Why Heated Rivalry is the Perfect Adaptation of the Romance Novel’s Strict Conventions

There is something very fitting about the fact that a gay hockey romance has been one of the biggest cultural phenomena to mark the closing of a politically tumultuous year. Jacob Tierney’s season one TV adaptation of Rachel Reid’s romance Heated Rivalry follows the erotic and romantic relationship between archrivals Canadian Shane Hollander and Russian Ilya Rozanov beginning just before their rookie pro year. The hit show is equal parts sexy, fun, and tender. Not only has the show become a sensation for the uninitiated in the romance genre, but most interestingly to me, it has been lauded as a near perfect example of the genre done right by keen romance lovers.

Though best known for its steamy content, the literary genre that Heated Rivalry belongs to, the contemporary romance novel can be equally identified by its satisfying resolution of plot, or “happily ever after,” often shortened by those in the know to HEA. The HEA is so important to romance readers that you can even buy stickers and other merch at bookstores and on Etsy saying, “HEA or GTFO.”

How then can Heated Rivalry tease a happily ever after for two gay all-star professional hockey players who aren’t just gay but are gay together? In his remarkably faithful adaptation of Reid’s novel, Tierney manages to accomplish this tricky narrative task by emphasizing three particularly moving declarations of love, each of which speak to the possibilities and limitations baked into the romance genre.

In her groundbreaking 1984 academic work about the then either ignored or openly derided genre of mass-marketed romance novels, Janice Radway argues that for the overwhelmingly middle-class, straight, married women she interviewed, the act of reading popular heterosexual romances was “compensatory” because it gave stressed out women a reason to take time for themselves while giving them a bit of fantasy to compensate for their social positions. She also said that reading romances was “combative” in that it enabled them to temporarily “refuse the other-directed role socially prescribed for them.”

One of the most popular forms of the romance genre in the 2020s is the queer romance novel, particularly the “MM” form featuring a romantic and erotic love story between two masculine “heroes.”

While some romance readers balked at her conclusions, particularly saying that they did not actually resent their positions within patriarchy, Reading the Romance’s basic premises are still overwhelmingly accepted by critics (and many lovers) of the genre today. Her conclusions sparked greater respect for academic studies of women’s media and showed how to bring questions about the political effects of popular culture to the domestic realm of romance.

One of the most popular forms of the romance genre in the 2020s is the queer romance novel, particularly the “MM” form featuring a romantic and erotic love story between two masculine “heroes.” Like the heterosexual stories from the 1980s studied by Radway, MM romances are usually written by women, marketed towards women, and read by women. By the closing epilogue of the MM romance novel, the author must figure out how to create honest stakes for a gay couple in an overwhelmingly heteronormative context that threatens the heroes with societal subjugation and maybe even physical punishment. Then, within 150 to 200 pages, authors must somehow accomplish a true happily ever after for said heroes.

After all, readers of these queer romances are usually devoted followers of the genre, and they know what they are doing when they pick up Heated Rivalry rather than say Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. The constraints of the genre promise readers that despite the precarity of queer life, each of our main love-interest characters will find a form of fulfilling happiness in the end.

Though the romances studied by Radway were distinctly less feminist, gay-friendly, or progressive than MM novels from writers like Rachel Reid, Alexis Hall, and Cat Sebastian today, critics still often use Reading the Romance to discuss to what extent the genre encourages audiences to accept societal structures by compensating them with a small escape of wish-fulfillment, or on the other hand, how much they help them combat those structures by offering a better vision of their treatment in society. And what does this mean for the TV version of a queer romance like Heated Rivalry at the end of 2025?

In Tierney’s Heated Rivalry [spoilers forthcoming], the B plot, which follows fictional New York hockey team The Admirals’ Scott Hunter and smoothie maker-turned graduate student Kip Grady, (which is itself a condensed telling of a previous novel in Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” series), provides audiences with the show’s most public and—to use Radway’s term—its most explicitly combative gay storyline.

These books about distinctly private and often erotic events have recently gained a more political and combative edge.

When Scott kisses Kip on the ice only minutes after winning the Stanley Cup in episode five, he uses an act of gay affection to defy compulsory heterosexuality while spectacularly stepping out of the closet. Because the kiss is so visible (we even hear the announcer’s surprised understatements that “you don’t see that every day” and it’s a “pretty big night for hockey”), it seems like it might make enough of a splash to begin shifting the conditions that had psychologically suffocated Scott and kept him (and others like Shane and Ilya) in the closet in the first place.

While these types of social progress moments are not a requirement for contemporary queer romances, they are increasingly more common, and thus more expected by readers. In other words, these books about distinctly private and often erotic events have recently gained a more political and combative edge. In this way, mass-marketed popular culture’s most intimate genre has of late become interested in public life.

