Heated Rivalry: Everything But the Hockey Sticks
If you are anything like me, your social media feeds have been filled with Heated Rivalry content. Or maybe it's just that my algorithms know how much I love romance and hot guys, and it's not a big stretch to imagine that I would be interested in romance between two hot guys. I had the flu last week (mucus gang rise up) so I decided that there was no better companion for my fever than the feverish chemistry of two hockey players whose yearning has lit the internet on fire.
Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) is a rising star in the hockey world with a reputation as a hard worker and team player. Ilya Rosanov (Connor Storrie) is a bad boy Russian whose hard-partying lifestyle conceals a painful childhood. They meet just before they are both drafted into the NHL, when Shane tries to be nice and Ilya is an asshole to him. This dynamic continues for literal years, even as they acknowledge their attraction to each other and the media has a field day with the supposed rivalry between them. When they can, they meet up in hotel rooms and vacation houses to hook up, and they slowly develop feelings for each other despite how inconvenient a relationship would be for both of them.
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Meanwhile, another player, Scott Hunter (Francois Arnaud) falls in love with Kip (Robbie G.K.), an art history student who works at the coffee shop where Scott gets his smoothies. Scott is deep in the closet and refuses to live openly with Kip, who eventually leaves Scott because Kip can't stand being a secret. When they finally get back together, it provides a nice mid-series catharsis that also gives Shane and Ilya hope that they, too, can be out and proud as professional sports players.
So first things first: there's a ton of sex in this. Like, so much sex. And it's about as close to porn as you can without being censored--there's a lot of strategically placed chairs and lamps so you can see everything but the, errr, hockey sticks. I love watching two horny idiots bang their way into a relationship, so that works for me. What really works for me is how the way they touch each other changes over the course of the relationship. At the beginning, they are impersonal with each other, getting straight to business. By the end, they are touching each other's hair and faces and necks with a level of passion and abandonment that you don't often see on screen. Though it takes them a long time to confess their feelings in words, it is clear from their actions how much they care about each other. It's not sex for the sake of titillation: it's character development sex.
Another big portion of each episode is taken up with pop music montages of the two of them texting each other, playing against each other on the ice, or thinking about each other while they are with other people. This is my one major complaint about the series. All the songs are good, but they have nothing to do with what is happening on screen. It's like they randomly selected ten songs from the Spotify top 50 and plugged them into the episodes. Personally, I like my needle drops to feel thematically related to what is happening in the show. They also loop the songs in a weird way so there's no verse, just chorus-chorus-chorus. Is it possible that I'm a music snob? Yes. But when I'm watching two hot boys rub all over each other, I don't want to be distracted by the way Wet Leg's Mangetout is being mangled to keep the energy as high as possible.
The show is based on the book series Game Changers by Rachel Reid, and the series covers books one and two. Since the show has been renewed for another season, I'm really excited to grab the books and see how they are translated to the screen. Hot guys with hockey sticks? Sign me up.