shane: has a paranoid mental break bc he once looked at ilya for too long during a game and the cameras caught it and a commentator made an offhand comment about their chemistry or something, vowing to never look at ilya again while playing (even though their rivalry is squashed), returning home in a cold sweat and making ilya wait until it’s dark to come in through the back door
ilya: has been googling “hockey players dating legal” “what happens if two hockey players have sex at rink” “can you get fired from hockey for dating other player” “scott hunter missed goals compilation” “nhl players dating rules” for months on shane’s laptop
Of course I was more excited for Connor as Ilya because Ilya is so charismatic in the books. He's got that wit, and Connor was being praised (and I agree) so highly for his linguistic effort and talent. He also has that very European face. Yes yes yes he is spectacular and some kind of rarefied, genius level actor. What I hadn't expected was to be so completely head over heels for Hudson's Shane. He's all I can think about. He brought to life Shane's wealth of emotion so beautifully. He's like the pulse of the show, so much happens within him. He's so tortured and naive and capable of such open love. He's so full of life and charming. He made Shane so lovely. I've seen so many people online say they feel protective of him and I feel the same way. Like you can tell why Ilya is obsessed with him; you look at Ilya pining over Hudson's Shane and go "yeah of course, that makes perfect sense." And of course, the way Connor's Ilya is, of course you in particular would gravitate towards him. It wouldn't be possible to have that connection without having good chemistry as actors, I think.
There's this inside joke in the Canadian entertainment industry that everyone at some point in their career has pitched a hockey show
it's like a Canadian screenwriting right of passage, even writers who aren't that into hockey find they have an idea rattling around in their brain and try it
In spite of this it may surprise people to learn Canada went decades without a hockey show. it seems like such an obvious idea right? thats why writers kept pitching it and yet...it just never happened. the possible reasons why belong in another post but the fact is people have spent years and years behind the scenes in Canada trying to get a hockey show off the ground (ice?)
I cant emphasize enough how this is not hyperbole. like if you gathered a bunch of Canadian screenwriters in a room and threw a rock (please don't throw rocks at Canadians or screenwriters) you'd hit someone who pitched a hockey show, and relatedly someone who could never get that greenlight
The show that finally broke the curse? of all shows the Letter Kenny spin off Shorsey which Premiered in 2022
Which is what makes Heated Rivalry so bonkers insane funny to me
It took Canada so long to get a hockey show out of development hell that once we finally figured out how to do it and make it viable we were able to speed run past 100 years of institutional and internalized homophobia in the NHL and just skip straight to hockey yaoi
we sure are a real country, eh? you miss 100% of the shots you never take and sometimes you miss for so long the shots become gay or whatever Wayne Gretsky and Michael Scott said
There was never any curse in French, folks. OP is betraying their ignorance of the absolute juggernauts of Québec hockey tv and film of the last 40 years. Hockey has never not been present in fiction and reality tv, decade after decade. For example:
-Lance et compte, nine seasons, from 1986 to 2015 for a total of 99 episodes, including 7 tv movies and one film. So culturally influential its catch phrases are still part of popular speech. There are gay characters in the latter series.
-Les Boys, five movies (1998 to 2013), a tv series (2007-12) and and stage show that is on right now. So popular real hockey players get compared to the characters. And one of the characters is gay, that is known from the first 1998 movie, he stays on the team and is in a happy relationship in most of the instalments. AND he's played by Yvan Ponton who played the Québécois goalie in the classic hockey movie Slap Shot. Iconic.
- Histoires d'hiver (1999) and Les Pee-wee 3D (2012), two lovely teen movies that were moderately popular, the first being absolutely charming.
- Premier trio (2023-...), 3 seasons so far, ongoing, 78 episodes, a series about a female AAA Bantam player in a male team and their teen difficulties and triumphs.
There is more! And that's not even listing the documentary and reality tv series!
Am I glad that Jacob Tierney is giving us gay hockey players? Hell, yes. Is there a story in this series he's giving us? Nope. It's just romance and sexual tension and sex. Whatever stakes are coming are self-evident from episode one and the book told us it'll have a happy enough ending. Heated Rivelry is actually not about hockey. It's important for North American tv and will change things, but I'll be blunt it's pretty boring so far.
But if there was a curse to break, it's only for English Canadians. Québec's been doing fine.
When Heather said Muse and Daredevil are the same, just “underdeveloped boys hiding behind masks, trying to make it look more sophisticated”, do you think she might have a point? (Personally, I don’t — I think she’s speaking from a place of ignorance + trying to process her recent trauma + feeling some understandable anger. Also I think this is good indicator — and purposeful by the writers — that Heather doesn’t actually know Matt that well and their relationship won’t last much longer)
Eager to get your perspective — imagine me with my face in my hands, kicking my feet and giggling
NO BUT LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS, CAUSE I CLOCKED THIS TOO.
