royal Winnipeg Ballet featured in popular Heated Rivalry fan-fiction series By: Eva Wasney Posted: 4:52 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 1, 2026 Last Modified: 5:04 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 1, 2026 Updates

A Heated Rivalry-Royal Winnipeg Ballet crossover was not on Christopher Stowell’s 2026 bingo card.

The ballet company’s new artistic director was surprised and delighted to learn about a piece of popular online fan fiction that sets the main characters of the gay hockey romance in Winnipeg during the RWB’s seasonal run of Nutcracker.

“We’re very flattered. I told the dancers as soon as I found out about it; they were like, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s hilarious and amazing,’” Stowell says. “It made the world feel very small that this exists, that there’s this sort of connection with something as globally popular as Heated Rivalry.”

Nutcracker! was written by fanfic author OpalApparition and posted to Archive of Our Own, an online fan-fiction platform commonly called AO3, in December.

The story — which has racked up more than 90,000 views and thousands of kudos — is what’s called an alternate-universe take on the Heated Rivalry source material, which follows the relationship between two closeted major league hockey players.

It casts protagonists Ilya Rozanov as a visiting principal dancer from Russia’s famed Bolshoi Ballet and Shane Hollander as a high-strung RWB stage manager.

There are no hockey references in the story, other than the local ballet’s signature pond hockey scene and some backstage… stick handling. (As with Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, which inspired Jacob Tierney’s groundbreaking TV show, Nutcracker! is sexually explicit.)

There are, however, many admiring depictions of the RWB’s Nutcracker and of Winnipeg itself — neither of which the author has experienced first-hand.

“I have not been to Canada at all, but I hope I can change that because this production is on my hit list,” says Opal, speaking over Zoom from their home in the eastern United States.

The Free Press has agreed to keep the author’s identity anonymous, owing to the tricky legal standing of fan fiction, a creative writing niche that uses pre-existing media and characters to create new, unauthorized stories.

“I’m playing in a sandbox with someone else’s Barbies,” says Opal, adding they don’t write for recognition.

“It feels very special to be anonymous, to pour your heart out on a page and have someone else, a complete stranger from across the world say, ‘Oh, I see myself in this.’”

Fan fiction has been around for decades, if not centuries, with some arguing Dante’s Divine Comedy is a work of 14th-century fanfic based on the Bible.

The modern fan-fiction movement traces its origins to the 1960s when Star Trek devotees started publishing fanzines about the show and the extracurricular activities of Spock and Captain Kirk.

The first such zine, titled Spockanalia, was a 90-page publication stuffed with art, essays, poetry and original fiction submitted by Trekkies. These mimeographed booklets allowed fans to connect and communicate in the pre-internet era, leading to a thriving global fandom.

Once dismissed as a horny pastime, fan-driven stories have become a legitimate form of authorship in recent decades. The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, for example, started as a Twilight fanfic before becoming a mainstream bestseller and movie series.

Reid originally wrote chapters of her first Game Changers book as Marvel fanfic on AO3.

“Everything I write is a love letter to something that I wish I knew more about.”

Opal, who says they are in their early 30s, has been writing fan fiction for nearly 20 years, posting tales about Saturday morning cartoons and assigned reading, such as The Odyssey, to fanfiction.net and LiveJournal.

Putting cursor to blog allowed them to craft alternate storylines while researching personal topics of interest.

“Everything I write is a love letter to something that I wish I knew more about,” says Opal, who has no formal writing training and describes their day job as science- and health-care- adjacent.

AO3 is where OpalApparition (a pseudonym referring to their dog’s name and favourite gemstone) shares most of their work these days.

The site hosts homages to every imaginable fandom, from Harry Potter to K-pop band BTS to Broadway’s Hamilton. Everything is free to read and authors receive no compensation for their contributions — a core tenet of fanfic culture.

There are more than 24,000 individual pieces of Heated Rivalry fanfic on AO3 and another 14,000 dedicated to the Game Changers novels. Opal has written 14 of those entries. So far.

They discovered Reid’s books during a bad breakup and found solace in the cosy love stories and nuanced characters. Opal began writing their own stories about Shane and Ilya’s secretive relationship and posting their work to AO3 once the Crave TV adaptation aired last winter.

Their most well-read piece, Wolfbird, is more than 170,000 words long (and counting), and has been viewed more than one million times. In it, Shane is a closeted hockey player and Ilya is a professional dom.

Other pieces set the pair in ancient Rome and aboard the International Space Station — history and space are two of Opal’s interests.

Ballet is another passion.

Nutcracker! was inspired by a social media post imagining Shane and Ilya as ballet dancers. It was largely written while Opal was stranded in the Los Angeles airport on a 38-hour layover, during which they took a mental vacation to Winnipeg.

They landed on the RWB as the story’s setting after watching a YouTube clip of the company’s decidedly Canadian version of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. The local production, which premièred in 1999 and was choreographed by Galina Yordanova and Nina Menon, features Mounties acting as toy soldiers, polar bear cubs running amok and multicultural dancers performing the traditional divertissement.

Opal felt a kinship with the RWB’s efforts to turn a beloved classic into something new.

“It’s the same thing that I do — they do it with dance and I do it with words,” Opal says.

Nutcracker! opens during rehearsals for the Christmastime ballet. Snow is flying and tensions are heating up between the RWB’s stage manager and an exacting principal dancer. The story follows a familiar arc as the difficult co-workers discover they like-like each other.

It’s evocative, plot-driven smut with an impressive amount of ballet terminology and history, delving into the differences between Russian and North American training styles and the historic racial inequality of the artform.

There are also nods to The Forks, Corydon Avenue, the Toad and other Winnipeg landmarks gleaned from online travel vlogs.

Opal isn’t a dancer, but they do love ballet and have season tickets for their local company.

The author’s affinity is evident, says Christopher Stowell of the RWB.

“Opal has done some good research. It feels like it comes from a love of dance, of ballet and obviously this story,” he says.

While Shane’s stage management responsibilities are well beyond what the actual role entails, Stowell says “there are much smaller details that are accurate that many books, television series or movies get wrong about our world,” such as the camaraderie between dancers and staff.

Stowell has invited the author to Winnipeg to see Nutcracker and take a backstage tour of the Centennial Concert Hall.

“Opal has done some good research. It feels like it comes from a love of dance, of ballet and obviously this story.”

It’s an offer that was not on Opal’s 2026 bingo card.

Their Heated Rivalry remakes are far and away the most popular fanfics Opal has ever written, turning them into a minor online celebrity. While they’re happy others are enjoying the work, satisfying the demands of readers is a strange new experience that doesn’t always jive with their process.

Opal writes daily, but only about what they want to. This means letting things languish while their attention is drawn to other projects and fandoms, such as the video game Dragon Age.

“I have to go where my fixation lies in the moment,” says Opal, who has 62 published works on AO3, many of which are written for a YA audience.

Fans of Nutcracker! waited nearly a month for the seventh and final chapter, which Opal published earlier this week. An epilogue remains in the works with no deadline for completion.

For Opal, writing fan fiction is a hobby. It’s a creative outlet that comes with a community of like-minded fans and writerly friends. It’s a special place where “the goodness of a thing doesn’t come from correct punctuation or accuracy or length. It just comes from the act of making.”

To read Nutcracker! visit archiveofourown.org and search for OpalApparition to find the work.

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