And yet, Tierney exclusively sets the very next episode (and Heated Rivalry’s season one finale) in the genre’s more classic domestic sphere—namely Shane’s luxury “cottage” and his parents’ house. Even though Shane and Ilya don’t suddenly become public and proud gay hockey icons like Scott Hunter by the end of the season, Tierney still manages to fulfill the compensatory and combative requirements of the romance genre through two moving declarations of love. Meanwhile, Tierney manages to keep the door open to a second season.

In episode six, viewers get to see the main characters—Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov finally openly say “I love you” to each other, a proclamation that represents their relationship and character development over the last five episodes and almost eight years. This moment is touching because it suggests that to some extent, they have been able to overcome the emotional strictures of heteronormative masculinity epitomized by the aggressive rivalries stoked by the nature of professional hockey.

And yet, their “I love yous” are filled with unfulfilled longings, exemplified when Shane asks Ilya of this love, “Does it [expletive] kill you too?” as they embrace. Ilya responds, “not anymore.” But we the viewers know that this is not a fully-realized happily ever after because there is more suffering to come. They had just moments before discussed ways to keep their relationship alive but secret. Being publicly gay and together would threaten their popular images and thus their careers, finances, and in the case of Russian-born Ilya, safety in his home country. As Shane’s mother, Yuna will say when she hears about their plan to continue secretly loving each other until they finally retire from hockey, “Oh no, that’s sad.” And romance readers know that the A-couple’s HEA cannot be sad.

Heated Rivalry accomplishes a hat-trick of happy gay resolutions.

I suggest that Tierney uses the combination of Scott and Kip’s kiss, Shane and Ilya’s “I love yous,” and an interaction with Shane’s mom, Yuna to accomplish the season’s narrative HEA requirements. When Shane and Ilya first arrive as boyfriends and (in a humorous note “lovers”) at her and her husband’s door, Yuna’s body language and tone scream discomfort. Then, after an awkward conversation about the couple’s origins and current feelings over tea, then vodka, at the dinner table, we find Shane and Yuna standing alone outside the house.

Shane tells his mom, who has long acted as his professional support and brand manager, that he “tried really hard,” but he “can’t help it,” adding in a final heartbreaking “I’m sorry.” Yuna at first acts the dominant parent she already seemed to be by commanding the sheepish Shane three times, “look at me.” When he finally meets her eyes, she not only says that he does not need to apologize to her, but in a moment of pure gay wish fulfillment, she immediately owns her part of the situation by saying she’s sorry that she established a maternal relationship where Shane would feel that he had to hide key parts of himself and in the process, negate many of his desires for emotional fulfillment. In a flip of Shane’s earlier apology, Yuna tells him she’s proud of him, then she tearfully adds, “please forgive me.”

Tierney’s characterization of Yuna as a hyper-involved “momager” to her star son is one of the few deviations he made from Reid’s original version of the Shane and Ilya story, where Yuna is far more laidback, but similarly hockey-obsessed. While at first I didn’t like how controlling Yuna comes off in the show, I now see that Tierney’s choice allowed him to raise the psychological stakes for Shane and viewers, which then created one of the season’s key transformational and satisfying moments.

Romance’s HEA is all about emotional fulfillment, and for many of the queer viewers of the show, Shane’s interaction with Yuna signifies one of the most fulfilling turn of events we could dream of—a parent not only saying that they accept us, but clearly acknowledging, apologizing for, and working to change the parts of themselves that had consciously or unconsciously not accepted us before. And this act of love is as powerfully performed in Tierney’s adaptation as are the televised gay kiss after the Stanley Cup and the declaration of love between two muscular men tenderly holding each other in bed. Shane may have to choose between career and financial success and his “true love,” but he does not have to choose between his family and romantic fulfillment. Sadly, Ilya may still have to do this, as foreshadowed by his brother’s homophobia and his disillusionment with Russia writ large. Still, with Yuna’s declaration a different kind of love, we can say that the season accomplishes a hat-trick of happy gay resolutions.

When the credits start rolling for season one, viewers watch Shane and Ilya driving away, signaling that they will be leaving their loving domestic space for the cold world of politics and ice hockey. At this point, we are left with questions about how Shane and Ilya will solve their logistical problems. But even avid romance readers like me can feel that at the end of Heated Rivalry season one, we have read a complete romance novel (though admittedly one without the epilogue), meaning that we are not left on an emotional cliff-hanger. These two men get to be happy together, even if we don’t know exactly how.

The act of watching (and likely re-watching) the key declarative love scenes of Heated Rivalry—the public kiss, the intimate “I love yous,” and Yuna’s vulnerable version of parental accountability is not just compensatory for viewers ending a year marked by aggressive politics and harsh policies; it is also combative. Tierney presents us with a vision of the kind of more loving and honest future for which many of us straight and queer readers-turned viewers of MM romance are willing to fight.