#hr crit

why are the characters and specifically Shane so much better in the show than in the books?

what is the self indulgent/tropey stuff that puts you off of the books somewhat? and what is the difference between something having a trope in it (enemies to lovers) vs being tropey?

do you think keeping Shane and Ilya on different teams would have been a good way to build tension even after coming out? a tension between career and them? this is partially just personal preference but i really missed the, well, "rivalry" and the appeal of being on different teams in TLG a lot. maybe this was shaped by Ilya clearly not having the best of times in Ottawa, or maybe it was because in RPF one of my least favorite settings is the "everyone's gay" team.

i love your metas on writing and i am trying to write more so that's what's driving all of these questions!

hi hi anon! i think you might've also sent a second ask about this too (and if not, then two people had very similar questions!). i will answer this with two standard caveats: 1) i actually ENJOYED heated rivalry the book and read it several times (i just also happen to think it's not that well-written) and 2) these are just my opinions no one else has to share them.

ok so for your first question: why are the characters so much better in the show than in the books? i think, first of all, connor storrie and hudson williams are talented actors who really cared about their characters and clearly spent a lot of time developing a deep understanding of each character's backstory and of their physical mannerisms, quirks, emotional patterns, etc. so their individual performances did a lot to elevate the source material. but i think the biggest reason that the show is richer/deeper/more nuanced than the books is that the show gives us zero access to the character's interior monologue, and instead gives us all kinds of external cues and signals we have to interpret to piece together theories about what the character is feeling or why they feel that way. we have to do more work to understand the dynamic... but doing that work also makes us feel so much more deeply, viscerally invested in the characters. the characters' interior emotional landscapes are communicated largely through body language, microexpressions, lighting choices, sound cues, camera angles, etc. rather than through dialogue, we also end up feeling with the characters more, ie feeling what they are feeling in our own bodies and empathizing more deeply with them as a result. also, the fact that there's no author in our head telling us exactly what the character is thinking and feeling means that there's soooo much more grey area for us to imaginatively play in. there can exist multiple versions of ilya or of shane, depending on how you personally "read" each character's cues.

whereas with the book... with the book, we are granted too MUCH access to the characters' interior monologues. beat by beat, reid tells us exactly what ilya and shane are feeling and thinking. she explains their motivations. shane thinks this, so he does this, and this is WHY he does it, and this is what he thinks will happen, and this is how he interprets what does happen. this woman is relentless in leaving no thought, feeling, or emotional motive unnarrated lol. the result is a work that is very, very easy to read (you can zip through it in an afternoon), but that makes no real interpretive demands on the reader, and, in over-telling or over-narrating, ends up flattening the characters into sort of caricatured versions of themselves.

here is an example of what that looks like:

like, this is fine. it's fine! it's not actually bad writing, imo! the prose has a nice rhythm to it, especially the last three sentences, and i like that it gives us a strong sense of who ilya is: guy who wants the flashy external stuff because he wants his life to be easy, hot, and simple, but whose desire for the flashy external stuff of course actually masks a deeper unmet longing to be loved and accepted for who he is. but in just flat-out telling us exactly who ilya is and why he does things and how he feels about his dysfunctional family situation, reid kinda deprives of the opportunity to do the emotionally and intellectually satisfying work of slowly piecing together that understanding of who the character is on our own. contrast this very blunt, matter-of-fact description of ilya's state of mind with the way tierney slowly unfolds ilya's family backstory in the show. we get ilya with his father at the draft, calling him lazy and irresponsible in front of his new boss, while ilya absorbs this criticism in silence with an impassive expression on his face (indicating that this behavior is not new or surprising to him, that he has likely heard this criticism many times before, and that one of his defense mechanisms is to go completely blank when he is experiencing emotional stress or harm). then ilya tries to assure the GM/exec that he will work hard for them, and is told by his father (in russian) to basically shut the fuck up, as his perspective is neither needed nor wanted.

