is there significance to lily and rose both being flower names?? thoughts đ§ I didn't think of it until yesterday
This is SUCH a good catch & I've been wracking my brain abt this all day, bc once you start pulling on it, the Rose/Lily distinction basically maps onto the entire logic of Heated Rivalry, esp the tension between heteronormativity and queerness, performance and authenticity. đ¤
From my extensive googling, here's what I came up with:
In Western flower language, roses and lilies are among the most symbolically overloaded blooms, and they point in opposite directions. The flowers don't just symbolize the relationships. They reproduce the conditions those relationships exist under.
đš The rose governs public love: courtship, desirability, legibility. It announces "this is a relationship" in terms the world recognizes. That's why roses feel heteronormative. Culture has absorbed them into a script of visible, socially sanctioned romance. Even the sub rosa tradition (a rose hung above a table meant secrecy) adds a layer of performance. With a rose, even secrecy becomes theatrical.
đ¸ The lily carries a different register: purity, devotion, grief (!), rebirth (!!). Lilies appear in liminal spaces like funerals, religious iconography, moments of transformation. They're not about spectacle but interiority. Historically less fixed than roses, they map less cleanly onto a single romantic script. That ambiguity makes them feel less culturally policed. More open. More queer, if not inherently, then at least structurally.
Rose = visible romance, social love, being chosen and displayed.
Lily = hidden devotion, transformation, the private weight of grief.
Both flowers emerge from love myths, but radically different kinds of love.
đš The rose is tied to Aphrodite (Venus), goddess of romantic/erotic love. According to myth, the first rose bloomed from her tears or the blood of Adonis (love and suffering intertwined).
đ¸ The lily comes from a stranger myth: when Hera nursed Heracles, droplets of her milk fell to earth and became lilies. So the lily is maternal, bodily, intimate: love as origin, as creation, as something that flows from the divine body itself and cannot be separated. Later Christian tradition attached the lily to the Virgin Mary: purity, secrecy, sacred interior life. And because lilies dominate funerary imagery, they also carry death and rebirth, grief as the shape devotion takes when love outlives its object. (Side note: the lily's maternal origin is only even more important when considering that Irina's death starts the novel's butterfly effect. More on this later.)
Rose = love performed outward, tied to desire and suffering, beautiful on the surface but prickly with thorns and all.
Lily = love held inward, part of your body, tied to origin, grief, and transformation (!!!).
This is where symbolism becomes structural imo. In the novel:
"Lily"Â is a false name (Ilya saved under a pseudonym...also similar letters btwn Ilya/Lily) â but encodes a love that is emotionally real, private, transformative.
Rose is a real person (Shane's public girlfriend) â but her relationship is performative, socially legible, ultimately empty.
So we get a complete inversion:
Lily = fake name, real love
Rose = real name, fake love
The text assigns the culturally correct symbol of love (the rose) to the incorrect relationship, and the ambiguous, grief- and devotion-laden symbol (the lily) to the true relationship. To me, that's the novel quietly arguing that queer love here is structurally incompatible with the forms through which love is usually recognized (which is so fucking sad đđ).
As mentioned, lilies are tied to mourning, devotion, and rebirth. These states happen in liminal privacy, exactly where Ilya and Shane live.
Irina's death haunts the narrative as a quiet foundation. If she hadn't died, Ilya never would have been desperate to leave Russia. Without that desperation, he wouldn't have clawed his way to the NHL. And if he hadn't become a first overall draft pick, a star, Shane never would have introduced himself to such a "mediocre" player. No CCM. No anything. Irina's absence sets every wheel in motion.
Then there's Grigori. The first "I love you" is spoken in Russian, in a dark tunnel, immediately following his father's death. Mourning/grief doesn't just surround Hollanov. It opens the door for love to finally be spoken. The lily's grief and rebirth, together, in one moment.
Beyond his parents, the lily fits Ilya's character painfully well: his emotional repression, the sense that loving Shane is both life-giving and destructive. And lilies, unlike most flowers, bloom from bulbs underground, hidden before emerging. That's almost too on the nose for a closeted relationship...
5. Rose vs. Rozanov: phonetics
This is slightly unrelated to your question, but it's another observation I've had in the back of my mind for a few days now lol. The sound similarity between Rose and Rozanov turns "rose" into a kind of linguistic stand-in, like a the name Shane can say in public that approximates the one he can't, even though the desire is always underneath.
The etymology is quite fascinating too: Rozanov means "son of rose." So when Ilya stops being "Lily" and becomes Ilya Rozanov once again to both Shane and eventually the world, Shane gets that rose/romance/loudly loved symbol back, but in another form. Reclaimed, transformed, full circle. Rachel Reid has confirmed the similarity in name wasn't a coincidence, which makes the whole structure feel deliberate, even inevitable.
In Heated Rivalry, roses = public, performative love. Lilies = private, grief-laden, transformative love. The novel inverts them: "Lily" is a fake name for the real love (Ilya), while Rose is a real person for the fake love (Shane's girlfriend). The lily's mourning haunts the narrative through Ilya's parents, and phonetically Rose echoes Rozanov ("son of rose"), meaning Ilya eventually reclaims the rose symbol transformed. The flowers aren't decoration. They're the story's emotional architecture.
Hope this helps! If anyone has other thoughts, PLEASE SHARE.