The thing about Heated Rivalry and The Long Game being perceived as both a feel good love story and a true critique of hockey culture as it exists today is that those two things are fundamentally incompatible.
If Shane is Sidney Crosby adjacent in terms of how phenomenal he is as a player, that means he was subjected to the same cruel and unusual treatment that Sidney Crosby faced on his professional journey. If you’re not familiar, Crosby was targeted from as young as 12 with opposing players slashing at him and beaning the puck at him in an attempt to injure him. He was heckled and threatened by parents in the stands at peewee games. Shane is Asian on top of this, and was most definitely subject to racial abuse. If these things happened, obviously they would be traumatic and make the person on the receiving end of it aware of “the dark side of hockey.” (I would really go so far to argue that there’s no chance in hell any real life North American hockey player isn’t aware of the dark side of hockey, because the hazing and the social hierarchies are engrained into the culture).
But if Shane allegedly, the way Rachel writes The Long Game, is blissfully unaware, then they exist inside some alternate universe where hockey culture isn’t anything like what it is in this one.
Ilya’s characterization is also fundamentally incompatible with “the realities of hockey culture.” Hookup culture in locker rooms, and particularly the way hockey locker rooms treat sex and women is inherently degrading. We Breed Lions by Rick Westhead does a really phenomenal job of breaking down the systemic way boys in North American hockey are conditioned growing up to see women and girls. It’s one that has historically encouraged players to view women as status symbols, conquests, and tools for male bonding rather than as equal people. You could make the argument that Ilya was raised in Russia, so it’s different, and I don’t know anything about Russian locker room culture so I’m not going to. But he plays in the American League, alongside North American players during the duration of the book. I’m not going to get into detail about the structure of athletes and hookup culture, and I really encourage everyone to read the book or exerts of it, but they don’t view the people they sleep with as equals. They don’t value consent. Even if Ilya himself (or the character of Ilya contextualized in the reality of what hockey culture looks like) doesn’t partake in the sleazy way hockey players try to get women into bed, he’s at the very least, privy to conversations about it. Whether or not he personally participates in the more predatory aspects of that culture is moot because he would, at minimum, be immersed in locker room conversations where women are discussed as sexual conquests, hear teammates boast about hookups, and witness the attitudes that are deeply embedded within the sport.
But Ilya’s character is a good person, and the narrative supports this. So we know that the reality of hockey culture’s attitude towards women doesn’t exist in this universe. If he encountered the misogyny that is so well documented within professional hockey culture, the character as written would almost certainly reject it. Yet the novel never asks him to. Instead, it simply removes that dimension of hockey culture from the world it has constructed from his narrative altogether. He’s a hockey player and he has a lot of casual sex and those two things exist in two separate places altogether.
Ilya is also a white man, who in The Long Game, dismisses his Asian partner’s ability to accurately perceive how nasty hockey can be if we look at him in the context of reality. But Heated Rivalry isn’t rooted in reality. Instead, it presents a sanitized version of oppression where prejudice exists only when the narrative explicitly points to it and disappears elsewhere based on convenience (or if it can’t be used to paint Ilya as the darling white boyfriend who doesn’t have a racist bone in his body and actually he’s sooooo much more oppressed than his boyfriend!!!! Not that he would ever make it a competition. But Shane just doesn’t understand … good thing white Ilya is here to comprehend it for him!!)
The novel operates with an almost binary moral framework. Ignoring mental health is presented as unequivocally wrong, so mental health becomes a subject the narrative takes seriously. Racism is largely absent from the text, so it effectively ceases to exist within the univese the novel has constructed. Misogyny receives an occasional throwaway acknowledgement, allowing the narrative to sidestep the pervasive sexism embedded in professional men’s sports. (I’m sure it’s more of a focus in Troy’s book, and eventually I will read that, but I’m aware of the major plot beats and I’m aware of Rachel Reid’s tendencies, so I don’t really have high hopes).
My truth is that the show canon is what I take as truth (and you don’t know bar for bar what a character is thinking in a TV show, so omission doesn’t necessarily mean that those things don’t exist, just that we as the audience didn’t get to see them). Even the show’s canon isn’t truly compatible with the reality of hockey culture, but it’s not so blatantly dismissive of Shane and his interiority.
Rachel can write these books and call them romance. Shane doesn’t even have to be as equally fleshed out as a character as Ilya, if we’re going to call it a romance book. But to call it a social critique and ignore the elephant in the room that is race every single time is a slap in the face to the players that most definitely receive the brunt of abuse during their careers when it presents itself as a commentary on hockey culture, homophobia, masculinity, or prejudice. Once a text claims to be a commentary, what it chooses to leave out becomes part of the critique. That selectivity matters because it sanitizes who bears the cost of hockey culture in real life. Players of colour have spoken about racist abuse from teammates, opponents, fans, and even coaches. Women working in hockey have documented cultures of sexism and harassment. These are not peripheral issues!!! They are part of the fabric of the sport’s history.
At the end of the day I am going to interact with Shane and Ilya’s characterization with the lens of what they mean to me, and what their love story and dynamic symbolizes to me. Do I think it’s realistic that someone will never say something insensitive about their partner concerning part of their identity? No, but I’m not claiming to write a critique most of the time I’m writing feel good fluff for the most part. Part of the appeal for me is the fact that Shane is Asian and Ilya is an immigrant and they treat each other with respect and see each other as complete equals, and I see that reflected in the TV show dynamic. But to me, they don’t exist in the real world, because they are incompatible with it in universe.
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