The reason people are so captivated by Heated Rivalry, the new Crave romance adapted from Rachel Reid’s popular novel, isn’t just because the storyline is unprecedented, but because the two main characters find queer joy in impossible circumstances. In doing so, the series creates new possibilities for imagining relationships, masculinity and society.
The show centres on a romance between two professional hockey players, Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), who are rivals in a fictitious professional hockey league.
Queer joy in Heated Rivalry unsettles hockey’s hypermasculine order and makes new ways of relating seem possible. As my research on queer joy articulates, this form of joy holds transformative, collective power for reimagining the world beyond oppressive norms.
