I really didn’t think I’d have anything to add to the plethora of Heated Rivalry analysis, but I honestly can’t help myself.
There are some excellent takes on how Rachel Reid’s queer hockey romance epitomizes the genre, and other subgenres of romance outside of contemporary / sports / m/m romance (personal favorite of the similarities between common conventions in historical romance).
Before I extrapolate over my favorite tropes (and believe me, it was hard to choose three…), I want to talk for a minute about Jacob Tierney’s television adaptation of the book, and why we’re all losing our marbles over it.
Adaptations are immensely challenging. Yulin Kuang spoke elegantly about this on a recent podcast with Emily Henry. The best adaptations stand on their own; they don’t require someone to read the book to appreciate the story or characters.
The thing about Tierney’s adaptation, however, is that he’s given us crazy fan readers EVERYTHING. In my [redacted] number of decades around the sun, I haven’t seen an adaptation that not only gets every beat, every look, every EMOTION to echo the experience of reading Heated Rivalry, but using the medium of film (tv), adds to it.
Much has been written about how moving it is to see queer joy and queer love represented in this format. As someone who has a postgraduate degree in gender and media–and wrote a thesis on masculinity– I adored Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie’s performances as Shane and Ilya for reasons to numerous to expound on here. But especially for their nuanced and layered portrayals of masculinity, and in particular, queer masculinity, which we often see stereotyped as flamboyantly effeminate. That’s not to say those portrayals–with equal nuance–aren’t important (I love you David Rose). They also deserve representation. People contain multitudes and so do our expressions of gender. Gender theorists refer to this as masculinities, rather than masculinity.
Okay, before I lose you to an academic tangent, here’s a far from exhaustive list of three tropes I love to write and how they show up in Heated Rivalry:
- Forbidden Romance. If you’ve read Keeping the Countess, you know this is one I’ll never get enough of. In my opinion, this is the central trope that sustains Heated Rivalry, more than the rivals-to-lovers trope from which the book gets its title. The forbidden romance is inherently tied to the external conflict (two kings on the ice constantly competing against each other who cannot risk their careers by coming out) and the internal conflict of the novel (Ilya and Shane moving past a purely physical connection to a relationship of trust and intimacy, something their boundaries of their world has made them think is impossible).
- Forced Proximity. Okay here me out, I know this one seems strange since Ilya and Shane play for different teams and live in different countries. But metaphorically, they exist in the bubble of sports stardom. Few people can relate to the experience Shane and Ilya have as hockey player phenoms who go on to become the best players in the league. And along with it, the pressures of maintaining peak performance, and the fame that goes along with it. The stolen moments they share when they are together–when their teams play each other or the industry events and finally “at the cottage”–feel as close as if we’re stuck inside a phone booth with these two. It’s delicious.
- Food as Love Language. Y’all, the idea of a tuna melt makes me want to gag, but I am willing to put aside my abhorrence in this instance only. As a romance author, one of my favorite things to write is a scene where the characters share a meal or a morsel (the entirety of Stirring Up Scandal is based on this trope). It’s a great way to invoke sensory stimulation for the characters. And if every romance destination is an HEA, and most partners regularly share meals with each other, it foreshadows their future life together. Immensely satisfying.
I’m so glad we live in a world we’re we’re getting Season Two of Heated Rivalry, and a third book about Shane and Ilya’s happy ever after. Thoughts and prayers to all of you waiting for these joy nuggets to arrive