About Those Hockey Boys...

Lately my weekends have felt like this:

Thursday night: Critical Role - SLAP IN THE FACE
Midnight Friday: Heated Rivalry - SLAP IN THE FACE
Midnight Friday, Pt II: End of an Era - nice warm hug....then SLAP IN THE FACE

December isn't historically the best time of year for new shows but fandom as an entity is thriving right now. My 7+ hours of new media has me racing every weekend trying to keep up.

While CritRole is new-to-me and I'm doing a tough balancing act watching a new double feature length ep almost every week, the biggest surprise was Heated Rivalry (Canada's Crave, distributed by HBO). That it was even like...watchably good.

Listen, I can spot AO3 fic from miles away and when I watched the first two eps of this laudable but shaky translation of propub to screen I was not very impressed. The actors are hot and the tropes are doing their best to break through under (the presumable mountain of) network notes, but it just seemed like TV wasn't the right medium for fic queerness. Shows can be gay, some shows are queer, but historically queer media has an entirely different rhythm and bent than queer fic. The stories and sensibilities live in entirely different universes.

Uhhhh but then episode 4 happened. And my brain got t.A.T.u. worms.

Episode 3 was like…fine. It felt headed in the right direction and cleared up a lot of the production and narrative problems that the first two episodes had. It still had a bit too many model guys with dehydrated six packs for me to fully invest in it and it was based on Stucky when in my heart I'm a Stony fan so I held it off a little even though I enjoyed it.

But by episode 4, all the fanfic beats shone through the way they were supposed to and, by some miracle, the show has been able to recreate the feeling of reading fanfic through the television. Like that gut feeling of when a fic is really ineffably good and engrossing and makes you hyper...I got that.

You might be wondering why, if I've been watching weekly since the first two episode drop, and last Friday we got episode 5, I haven't written about this show before. And the answer is because I've been in a two week fandom spiral that involves getting my ass handed to me on instagram reels and culminated with watching 20 minutes of Hudson Williams doing his "5 minute" skincare routine at 2 in the morning.

I think we’re going to be hearing a lot about Heated Rivalry. While we’ve had a run of Wattpad and * cough * hetslop fanfic turned pro turned movie (see: 50 Shades, After, that one where Anne Hathaway falls in love with Harry Styles), there have been very few successful slash screen adaptations. But now all of fandom is coming out of the woodwork to support this one - plus just all the romance fans who didn't even know it as fanfic to begin with. It's where I can't go to a screening of Die Hard without hearing the guy behind me ask "have you watched the new gay hockey boys show?"

If anyone was going to make it, it was going to be Stucky fandom. And weirdly enough, hockey as a setting makes a lot of sense. Maybe less obvious to people outside fandom is how fandom groups can sometimes move through different fandom texts together - as in, a lot of the fans of Stucky then became fans of a hockey comic called Check, Please! which led them to Hockey fandom which is why a Stucky AU set in the world of hockey tracks to anyone who has been in fandom spaces for 5+ years. (A large group also went from hockey to kpop to F1, etc. All huge fandoms but with a seeming central magnetic pull for a type of fan.) I’m not one of those fans (again, Stony) and the lack of my fandom...type? profile? persona? flavor?...does ruffle my feathers simply because of course it was the Stucky's - the huge fandom, massive output, wildly devoted Stucky's - who got there first. (I'm not a ship war person, I swear).

But like. That said, Ilya cried. And I felt things, man. It felt so good.

Shane went to the hospital and Ilya tenderly smoothed his face. We got whumped twice. Both kinds. This is heaven.

The other thing that happened is that reels absolutely clocked me and right after serving me like...so many HR edits, it smoothly transitioned me to Merlin and very quickly peppered me with Tom Welling thirst traps. Like Smallville thirst traps in the year 2025. Then like, a bunch of Jess Mariano Gilmore Girls nonsense including a spectacular enemies to lovers edit of Jess and The Swan. It is a dangerous place.

May the cottage bring us joy and peace.

A/N: I'm aware that many other fandom queers are currently watching Pluribus and HR and that is their Friday night lineup. I've watched the first ep and will probably watch more but I am currently overwhelmed. I also didn't talk about End of an Era at all (oops) but it's more like a reality show so I think there's less to say abut until it finishes dropping. Or at least that's my defense.

Reels rec list (because they won't embed):

Heated Rivalry, Should I Stay Or Should I Go: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSEK7uwDcMf/

Heated Rivalry, Love Runs Out: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSIHqPgkZzM/

Heated Rivalry, Ilyvia is obsessed: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSLqAE7knXZ/

Heated Rivalry, Scotty Doesn't Know: https://www.instagram.com/p/DR4o5REibfE/

Heated Rivalry, Taylor Supremacy: https://www.instagram.com/p/DSedgnAjjBq/

Heated Rivalry, I Wanna Be With You Everywhere: https://www.instagram.com/p/DSbJuFaEpth/

Heated Rivalry/Challengers/Psychosexual sports rivals: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSEy-JaEZAd/

Heated Rivalry, A Full LA Bar Watches Episode 5: https://www.instagram.com/p/DSeQUvWE45f/

Gilmore Girls, Christopher is a Manchild: https://www.instagram.com/p/DMQDn39Mw-c/

Gilmore Girls, Taylor Supremacy: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPr_3OcjANO/

Buffy S1, Hey Ya: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRXOuZgjihK/

The Pitt, Dr. Robby has a dirty little secret: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSP8H2xADyA/

Tom Welling Thirst Trap: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DR3nRaEk9l7/

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