I was going to take a week off but then Heated Rivalry finished and my brain was too full of thoughts.

If you’re an extremely online person (and it’s hard to imagine you’re not if you’re subbed to this email) you won’t have been able to escape hearing about the Canadian smash-hit tv romance about two closeted professional hockey players. Let’s catch everyone else up real quick. Heated Rivalry is a six-part show made for the Canadian streamer Crave. It’s based on a novel by Rachel Reid, part of a series of interconnected m/m novels called Game Changers, all set in the world of North American major league hockey. The book was written back in 2019, but has come back to prominence recently, due to the rise in popularity of romance fiction in general and sports romance in particular. Though don’t get me started on whoever has decided romance novels now all need cartoon covers(!)

Jacob Tierney, an actor and director who you might know from the very funny Canadian comedy Letterkenny, read the book during covid and decided to adapt it for tv.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think the book was great (don’t come for me book fans). I also read it during covid, because as you know I was getting into hockey then, and it’s … fine — way too much telling and not showing, way too quick to a “happily ever after”, etc — what Tierney and the cast has done with the show has definitely elevated the source material.

speed-running the discourse

No sooner had the show dropped than the first round of negative reactions hit social media. As if they’d been pre-recorded, these were deeply predictable. One: m/m romances written by and for women are not genuine queer stories and “fetishise” gay men. Two: queer actors should play queer roles, and if the actors in Heated Rivalry aren’t out and proud then they’re either straight or cowards. (See also: Red White and Royal Blue, Heartstoppers, and Love, Simon) Early on, these criticisms found a champion in I Love LA’s actor Jordan Firstman giving an interview in which he claimed the sex in Heated Rivalry wasn’t “authentic” and that he “didn’t respect” the actors for not saying whether they were queer or not.

But something different happened this time around. The show was so good that it united the girls, gays and theys online. Having watched Kit Connor be forced out of the closet to defend his role in Heartstoppers, the audience and showrunner Tierney (an out gay man) were quickly on the side of the young, unknown actors in keeping their personal lives to themselves. Tierney shut down any speculation before the show even aired, saying, “what’s so impressive about both of these guys is they came into this being like, ‘Yeah, we’re here to do this, and we are here to make this story feel authentic and to be as real as possible.’ And they fucking hit it out of the park.”

Firstman and HBO had to go into damage control.

they bangin’

And let’s be real, the first two episodes of this show are not ones that you sit down and watch with your parents. Instead of the usual fade-to-black approach of many mainstream depictions of queer sex, you’re left in no doubt about Ilya and Shane fucking. This is a great interview with the intimacy coordinator, Chala Hunter, who deserves a New Years Honour, let’s be real.

Twenty-five years after Queer as Folk came out, the boys are back at it. And as Jenny Hamilton took the time to explain, the sex is the story in those first episodes.

what women want

The runaway success of any media property seems to mean pundits feel like they have to boil that success down to a single factor, or be able to isolate a check-list of things that worked so they can produce a chatgpt-generated linkedin post. And, to be clear, this show has been a runaway success.

But it’s produced some eye-wateringly bad takes from people who seem staggered to learn that both straight women and queer people voraciously consume romance fiction, erotica, and m/m stories. Instead of asking the audience what they want, Hollywood seems to prefer to be continually caught on the hop. Imagine if we made shows for people other than cis-het men??

Let’s start with the fact that there are basically no contemporary adult dramas with a romance at the heart of them. Bridgerton, Outlander, Poldark, and various Austen adaptations exist for period romance. There are comedies like Brooklyn-Nine-Nine or Schitt’s Creek that have romances in them. And there’s YA romance like The Summer I Turned Pretty. Is it any wonder then, that the Hot Rabbi from Nobody Wants This, the Hot Priest from Fleabag before him, and Paul Mescal’s chain from Normal People become internet sensations. We’re starving out here.

This is despite the fact that romance fiction continues to be a best-seller (no, there is no good data on this and anyone who writes a post claiming there is is using genAI). There are 16.5 million transformative works on AO3 and around half of those are tagged m/m. And I’m only talking about the West — add in yaoi from manga and Boys Love (BL) from Asian media. This is not a new phenomenon — and yet…

but whyyyyyyyyyyy?

