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Like Real People Do by xiaq/E. L. Massey was a pretty good fanfiction for the very good webcomic Check Please! By Ngozi Ukazu (who btw has a new book coming out and it’s gonna be so good), that then filed off the serial numbers and got republished as an original novel by a real, small press, with an editor and everything.
Except for some reason the only changes made to the version that was published as a fic on AO3 were the character names (for the characters originally in Check Please!) and some biographical details of not!Jack and not!Bitty. Jack Zimmermann became James Petrov (JAMES?! JAMES?!?!? We’ll get to that later), Kent Parson became Alex Price, Eric Bittle became Cody Griggs, etc, etc. Vegas was changed to Houston and Samwell, in a decision that feels like a personal attack against Me Specifically, was changed to Princeton.
It doesn’t really work.
As I said on social media, in a fanfic, you can just cut to the fun stuff without having to bother with any setup because the setup was already done for you in the source material of whatever you’re fanfictioning. You don’t need to describe Samwell in a Check Please! Fic because the reader already read the webcomic, they know what the campus and the Haus look like. In your original novel you do need to describe Princeton (and the unimaginatively renamed “house”) at least a little bit because your original novel readers will not have that context.
I was surprised when the airport was only a 20 minute drive but I guess they flew in to Trenton? Not gonna fact check if they have Houston to Trenton flights but I’m pretty sure Frontier does not do first class. I was also surprised that when visiting a town, or even like, the American north for the first time, the viewpoint character (as far as there is a viewpoint anyway, we get very very little introspection on either Eli or Alex’s parts) does not have any inclination to describe it. Or the “house.” I was expecting to see at least one line about the ivy covered buildings on campus, or at least a namedrop of the main fucking street, but nope. Which grocery store did they even go to was it the fancy Italian place or McCaffrey's or what. They get “Boba Teas at the coffee shop on campus” which is not a fucking thing you have to go to one of 5+ bubble tea shops directly across the street from Princeton Campus if you want a boba tea, because Princeton is a specific, distinctive, REAL PLACE THAT EXISTS AND YOU DIDN’T CARE ABOUT IT!!!
Ok Princeton Local sidebar over back to business.
Eli and Alex both feel like side characters in their own story– because they're barely changed versions of an OC and a minor antagonist in a fanfiction of something else.
It’s fine that we don't get a lot of interiority from Eli or Kent Parson in the fanfic because the reader just wants to see their blorbo Kent get with the perfect boy for him. In an original novel, the barrier to caring about Eli and Alex is higher. It feels odd how peripheral Eli's skating career or college friends are to the story, while Alex's hockey stuff is at the forefront, but it makes total sense in a Check Please fanfic because no one comes to a fanfic for the OCs, they're here for the characters they already know and like from something else.
I feel like to make this story work as a novel, it needed a lot more editing than it got. I read the fic version before it was taken down, and every single scene and line of dialogue was basically unchanged from what I remember reading on AO3. Even the parts that pissed me off. Actually those parts got worse.
Enter James.
French Canadian hockey dad haver Jack Laurent Zimmermann became Russian-American hockey family scion James Petrov (now with two older brothers, Eric and Mark, which are actually ok names for second gen Russian Americans to have). JAMES!!!
Most immigrants I know at least tend to name their kids things that are easy to pronounce in both their native language and English, which is why almost every Russian American boy I've ever met was named Anthony, Alexander, Daniel or Ben. (Which makes it extra funny that the American character is named Alex in his story lol). Or something Jewish because Russian Jews. No Russian parents would ever name their kid James, because there is no J sound in Russian and you want grandma (and in this case probably the Russian sports press too) to be able to say your baby's name properly.
I was willing to let this slide under the assumption that James is a second generation immigrant without strong ties to his country of origin, but then he's described as switching to Russian when he's angry, having a slight Russian accent (because Jack Zimmermann has a French Canadian accent) and as wanting to play for Russia in the Olympics (very weird, if you know you're queer already, and it's some year between 2014-2022, and your parents probably left Russia for a reason!) So like. Why tf would his parents give him an English-English name.
Additional Russian nitpicks I remember from the fic version that are still in the book version: no one makes their own pelmeni for fun unless they're masochists because the grocery store version is literally fine and diy pelmeni is a lot of work for not enough reward, the Russian word for recipe is pronounced “recept” so idk why someone would substitute it for “cooking plays” in a conversation, blini are usually eaten with savory toppings or with jam, not “strawberries and a pale pink sauce”... I don't understand why like. If you're getting tradpubbed. You wouldn't do your due diligence on this part at least. Find a Russian and ask a few questions. Blah
The other book I read that was filed off fanfic did a lot of edits, preserving the best jokes but also merging, removing and changing the genders and nationalities of characters, restructuring scenes and plot points, and adding new things entirely (and toning down the romance by a lot because this was a Russian slashfic and the censorship hammer came down hard). It was a very good fic and a very strong original book!
I wish the author of Like Real People Do was willing to be edited more.
