The Sexy Anti Russian Orientalism of Heated Rivalry
Since Mark Carney is trending, mostly for admitting the liberal “rules based order” of freedom, human rights and democracy has always been a western fiction and he’s shocked that after all the raping and pillaging of weaker countries Canada participates in with US-led empire the American leopard is still planning on eating his country’s face, now’s a good time to talk about the Canadian government funded project, Heated Rivalry.
This TikTok’er is extending her critique of BBC’s Merlin to ask questions of western media in general, and specifically interrogating viewers’ reluctance to engage with everything but the deeper, structural subtext of a show, opting instead to fixate on the superficial aesthetics - camera language, colour palettes, sex scenes, identity representation.
The answer is to be found in the fact that lifelong indoctrination into liberal and more recently neoliberal philosophy means blanket acceptance of a raft of crimes against the majority of humanity by the imperial west, has been so naturalised as to become the water the fish are swimming in. We accept them not only because they confirm our existing biases but also because the subjugation of large swathes of the Global South is the source of exorbitant material wealth and privilege in the imperial north.
i know it’s cringe but i had to talk abt it #fyp #fandom #leftist #bbcmerlin #merlin
Some friends and I have been asking these same questions about Heated Rivalry - everyone’s talking about whether the copious sex scenes are gratuitous but no-one is mentioning the avalanche of homononationalism and queer imperialism, which is the very point of why the Canadian Government wanted to invest in this show. What are the aesthetics, the representation, the messages really in service of?
Samantha Youssef takes our avoidance of the structural load-bearing work the narrative is subtly doing, one step further by educating us why we should be more aware of the intention behind funders of first and second cinema. We all need to pay much more attention to the ideas embedded under the literal text which is the real goal of the production - *shaping our world view*, not the queer romance that’s sold on the surface.
The fact that viewers of western filmmaking have been trained in specific, often anti-humane and usually anti-collectivist ways to consume media is precisely why film productions like Heated Rivalry bear far more scrutiny than we typically give fictional queer works.
In Heated Rivalry we’re so busy rooting for the four key individuals, the “Russia bad” narrative doesn’t even need prior explanation, or even logic for that matter, to implant securely in our brains that Russia is the villain of the gay hockey show.
We see that Ilya has negative feelings about his Russian family and his status as a bi-sexual man in Russia while ignoring that the other two professional hockey players are both not out to their friends and family either even though they’re not backwards or primitive Russians. We’re supposed to get that the discovery of someone like Ilya having gay sex in Russia could be a life and death matter for him there yet ignore that it’s Ilya who has actually had gay sex in Russia as a vulnerable teenager while in the enlightened Canada Shane had never. We see Scott having a panic attack that strangers might suspect he’s not straight, despite not having a law against homosexual propaganda on the books in either Canada or the US but we’re encouraged to conveniently forget that’s because homophobia is a global phenomenon and doesn’t need a law for public discovery of one’s sexuality to ruin the career of any high-profile professional, which is why in 2026 most still guard that information carefully wherever they’re from.
Shane isn’t white, in a notoriously racist Canadian society, but we never see any racial or sexual animosity directed towards his Asianness, instead all the homophobic, identity-based aggressions in Heated Rivalry are directed solely to Ilya, whether he’s in Russia or in North America, as the only character deserving of homophobic violence in the entire series - I wonder why.
All these contradictions and more have to be memory-holed by already primed viewers, to maintain the orientalist fiction of “Russia bad” that Western Europe has woven about Russia for 200 years; it becomes critical at this present moment when Canada and its fellow NATO gang members have catastrophically lost their proxy war against Russia using Ukraine.
This isn’t internationalism. It’s queer imperialism dressed up as “solidarity” all aimed at winning the psychological warfare for hearts and minds, over a lost war carefully orchestrated by the U.S.-led west for more than a decade between Russia and Ukraine. A high stakes operation involving regime change colour revolutions; two USAID/NED-engineered coups; billions of dollars spent on political, ideological and military subversion; 1.4 million Ukrainians dead and a Ukrainian population left bereft at how they explicitly voted for a President who would be neutral (not join NATO) and make peace with Russia, but got the exact opposite. Someone has done a post with resources on the origins of the ongoing Russia/Ukraine conflict in a more detailed dive here:
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
These factual and illogical atrocities under cover of a rainbow flag are employed to hijack our natural human empathy for marginalised people and underdog nations to intensify enmity and hatred, not for the NATO countries Canada is supporting multiple genocides alongside - but Russia, in an attempt to make gains in psychological warfare they’ve been unable to make in military warfare against a meticulously manufactured enemy.
Here’s an excellent historical summary of Europe’s long goal to isolate, invade and Balkanise, in order to degrade Russia’s development and sovereignty which started way before its communism revolution and goes all the way back to Napoleon:
Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven pro
Why the ultimate target of this current western onslaught on Russia is China is a topic for another long post. In that one we’ll look at why China has been gatekeeping its information and media space from nefarious transatlantic ideological incursions and what that’s got to with Danmei onscreen adaptations in particular.
