ā[ā¦] I loved these books. I wanted to do queer joy. I wanted to do something fucking horny, too. Like, I love that. I was like, we donāt get that. I feel like thereās been this weird divorce of sex from art for a while, and the sex you see on TV and movies is always sex nobody wants. Itās all, like, violent and unpleasant and coercive or just something that Iām like, bleh. And the reason that I loved heated rivalry specifically is because the sex tells the story, and it felt like I could really use that, that this was not going to be gratuitous, this was not going to beāand like, who cares if it is, but you have to convince people of stuff like this. So I was like the sex is architecting this relationship through ten years, thatās how they know each other, because when theyāre talking, theyāre lying, or not quite telling the truth. So itās almost likeā¦the sex is when theyāre allowed to be honest with each other and when theyāre allowed to be vulnerable. So the sex is telling you, is giving you story information. And itās so funny as writing season two, like it is a reminder as weāre working, my cowriter and I, that this story, the plot of this story is emotion. The traditional beats of story, while they matter, they donāt matter anywhere nearly as much as the feeling that youāre left with, because what you want is to keep following the emotional heartbeat of this relationship. And that was always the way that I thought what I loved about the way Rachel wrote heated rivalry was, the way I interpreted it is, the reason itās written this way, in these snippets of time, is because thatās what they remember. Like, what do you remember about the day you were drafted? I remember standing next to Ilya, I remember the way he looked in that suit, I remember seeing him up there with his dad and wondering what his dad was like. And I remember not listening to my mom. And then, boom, whatās the next thing you remember? I remember not being able to sleep, and I went to the gym and there he was. Like, all of their memories [ā¦], itās told in a language of memory, and sex is such a powerful part of the memory scape of this thing. So I felt like that was a great way to also, you knowāand what I promised Rachel, which is the promise I try really hard to keep, was like, I want to take this seriously, because I think what a lot of people do with genre in general, but romance in particular, is they try to make it, theyāre like, āthis is easy and this is dumb, and we can make this triteā, and I was like, I donāt want to, I want to dig deeper because everything in her book there is the foundation of a very real and understandable queer relationship, and I wanted to be like, I didnāt want to shy away from it, and I wanted to dig into it.ā
jbbartram-illu
izzy806
stormborns
origamiaround
titsay
