‘Heated Rivalry’ Turned Me Into a Woman I Barely Recognize

A horror fanatic finds herself deep in the world of romance—and we mean deep.

^{*Series spoilers ahead.}

It started with a message on Instagram: One of my close friends, someone who shares my taste for the dark and macabre, surprised me with an uncharacteristic nudge to watch Heated Rivalry. “It’s so good, don’t ask questions, just turn it on.” My schedule was clear in advance of Christmas break, and I’d planned to spend my time playing cards with my kids, taking my dog on long walks, and planting myself on my couch with the latest Agustina Bazterrica horror novel.

Two days later, my eyes had hardly left my phone screen. I was in two marathon text conversations with friends and I’d been added to a women/NB group chat, all of us losing our minds over the queer hockey show. I’d created a separate folder on my phone specifically for Heated Rivalry memes, and I was swapping them with in-the-know friends like Pokemon cards.

My descent was fast and frenzied—I posted an Instagram story captioned “our home for the past few days” with my teens walking into the living room only to be met with a, “I’m watching queer hockey, don’t come in!” as “a Crave original series” played across the TV screen. Looking through my recent messages, 60 percent of my conversations—spanning three apps—have centered on the show. Most of my social network has been locked in beside me, all of us hanging on Ilya’s every rolled-r, dissecting Shane’s micro-expressions, sending play-by-play breakdowns at all hours.

I knew I was down bad when I woke up two days after Christmas with a Google Drive file in my DMs—a fan edit, distributed via private link, sent by a member of the Discord server I’d joined the night before. How did I get here? I wondered, not with shame, but with tender satisfaction. I’d been absorbed into something fun and joyful, in a way I hadn’t been since I was a teenager. I was high on this new way of life.

I’m not typically a romance person. I have great affection for romance readers, in the sense that I want to tenderly stroke their faces and tell them nice things about themselves. But I’m a longtime horror girl. Though this does make me sympathetic to the box that genre communities are often put into. It’s not unlike being queer: a part of your identity is categorized, reduced, and relegated by people on the outside. 

In my personal life, I’m prickly about long-term relationships; I struggle to return texts after the thrill of the first few dates has worn off. My last dating attempt resulted in three rescheduled dinners before she got fed up with my chronic evasion of plans. I felt guilty telling her, truthfully, that I preferred spending time with my kids, or with my friends, or alone. I’ve enjoyed being single for so long that the wrong person in my space feels like a hostile alien invasion.

I’m also not someone who watches a lot of TV. I read—mostly horror and nonfiction with a trauma bent. The content I consume is aimed at matching what I feel inside; it’s dark. When I stream a show, it’s usually background noise while I work or do chores. The idea that I’d be glued to my screen for hours, on my [redacted] rewatch, screenshotting moments, creating dedicated folders for content about a show is not typical behavior for me. Or, it wasn’t, until Heated Rivalry.

I became completely absorbed by the storytelling, and also the production choices—the mirroring of scenes from the early episodes to the later, the scoring, the use of lighting to support character arcs. I was broken in half by the intensity of Ilya’s gaze as he watched Scott Hunter pull Kip in for a kiss under the blazing lights of the hockey rink. Watching someone realize the world might hold greater possibilities than they could imagine pushed the chemistry beyond the physical; it was narrative, emotional, and totally addictive.

The sex scenes, in particular, are a masterclass in craft. I have the privilege of not being widely attracted to men, so I watched them with a storyteller’s eye rather than getting swept up in the heat of it all—though objectively, the sex is extremely hot. I’m not immune to good cinematography and two people with electric chemistry. But I particularly love when a sex scene (something that, like genre writing, is often cheapened or reduced to a trope) advances the story, shifts a power dynamic, or reveals something essential about the characters. The sex in Heated Rivalry is propulsive. The first time Shane and Ilya sleep together, we see Shane’s need for control unravel. In another, Ilya’s vulnerability cracks open in a way dialogue couldn’t capture.