WHEW! that's a WHOLE lot of information conveyed to us about ilya's family life, his psychological defense mechanisms, the inner voice of shame he has absorbed from a lifetime immersed in this type of relentlessly negative and personal criticism, and perhaps even how ilya communicates or fails to communicate (if you have been told all your life to keep your mouth shut, talking about, say, your feelings is probably not going to come easily to you later on in other relationships). then tierney slowly deepens our understanding of ilya's situation through a mix of little moments and big scenes, ranging from ilya getting upset with shane on the rooftop in vegas to ilya evading shane's questions about his family in the stairwell to ilya freezing shane out in russia to all the sochi scenes where we start realizing oh okay, so this is like, a kid who grew up being verbally abused/shamed by a parent, who is now under significant pressure to represent his country at the highest level of his sport (and who crucially fails to do so at the second world juniors tournament and at the olympics), and who as a result of all of this probably has an extremely complicated relationship with home.

see how much richer that is than the paragraph above??? obviously, the fact that the show is a visual medium and the book is a textual medium makes a difference, but there are PLENTY of literary works that are not written in this style of telling-not-showing lol. reid just isn't that type of writer, and i think the result is like, books that are enjoyable vacation reads but don't really invite or reward deep analysis or headcanoning in the same way the show does.

i think the hockey is inseparable from ilya & shanes dynamic. it is how they meet. it is how they become interested in each other. it is their identity & its culture is what manipulates the autonomy of their bodies, which influences the specific way in which they attract each other and how they react to intimacy. it's what materializes their fear & their shame. i can give credit to RR for writing about shane's internalized homophobia as a result of his environment but she shot herself in the foot when she created ottawa & when she refused to give shane a complex internal voice. there's just so much left to be explored. the hazing; the intersection between race & queerness how that fits into a hypermasculine culture; the possibility of giving each other game injuries & hurting each other's teammates & slipping into a violent facet of their desire, etc.. all of that which raises the stakes of the romance is nicely waved off in a few pages for the sake of a HEA. it's like. for the sake of making Thing happen she erased the field that gives Thing its exact contours. defocusing hockey makes their romance generic & removes the conditions that define its impossibility & that make the eventual HEA stand out

it actually really is not though. maybe you are coming across people who are dismissing the books because of it's genre but the people i interact with, the critique i interact with, is not that. and neither am i discrediting rachel but i find it annoying and childish that valid critique is being instantly shot down with accusations of misogyny. i have read contemporary romance, i have read mm hockey romance. i have read a lot, A LOT, of fanfic which contemp romance takes a lot of it's tropes and genre beats from. i know what the genre expectations are. it's not my favourite genre but i have read good books that i will say i enjoy. heated rivalry is not one of them - i have tried it twice and i think the writing is weak, i think it's sloppy, it's a slog to get through. this has zero to do with her gender.

the idea that any art is exempt from criticism because of who wrote it is insulting. to discredit any criticism on the basis that because a woman wrote it, it's, what? infallible? it's mean to? yeah, i know there is the history of misogyny and the belittling of the romance genre because women write it, believe me, i know. but when people are bringing up receipts, are showing what about the books is bad, to dismiss anything and refuse to engage with this criticism says more about the people who immediately cry "misogyny" than the people trying to engage in good faith. just because i don't like it and i think it's bad does not mean that i'm some self-hating woman who hates to see other women win.

i have read the books. i read them halfway through watching the tv show for the first time. i wanted to see how they compared. i can show you the dms i sent my friend when i got to the coming out scene in the book before episode 4 even aired and how terrified i was to see that play out because in the book i felt it was so badly done, that it felt like the straight girlfriend was so kind as to help the gay man discover he was actually gay, like, oh! maybe am i! what a massive disservice to shane's character. what a lame and surface level understanding of his journey that is. and i think hudson, jacob and sophie did a such an incredible job with it that it completely changed my mind on that scene altogether and made me cry, remembering the incredible support i got from friends when i came out. the book pissed me off. it straight up pissed me off. it treated shane like he was stupid.

i think rachel presented a great premise that she executed poorly, even within the realm of contemp romance writing. i do not like her writing, at all. i think she treats shane like an npc for ilya to bounce off of. how much of her writing of shane she has had to retroactively agree with shows how much she is unaware of how she is writing that character and is that really a good sign of a writer? that others are pointing out to her very obvious signs of autism, obvious signs of eating disorders, and she kind of just shrugs about it? her little list of "shane doesn't hold any trauma" and other "character traits" was really all i needed to know about how reductive and superficial her understanding of her own characters are.

she presents these intense narrative arcs and does fuck all with them. she brushes up against these plotlines and then shies away from them immediately. she approaches something like a real relationship conflict that shane and ilya need to work through like two people IN a relationship and she makes ilya's plane almost crash. it feels cheap, it feels forced, it feels like she cannot commit to her own story. i was so amazed by the nuance of ilya's relationship to his family, his sense of obligation, the entire fucking russian monologue that is NOT in the book, and when you read the book, it's simply, his family is bad, his dad sucks, his brother sucks, cut them off, done and dusted. it wasn't a lot but it was enough we got a rich interior to ilya that we did not get in the book. even with shane, we get extra scenes with his parents, with yuna specifically, that paint a picture of what he is like outside of hockey, we are shown the pressure and the stress he's under, we see the hollander's as supportive and full of love if a bit distant from their son. there is just a maturity brought to the show the book lacks and i'm fucking allowed to say it.