Take your pick? We don’t all have the same reasons. Here are some I got just by asking my friends. You can do the same.

Two men kissing is hot (sorry, it's true).
I love queer joy.
I can enjoy a fairytale without having to imagine being a princess.
Even though this concept is itself weighed down by the baggage society gives us, what if we retold the heteronormative stories we're given with male bodies who are more "equal" in the eyes of society?
I get to think about sex without thinking about the patriarchy.
Imagine a world in which you can think about and experience desire without having it as closely tied to 1.performance of that desire and 2.your physical body.

Tierney, in a podcast interview, was clear about this, saying, “as a culture there is so little interest taken in what pleases women, what interests women and I think sexually especially because people are afraid of it and they don't want to deal with it…there's something counterintuitive about it but I think it's only counterintuitive because of the general lack of interest we take culturally in anything that women like.” Amen, Jacob.

I’m tired of seeing women brutalised on screen. I’m tired of shows about infidelity, dreadful husbands, stalkers, rapists, workplace harassers. The real world is exhausting. Give me an escape.

And obviously I’m not the only one:

hope for the bros

This is a show that has brought together a gorgeous mash-up of spicy book fans, genre romance fans, gay men who don’t read (affectionate), people wanting a queer love story, and hockey rpf fans. Fanfic authors and readers particularly love it I think because the show is fanfiction. Tierney took an average book and transformed it. He gets it, as this great interview with Carly Lane-Perry shows, and we love him for it.

But the subculture I was NOT expecting to dive in boots and all were straight hockey podcasting bros. Not one, but TWO shows — What Chaos! and Empty Netters — have done episode-by-episode reviews. Normally youtube “reaction videos” piss me off. They smack of clout chasing (no, I don’t believe you’re a “vocal coach reacting to Taylor Swift for the first time!”). But these boys have won over entirely new audiences with their genuine enthusiasm and respect for the show.

As Alex texted me after one episode of Empty Netters, “I thought young straight men were suffering a crisis and becoming nazis. What to do with this feeling … is this … hope? For the bros??”

During their watch of the second episode when these podbros dub Ilya the “Consent King” for checking in with Shane during sex, it certainly felt something like hope.

a perfect ten

No show can survive the expectations put on it if those expectations amount to it being all things to all people. And there are a wealth of legit criticisms bubbling around the edges. No, hockey isn’t just a sport full of homophobic men, there are awesome out gay women who play the sport professionally that you can also be fans of. Yes, calling going to a hockey game “visiting the boy aquarium” is silly and fun, but it doesn’t make you less of a real fan.

Does a show about hockey that doesn’t grapple in-depth with its racist, bigoted, misogynistic culture do us a disservice? No, I can read the facts. I’d still like the escape. Is a love story with a happy ending where nothing truly terrible happens a cop-out? No, because all queer stories are representation that matters to someone, that helps them feel seen and accepted.

I don’t know, the more I see people saying “ugh you can’t like this show because…” the more I see the same thing I’ve been saying all year. We’re forced to share our online space with literally everyone now, which means in our moments of pure joy, sitting in the back seat of Shane’s Range Rover on the way to the cottage, we have to also hear from the people who want to rain on our parade.

This is why fan spaces remain so important. And why it’s crucial that they remain separate, and not whatever tf Out magazine thought they were doing here:

The NHL itself, of course, is remaining diplomatically neutral, with a rep saying, “There are so many ways to get hooked on hockey and, in the NHL’s 108-year history, this might be the most unique driver for creating new fans.” The rep added, “See you all at the rink.”

I, for one, hope noone ever sticks a mic in a professional player’s face and asks them about this show. Let us enjoy things.

So, put some Feist and Wolf Parade and that t.A.T.u remix on your NYE playlist. Let the girls, gays and theys have a nice little win before the algorithm remembers we exist and tries to turn it into a take. The world is full of systems that want desire to be punished, policed, monetised, or turned into a moral referendum. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is to have a good time on purpose.

Have a happy new year.

finally, in my lego city