I think there's multiple things being brought together, a lot of which you caught here.
Going to put this under a see more cause it's a slightly longer dissection of this part of the episode.
DDBA thoughts beneath the cut.
"Underdeveloped boys hiding behind masks, trying to make it look more sophisticated."
If we compare this to the last time she brought this up, there's been a clear shift in perspective. Before, she was curious about the 'why' with vigilantes and masks - does the mask allow vigilantes/antiheroes to be their true selves, or is the mask about hiding those true selves, creating some sense of separation? She wanted to talk to Daredevil, even Frank Castle about it. Now, she seems (to me at least) to be working through her own trauma and anger, yeah - anger at Muse, yes, but at Daredevil too, because to her, at least right now, she's latched onto, 'Muse was a horrible person who wore a mask to hide his identity, which means horrible people wear masks. Therefore the people wearing the masks are the problem because if they were doing what's right, they wouldn't need to hide.'
It doesn't matter to her brain right now that Daredevil saved her life. He's part of the problem - especially since she just saw Daredevil at his most violent. I think with time she'll be able to process that and recognize it eventually, in the way that someone bit badly by a dog will often come to recognize that not all dogs are bad. But they're going to be afraid of dogs for a while, or maybe even forever. Especially if their sole experience with a dog is getting bit.
But if we set all that aside and just take the statement at its base value: she's both right and not, I think. We know how people are. We know how Muse is, calling his slaughter an 'art' and not just, you know, serial killing. There would absolutely, in this universe, be insecure, chest-thumping, underdeveloped dudes who'd slap on a mask so they can run out and beat people up and see themselves as heroes. But in reality they just like being violent, and the mask DOES help hide them from consequences.
But she's also wrong by applying it overall/to the masked vigilantes in general. Not just because of Matt/Daredevil, but because of people like Hector earlier in the season. With Hector, that was one of the whole plot points: he was (RIP) doing it because it's the right thing to do, and because he wanted to help. Matt, arguably, does what he does for the same reason: because it's the right thing to do. Hell, Frank isn't even hiding behind a mask for all that she included him on her list earlier. He's not calling it sophisticated, or hero work. He's doing it because he believes this is the only way to solve the issue.
They aren't playing at being sophisticated. What they are doing is trying to save lives in an inherently broken, corrupt, inherently unjust system: a system that killed Hector despite him being found innocent, a system that would rather spend more money jailing a hungry guy than feeding him, a system that allowed Muse to kill 60+ people before anyone noticed, a system that elected Fisk despite his loooong list of crimes. It's a system that will literally kill you if you help the very person the system is trying to crush, like Hector did. The mask is an added layer of protection so that they can keep doing what they can to help. It's not about 'allowing' them to be violent in the way the statement implies.
And the strongest evidence of that? If all crime stopped, they would give it up.
Frank would go into retirement.
Matt would hang up the suit.
And Hector would have been at peace.
That's something about the street level heroes. They're not up there. They're down here in the dirt with us. They're the ones who hear a woman get grabbed in an alley. They're the ones walking by the corner store when they hear someone pull a gun inside and demand money. They're witnessing all of this firsthand. And I don't think you can call them all underdeveloped boys playing at being heroes without acknowledging the reality that that the person being robbed in the alley needs a hero, because the system sure as hell isn't all that interested in doing anything about it.
And I think that's sort of where they're going this season. What they're leading us to. Because that's the reality that Matt's been struggling with - the system is broken. So what do you do when you have the ability to stop some of that suffering? Do you turn away and hope someone fixes it? Or do you fight?
We know what Matt's answer is, what Hector's was. And I'm not convinced it's the wrong one.
And I think you keyed in on how this relates back to their relationship: Heather doesn't know Matt all that well, not really. None of them do, really. Heather loves the image of Matt that he's shown to her, of course, but it's a false one, an incomplete one. That's not her fault, since Matt has been lying and frantically trying to hide that side of himself to her, and he also clearly hasn't been exploring his stance on various ethics with her like the regular debates he had with Foggy and Karen in the past. I do think the relationship's destined to blow up, though whether that might get mended in S2 is anyone's guess, but I just am noooot getting the feeling that relationship's going to be able to survive the fallout once she realizes just how much Matt has hidden from her.
Kinda obsessed with how Heather and Kirsten both said that Matt is behaving un-Matt-like/ "he's not himself" / "its not like him" just bc of how and when they first met him. His carefully crafted facade actually fooled them, up to this point. There's the whole Matt vs. Daredevil theme but for all the new characters, I feel like, there's apparently a Matt 2.0 as well who has his shit together, is just sassy instead of outright snarky, is relatively unpolitical (big firm, taking lying asshole clients, doesn't step on peoples toes apparently). It doesn't feel like the Matt we, Karen, Foggy and Frank know, even while he was doing well. He over-corrected.
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