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Shane: "F*cks sake, Rozanov! This is my smoothie! You already drank yours!"
Ilya: "It's not my fault you're so slow, Hollander. Let me help you out."
Scott: "Told you they'd fight over your smoothies, love."
Kip: "Haha! They really ARE that competitive!"
I've been sitting on this Heated Rivalry piece for MONTHS, and I'm so happy to finally finish it!! 💖🏒✨️ This print is now available on my Etsy AND I'm hoping to have it for Fan Expo Philadelphia this weekend!! Etsy link in my bio! 💖🏒✨️
From My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) to Mysterious Skin (2004) to Good Grief (2023), friendships between straight women and queer men have been very well-represented on screen. Famously, or notoriously, the titular characters in long-running sitcom Will and Grace often seemed more preoccupied with each other than with their respective romantic partners. There is no doubt this representation reflects real relationships between queer men and the women they emotionally support and are emotionally supported by.
What Heated Rivalry does is something next level though. Every queer main character has a female friend whose role in the development of his romantic relationship is instrumental except for Scott, who gets to borrow his boyfriend Kip's, whether he wants her or not.
The most organic of these relationships is between Ilya and his longtime friend and sometimes lover, Svetlana. Svetlana has known Ilya for most of his life. Their fathers were friends. She knows his lived experience because she's lived it alongside him. She offers understanding, acceptance, and gentle encouragement when Ilya needs it. What is particularly interesting about Svetlana is that her gender almost doesn't matter initially. She could theoretically have provided all this to Ilya if she had been a man; the only difference is that the sexual component of their relationship carries less censure in Russia.
What Rose offers Shane goes well beyond support. Not only does she conclude that he is gay on the basis of no evidence other than that he does not seem to enjoy sex with her, but her conclusion translates into Shane's epiphany about his sexuality. The change in how he sees his relationship with Ilya afterwards is drastic and immediate. Nothing that happens between the two men facilitates this transformation more than Shane's conversation with his girlfriend of a couple of months.
There are a couple of things about this that make do make sense. One is that, because their relationship is socially sanctioned, Shane is able to spend more time with Rose than he ever has with Ilya. There's not a lot of time for talking in depth about your feelings when your relationship involves playing a game of hockey against each other, fucking in a hotel room, and then not seeing each other for six to twelve months. Additionally, while Rose is not a gay man herself, she works in a profession where gay men have historically had much more freedom to be themselves than in hockey. She knows many gay men; apparently the only man who is attracted to men that Shane knows is the one he's fucking! Even if Shane already knows he's gay, which seems far more likely than the alternative, Rose is more comfortable saying it out loud.
But these aspects of Rose's relationship with Shane make Elena's relationship with Kip, and her confrontation of Scott, all the more bizarre. While Shane is isolated from other queer men, Kip is an art history scholar who watches Scott's hockey games with his friends in a gay bar. He's also significantly older than Shane and Ilya, and Scott is older still. There is no comparative lack of opportunity for Kip to talk to his lover; they live together. Yet we see none of the emotionally intimate kinds of conversations between them that Ilya and Shane have in later episodes. Of course, the characters in this B plot have less screentime, but for some reason there is time for a five minute near monologue from Elena to Scott about what Kip deserves. The episode in which that happens end with Scott sadly watching Kip's birthday party from the street outside. The next time we see him and Kip together, they're kissing on the ice on live television. Not exactly the "sunshine" Elena ordered, but the limelight is pretty close.
None of these relationships between queer men and women are problematic in and of themselves, but together they leave a bad taste in my mouth. There's an underlying implication here that men cannot have emotional intimacy with each other, or even self-awareness, without intervention from women. So much dialogue involves women explaining men's own feelings to them that it becomes repetitive, crossing the line between an accurate diagnosis of the emotional repression many men struggle with to gender essentialism. It does not help that these women are, for the most part, not nuanced characters with their own shortcomings and blind spots but instead flawless fonts of wisdom and insight. I think this representation of women is very revealing of who the show's target audience is. Of course it's good for young, and not so young, queer men to see themselves and their sexuality represented in a high-production, mainstream show. But in assuring women that queer men would be in deep shit without them, Heated Rivalry goes a little too far.
Robbie Gk was at the Vancouver Canucks game last night! The jumbotron posted THAT moment from 1x05 when Scott and Kip kiss. It then shows Robbie in the audience. He lives in Vancouver. Robbie stands up wearing a Vancouver Canucks Pride jersey. He pulls it off to reveal that he's wearing a Scott Hunter jersey underneath ❤️🌈🏒
17 - BONUS EPISODE: Extra Special Heated Rivalry Season 1 Chatathon (w/Veronica!)
We're still camped out at the cottage, so let's all revisit every episode of our beloved Canadian-funded queer hockey show with a super special guest: Konner's best friend and sister-in-law, Veronica!
She settles a few host disagreements, gives Skip a lot more airtime than we originally did, and helps us hand out some superlatives.
Get into it!
Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Who's making your game-day smoothie?
Konner: Banana, blueberries, peanut butter, cinnamon, protein powder, milk, ice
Rae: Carrots, ginger, apples, peaches, ice
Veronica: Spinach, banana, berries of some kind, Greek yogurt, milk/water, ice
so part of me wants to be like "why did Scott and kip have to break up in the show when in the books after the banquet they just dance and are in love" but another part of me is like "at least in one universe they get to be happy and in love with each other". but maybe that's just the stucky multiversal love story manifesting in me