i am sick to the god damn teeth of being told criticism of the books isn't allowed. if people are saying the books are bad without reading them because they are chick-lit, fine. go after them. i have read the books. i've put in the time. i've put in the hours. it's not weird. it's not misogynistic. i am invested in this piece of media and like anyone invested in any media, you are going to subject it to analysis and, no, it is not always kind. and neither should it be. you need to be critical of the things you consume. you can enjoy bad art. the show is not perfect either and a lot of it i wish were different, had done it differently, i will frequently lament to mutuals about things i love and how they left me unsatisfied.

You may read this title and think that's silly, what even is 'homonationalism'? I first learned about the concept of it and that some people think HR is homonationalist propaganda from social media influencer willz.talks. Homonationationalism is essentially the usage of queer media to promote the narrative of more progressive + liberal society's ,to justify unethical political action towards society's deemed as less liberal.

It is most commonly done in Western media to villainize the Middle East and is a tactic used by Israel to gloss over the violence committed against Palestinians(basically insinuating that it's okay to bomb them because of perceived homophobia, which is ironic because the state of Israel does not recognize same sex marriage and there is no excuse for ethnic cleansing especially from unfounded accusations of homophobia, but I digress)

After that detour, now that you understand what homonationationalism is, I will address concerns about whether Heated Rivalry is homonationalist propaganda or not. My answer is that it's more complicated than yes or no.

While I don't necassarily believe that Heated Rivalry was produced by Rachel Reid or Jacob Tierny with the intent of being homonationalist propaganda , I think that it can reaffirm anti-Russian sentiments already propagated in the West. If you were born in North America i the last 75 years it is likely that you have been exposed to Anti-Russia propaganda stemming from the Cold War; these views and messages still permeate through NA media and education, so I don't think it's a huge leap for someone to claim those factors influenced either RR or JT.

However, while the the U.S and Canada are framed as more excepting of queerness than Russia in both the book and the show, I think as a whole Heated Rivalry and The Long game are very light in criticisms of Russia, Canada, the U.S, and the MLH/NHL.

In terms of critiques of Russia, the show and book(i will be referring to them as one thing from here out for the sake of convenience but there are differences and we don't know how season two will be) there are very few scenes that actually criticize or address Russian policies on queerness, but the most notable ones are when Ilya talks aboout his experiences saying "I cannot go back to Russia" + "I would prefer not to have Russian passport" and the conversation between Carter Vaughn, Scott Hunter, and Shane Hollander at the Olympics where they discussed a presumably gay figure skater(who is canonically queer in the books but they Shane never confirms it out loud); all of these scenarios are very brief and vague, not stating why Russia is unsafe for queer people but relying on prior knowledge or bias of why that might be; specifically in The Long Game Ilya is outted but the book does not express Ilya experience any social or institutional persecution despite still being a Russian citizen, which is not suprising since throughout the books Ilya is shown to not really be that apprenhensive about coming out. we are given to believe Ilya's fraught relationship with his home country is mostly because of his tumultuous relationship with his family and their likelyhood of being homophobic as individuals, rather than fear of the governmental violence. While I'm not saying this reflects the realities in the past or present for real life queer Russian hockey players, this is the vibe I got from the fictional world of Rachel Reid.

In terms of the U.S and Canada which are treated as the same entity, HR and TLG basically any mention of societal mistreatment because of queerness can really only be interpreted through Scott's fear of publicly hanging out with Kip which is still within the context of his being a famous hockey player.

By in large the largest critiques in HR and TLG are of hockey culture and hockey institutions. This is a topic that could warrant a whole essay post on it's own(+ plus it would probably require me to read other books in the GC series, which I am not doing on pain of death), but what I'll say about this is, that at some parts of the HR/TLG we are led to believe that Shane and Ilya's relationship is more of a problem because it negates their PR rivalry than being gay; and lastly the conclusion of The Long Game being defeating Crowell and getting to live their gay hockey ever after does little illustrate how serious and prevalent homophobia is institutionally and culturally in the NHL.