“[…] I loved these books. I wanted to do queer joy. I wanted to do something fucking horny, too. Like, I love that. I was like, we don’t get that. I feel like there’s been this weird divorce of sex from art for a while, and the sex you see on TV and movies is always sex nobody wants. It’s all, like, violent and unpleasant and coercive or just something that I’m like, bleh. And the reason that I loved heated rivalry specifically is because the sex tells the story, and it felt like I could really use that, that this was not going to be gratuitous, this was not going to be—and like, who cares if it is, but you have to convince people of stuff like this. So I was like the sex is architecting this relationship through ten years, that’s how they know each other, because when they’re talking, they’re lying, or not quite telling the truth. So it’s almost like…the sex is when they’re allowed to be honest with each other and when they’re allowed to be vulnerable. So the sex is telling you, is giving you story information. And it’s so funny as writing season two, like it is a reminder as we’re working, my cowriter and I, that this story, the plot of this story is emotion. The traditional beats of story, while they matter, they don’t matter anywhere nearly as much as the feeling that you’re left with, because what you want is to keep following the emotional heartbeat of this relationship. And that was always the way that I thought what I loved about the way Rachel wrote heated rivalry was, the way I interpreted it is, the reason it’s written this way, in these snippets of time, is because that’s what they remember. Like, what do you remember about the day you were drafted? I remember standing next to Ilya, I remember the way he looked in that suit, I remember seeing him up there with his dad and wondering what his dad was like. And I remember not listening to my mom. And then, boom, what’s the next thing you remember? I remember not being able to sleep, and I went to the gym and there he was. Like, all of their memories […], it’s told in a language of memory, and sex is such a powerful part of the memory scape of this thing. So I felt like that was a great way to also, you know—and what I promised Rachel, which is the promise I try really hard to keep, was like, I want to take this seriously, because I think what a lot of people do with genre in general, but romance in particular, is they try to make it, they’re like, “this is easy and this is dumb, and we can make this trite”, and I was like, I don’t want to, I want to dig deeper because everything in her book there is the foundation of a very real and understandable queer relationship, and I wanted to be like, I didn’t want to shy away from it, and I wanted to dig into it.”
