Analysis: The lack of mainstream interest in popular romance explains why many were clearly surprised by the huge success of Heated Rivalry
Warning: this piece contains spoilers
The extraordinary popularity of the series Heated Rivalry appears to have come out of nowhere. It's the story of two superstar players in a fictional version of the National Hockey League who connect at first purely through sex and then gradually fall in love.
Audience response to the show has been feral and unhinged in the language of the internet. Its success was so unexpected that the show had no distribution in Ireland and the UK when it premiered in the US and Canada on 28 November last. But such was the unprecedented word-of-mouth reaction that a deal was swiftly concluded, with Sky and Now taking the show on from 10 January.
Heated Rivalry trailer
What has apparently provoked perplexed head scratching in relation to the show's success was its appeal for a large female audience, in addition to the queer male audience that might seem to be its primary constituency. Based on a series of novels written by Rachel Reid, and adapted for the screen by the openly gay writer-director-producer Jacob Tierney, the show brings together two demographics who are often underserved when it comes to screen media and has prompted mainstream commentators to reckon with the potency of the genre of popular romance.
A lot of the media coverage of Heated Rivalry has highlighted its sexual content as a key to its success. However, the sex in a romance text is never just sex and the premise of the genre is that erotic love has transformative power. In the case of Heated Rivalry, this finally compels its central characters to defy the limiting and oppressive expectations of men in the world of professional sport by acknowledging that they love each other.
Mass-market romance, of the type published by Mills and Boon or Harlequin, is an almost exclusively female market and is also overwhelmingly written by women. Romance is immensely significant in the publishing industry in terms of revenue and was estimated to be the highest-earning genre of fiction in 2022.
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Ó RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta's Pé Scéal é, scríóbhneoir agus dramadóir Seán Mac Dhonnagáin ag déanamh plé ar an sraith teilifíse Heated Rivalry a bhaineann le caidreamh aerach i saol an spóirt
But in spite of its size, the feminised nature of the sector means that is often perceived as inconsequential, in clear contrast to genres such as crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy. The lack of mainstream interest in popular romance explains the fact that many commentators on Heated Rivalry were clearly unaware that women have, for quite some time, been writing romance novels, read by other women, in which men yearn passionately for each other, overcome obstacles to their love, and are, as is the requirement of the genre, ultimately rewarded with their Happily Ever After – or "HEA," as it is known in the romance world.
Both the plot and characters of Heated Rivalry are shaped by tropes and conventions that are staples of the romance genre. As announced in its title, the central trope is "enemies/rivals to lovers," with the world of elite professional sport offering a high stakes spin on the pattern. The pressure on both protagonists to remain closeted in this hypermasculine milieu involves a compelling exploration of the trope of forbidden love.
In Russian player, Ilya Rozanov, Heated Rivalry presents audiences with a contemporary iteration of the archetypal "rake." As romance readers know, the more elusive and emotionally shuttered the rake appears, the more satisfying his ultimate "reformation." This is precisely the emotional pay off that viewers of the show greeted with delirious rapture in its final episode, when Ilya finally declares his love for his erstwhile rival, Shane.
From Teen Vogue, Heated Rivalry's Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams compete in a compliment battle
Readers unfamiliar with romance could be forgiven for assuming that it is a conservative genre that promotes a "trad wife" destiny for its female characters, equating happiness and personal fulfillment with the love of a good man. The power of romance, however, lies not in its mirroring of patriarchal structures, but its transformation of them. Feminist critics argue that romance redresses the patriarchal power imbalance that defines and deforms heterosexual relationships in the real world that women inhabit.
This reimagining of heterosexual romance is in fact central to some of the most celebrated literary works written by women. The tension at the heart of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (a novel that arguably created the template for the "enemies to lovers" trope) is driven by the inherent social inequality between Elizabeth and Darcy. When Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth, he does so from a conscious position of superiority, and is rejected. It is only when he truly acknowledges her as an equal that she accepts him.
The potential for romance fiction to challenge patriarchal structures and to imagine a world liberated from these forms of oppression offers a key to understanding the emergence of male/male romance fiction and its popularity with female readers. Female characters are not centered in these texts, but it is not difficult to see why women invest emotionally in the experience of male protagonists for whom patriarchal masculinity, in both external and internalized forms, is an obstacle that must be overcome, and is symbolically defeated when they achieve their "happily ever after."
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The enormous success of Heated Rivalry as a TV adaptation has made it available to a new audience of men in the LGBTQ+ community who have not traditionally been drawn to popular romance fiction. Showrunner Jacob Tierney has spoken of his awareness of the "baked in" female audience who were fans of the book series, but of how he also conceived of the show as offering queer male viewers an experience of unabashed pleasure in the sexual and romantic relationships it depicts.
Its resonance with this new male audience, and the conversations it has for example prompted about the persistent homophobia that continues to characterise the world of sport, testifies to the power of this often derided genre to offer readers fantasies that are not only escapist, but also liberatory.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