If you’re a story-obsessed writer like me, the craft lessons in Heated Rivalry are abundant. If you’re in it for the spice, there’s plenty of heat. Either way, it’s clear that everyone involved in creating the show cares as much about it as the fans feverishly consuming it.

I watched the season finale the moment it aired, mostly standing up on my couch screaming and texting my chats. Later that night, my phone dinged
—a 1 a.m. message from my friend who had started me down this all-consuming path. She had just finished up Stranger Things, and was ready to watch. “OK, the boys are queued up, let’s do this,” she wrote. I smashed the “restart” button.

Though Heated Rivalry may not win many awards (it’s not even eligible for the Emmys), it is a perfect display of art’s fundamental function: someone makes something and sends it into the world. It finds the people who need it, and then those people find each other.

At a time when things feel stark and divided, with content being produced more and more by entities outside our humanity, when impersonal algorithms serve us more of what they think we want, watching something earnest and deeply human—and then connecting with other humans who have been moved in the same way—feels like resistance. Better still that the fuel for this fire is based on a romance book, a genre so often dismissed by the broader literary population. Because why shouldn’t we take joy seriously, in all its dimensions?

Left to my own devices, I’d have spent my holiday break rewatching Gremlins or lost to the stack of books on my nightstand, all of which are designed to haunt my consciousness. I’d never have known a life of obsessive group chats and memes and standing-on-the-couch screaming, and I’d have never known what it is to be part of the collective psychosis as it played out across the internet. My group chats are full of scene breakdowns and character analysis and absurd memes, but beneath the fervor runs a river of deference; the show has given the public something powerful and joyful.

Watching my friends lose themselves in this show, and losing myself alongside them, made me pay attention to something I’d long been taking for granted: The friends I have who read romance are people who bring a lot of light into my life. They’re the ones most likely to create space for joy when the world feels like it’s collapsing. They’re not naive—most of them have been through their own particular hells—but they’ve made a choice about what they believe is possible.

I’ve always respected that from a distance, though I’ve never let myself be the person who needed that kind of story. But three days after Christmas, I opened a blank document and started writing. After 8 hours of desk time broken up only by walks to the kitchen to brew mugs of tea, I closed my laptop on 11,000 words of new writing: the beginning of a novel about two women trying to save a historic theater in a small town and falling in love along the way. It’s inspired by an actual event in my hometown but may have never made it to the page without Heated Rivalry.

I’ve since finished an outline, and I’ve been spending an hour every night writing into the draft, adding scenes and deepening the characters, building toward a happily ever after. This was an activity that, six months ago, would have given me hives; not the act of writing at volume, but the subject matter, and the indulgence of spending a whole day inside the emotions of two people discovering and wanting one another. My obsession with Heated Rivalry will fade—it’s already curling at the edges—but it opened a door into an emotional landscape that stands permanently ajar.

I’ve written about a lot of things over the years—grief, trauma, the architecture of family dysfunction, contemporary dread, the monsters in our minds—but romance has always eluded me. I can trace this back to my own personal traumas, and also to the broader terrain of queer media I was raised on. The shows and movies I grew up watching that featured queer storylines always ended in tragedy: Boys Don’t Cry, Brokeback Mountain. It’s challenging to have faith in happy endings when the stories that most closely represent your experience always end in heartache. And while the season finale of Heated Rivalry isn’t necessarily a happy ending—Shane and Ilya aren’t out, they were just caught, and they still have a world of mountains to climb—it feels like they’re at least on their way. 

As for myself, I’ve spent years cultivating a certain identity: Someone who doesn’t do relationships, who keeps people outside of my immediate circle at arm’s length, who has their shit together because I’ve learned to be self-sufficient. But going feral over a popular romance alongside an internet full of other humans has cracked open a part of myself I’ve kept carefully sealed. Being swept up in the collective experience of caring deeply about something also has reminded me of why we make art in the first place: to be moved, to move others, and to be surprised by our own capacity for joy.

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