Mackenzi Lee Talks Teela, Bucky Barnes and Her Star Wars Dream

The Teela: Daughter of Eternos author discusses centering warrior girls, the moral compass connecting Teela and Bucky Barnes, and the universe she desperately wants to write next.

Mackenzi Lee knows what it means to inherit a character.

Across her Marvel novels, Lee has stepped into decades of existing canon to explore characters including Loki, Gamora, Nebula and Bucky Barnes. Her latest novel, Teela: Daughter of Eternos, brings her into another enormous universe—and places one of its most enduring warriors firmly at the center.

Set in the world of the 2026 Masters of the Universe film, the novel follows a teenage Teela navigating the aftermath of Skeletor’s destruction of Eternos. With the world she understood gone, Teela must decide what she is willing to sacrifice for her people while confronting alliances and choices that complicate everything she thought she knew about heroes and villains.

It is a conflict that connects her more closely than expected to the teenage Bucky Barnes of The Winter Soldier: Cold Front: two characters shaped by duty, institutions and the painful realization that the adults—and systems—they trusted are fallible.

Lee spoke with The Nerd Wire about finding her own voice inside an established universe, making Teela the protagonist, moving from young adult fiction into adult romance and the franchise she is asking the universe to let her write next.

This interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity.

You’ve now written characters from Marvel, Masters of the Universe, your own historical fiction and, most recently, adult romance. Does your way into a character change depending on whether you inherited them from decades of existing canon or created them completely from scratch?

Writing a novel is so solitary. If you’re lucky, you have a great editor who collaborates with you to some extent, but mostly it’s just you. In a room. Making all the decisions yourself.

The great thing about writing a character who exists in a larger universe is that you have all these unseen collaborators in the people who have written this character before you. It makes an extremely solitary process feel more collaborative and gives you other voices to consult with as you interpret a beloved character.

You get to see what people have done before you—though, in my first Marvel book, I wasn’t prepared for how completely overwhelmed I was by this storied history. I had to learn to keep the voices in my head but not let them drown out my own. Which was a process!

Teela: Daughter of Eternos puts you in another enormous established universe, but this time centering a character who has often existed alongside He-Man rather than at the center of the story. What interested you most about getting to make Teela the protagonist?

I was such a nerdy, action figure-obsessed kid, but I grew up in the ’90s, so I just missed MOTU in the ’80s zeitgeist. But it was the sort of thing I would have been obsessed with, and I know Teela would have been my favorite character.

I was always drawn to the warrior-girl archetype, someone who was tough enough to keep up with the boys—or, in Teela’s case, outpace them. As an adult, I understand there are problems with that trope, as it often relies on women to present strength through taking on traditionally masculine traits. The opportunity to write the novel let me have a hand in deepening her characterization.

I was particularly drawn to the idea of her as a teenager, coming of age in a world that has just experienced this enormous upheaval. Everything she based her identity around—everything she thought would define the kind of person she was going to grow into—is gone. Now she’s left to navigate not just the normal difficulties of teenagerhood, but also figuring out her new place in a new world.

I was also interested in exploring concepts of gray morality in the world of Eternia. Since MOTU was a children’s franchise, so much of the conflict is good guys versus bad guys—which, don’t get me wrong, is enormously fun. I love a self-aware villain like Skeletor, who is evil because he’s evil, no more questions.

I wanted to challenge Teela’s ideas about the black-and-white morality of her world by introducing morally gray characters to surround her—and giving her some decisions of her own that complicated her narrative.

Between Teela and Bucky Barnes in Cold Front, you’ve written two characters whose identities are heavily shaped by duty, institutions and expectations placed on them. Do you see any unexpected similarities between them?

Ah, what a great question! I’d never thought of the parallels between those two, but you’re exactly right.

I think both books—and my interpretations of both characters—are focused on the way that you start to realize as a teenager that the world is not neatly divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather every side has its complications, its compromises and its sacrifices.

They’re also both characters who are, in the larger narratives, sidekicks of a sort to the main heroes, He-Man and Captain America. Getting to make them main characters gave me the opportunity to explore both of them as teenagers coming to the devastating realization we all go through: The adults around us are fallible.

Lady Like marked your adult debut after years of writing YA. Was there anything about writing specifically for an adult audience that surprised you—either because it gave you more freedom or because the process ended up being less different than you expected?

I approached writing adult and young adult novels very much the same. The biggest difference is where the characters are in their lives and how that affects their emotional journeys.

Your books can jump from the Winter Soldier to Regency romance to Eternia and still feel very character-first. When you start something new, do you usually find the emotional core before you find the plot, or does the world sometimes tell you who the character needs to be?

It’s always character first for me! A story is only as strong as the characters it’s happening to.

However, if I’m doing my job right, the emotional core and the plot should be intertwined and inform each other. One doesn’t come before the other; rather, they evolve and develop simultaneously—and often continue to change over the course of drafting and revision.

Going back to Bucky for a second: Cold Front gives us him at two radically different points in his life. What felt like the connective tissue between teenage Bucky and the Winter Soldier—the piece of him that survived everything that happened in between?

I think there’s a scrapiness to both Bucky and the Winter Soldier, and a really strong sense of morality.

As a teenager, he wants to join a righteous fight, only to realize that it’s sort of an oxymoron. In the older timeline, it’s that strong sense of right and wrong that gives him the power to fight back against HYDRA mind control.

In both timelines, he has a strong moral compass that he is trying to reconcile with a corrupt world around him that would warp and disrupt that goodness.

You’ve now gotten to play in some ridiculously big sandboxes. If somebody handed you the keys to any existing character or universe tomorrow, no restrictions, who would you want to write?

STAR WARS. Please God, someone give me a Star Wars to write!

Star Wars was the formative franchise of my youth, and I feel like I learned to be a writer by crafting stories for my sister and me to act out with our Star Wars action figures when we were kids.

Everything I am today is because of Star Wars.

YOU HEAR THAT, UNIVERSE? LET ME WRITE A STAR WARS!

Teela: Daughter of Eternos is available now in hardcover.