‘Heated Rivalry’ series review: Hudson Williams Connor Storrie mount a throbbing yaoi fantasy

I know why you’re here, fellow fujoshi…

If you’ve ever devoured enemies-to-lovers smut while mentally reaching for a Victorian fainting couch, one hand poised over the kudos button, Heated Rivalryis already fluent in these age-old fanfic indulgences. The hit Canadian romance fully understands the pleasures of watching two hyper-competent men feigning immunity to longing while circling each other like sharks in heat who keep brushing fins. It never plays coy about those tropes, because its makers clocked our collective motivations instantly and saw no reason to waste precious screen time pretending you didn’t show up ready to enjoy every last second of it.

That self-awareness is part of what turns Heated Rivalry into something more potent than the average queer romance. Created and directed by Jacob Tierney for the Canadian streaming service Crave, the series adapts Rachel Reid’s hockey romance, Game Changers, in six-episodes of well-funded AO3 wish fulfilment. The cultural shockwave that has followed in its wake has been impressive. The indie Canadian production led by relatively unknown actors quickly became a global fixation, inciting think pieces, thirst edits, and endless debates about who is allowed to enjoy watching men touch each other this tenderly.

The premise is titillating. Two guys — the serene, buttoned-down Canadian captain Shane Hollander, played with immaculately calibrated vulnerability by Hudson Williams, and the cocky, bracingly handsome Russian rival Ilya Rozanov, played by Connor Storrie — meet on opposing sides of a hockey rivalry, whose animosity is meant to sell tickets and headlines. The problem arises once their first late-night encounter rewires that antagonism into an incognito arrangement built on forbidden sex and a shared appetite for winning.

Tierney structures the story with a provocative confidence. The show declines the traditional romance crawl toward courtship and consummation and instead leaps into bed within minutes, stretching the consequences across years through aggressive time jumps that mirror the itinerant rhythm of a sporting season. Across the first half of the show, Shane and Ilya meet in hotels where the lighting stays low and pretty, use pseudonyms to sext in locker rooms, and mischievously tease each other in public — all of this simmers under the violent syntax of professional hockey’s stop-and-start life. And so the narrative pressure does not come from the anticipation of all the hot, steamy and gorgeously-shot sex, but the accumulation of feeling that all the sex keeps failing to discharge. 

Williams plays Shane like someone permanently bracing for impact, with tight smiles and fidgety silences which make his desire feel carefully rationed. Storrie counters that energy with a performance built on machismo, selling Ilya’s confidence as a layer of swagger he keeps weaponising whenever the ground shifts beneath him. The duo’s tremendous chemistry feels charged with calculation and want, and each clandestine reunion carries the faint panic of people who understand the stakes and choose to give in to desire anyway.

Heated Rivalry commits to the sex immediately and repeatedly, with the smugness of knowing it’s being oggled at for exactly that reason. The sex is hungry and shamelessly transactional at first, with a kind of hookup logic that starts with a rivalry kink and ends with someone gripping the bedsheets and holding on for dear life. Tierney shoots it with a conspiratorial eye, lingering just long enough to let you feel included while trusting you to fill in the blanks, which is frankly the oldest trick in the fanfic handbook. The camera stays close enough to catch breath stalling and muscles tightening, then pointedly refuses the money shot, trusting implication and rhythm. But what makes all the burnt calories so charged is how quickly the show clocks what fans already know: sex is how these men communicate when everything else feels too dangerous to say out loud. We watch their chiselled bodies melt into each other, working things out that pride, fear, and career ambition won’t allow them to articulate yet, and that tension is deliciously specific (and incredibly hot).

The decision to interrupt this central dynamic with a detour into fellow-hockey rival Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and his barista love-interest Kip Grady’s (Robbie Graham-Kuntz) relationship in the third episode clarifies the series’ broader architecture. Scott’s closeted terror and Kip’s refusal to accept invisibility provide a parallel case study that reframes Shane and Ilya’s choices without preaching. The poignant romantic climax during Scott’s championship celebration in the penultimate episode is a liberating final push that forces the Shane and Ilya to confront the possibility of a future that exists outside hotel rooms.

A lot of the chatter around Heated Rivalry keeps circling back to women having a very good time watching it, as if this were a baffling development rather than a well-documented tradition with decades of receipts. Male-male romance has long offered a space where desire can be observed without the risks of importing gendered threats that saturate heterosexual fantasies. Traditions ranging from slash fiction to Japanese BL and yaoi provided templates for this pleasure decades ago, and the show’s success only suggests that those traditions were never marginal.

What Heated Rivalry does so well is clear the field. Women aren’t removed from the story so much as released from the line of fire, allowed to watch as accomplices rather than participants, which makes the fantasy breathable. All the ensemble roles surrounding these men, including girlfriends, friends, and family members, function as emotional buffers who intuit truths long before the protagonists manage to articulate them, grounding the fantasy in recognisable social pressure. Power still exists, but nothing calcifies into anything permanent. Control, too, slides back and forth based on trust, timing, and who feels brave enough in the moment, and that fluidity becomes the real turn-on when desire stops being a zero-sum game.

One of the show’s greatest strengths is watching it take the usual bluster of locker-room masculinity and slowly sand it down into something warmer and far more watchable, especially once the final stretch forces these two to stop posturing and actually look at each other. When they finally retreat to the fabled ‘cottage’ of internet lore, the competitive sniping softens into a tentative honesty that feels earned, with their egos finally benched long enough for a real man-to-man. The unplanned coming-out sequence was also thoroughly entertaining to witness, with Shane short-circuiting in real time while Ilya stands silently beside him in support, occasionally beaming like a proud boyfriend — the contrast between freak-out and joy pops the cork on the whole series. Among all the happy endings on offer this season, this is the one that mattered the most.

Erotic fantasy is a sandbox that gives both queer and straight audiences room to experiment with what they want, what they recognise, and what they might someday claim. The online discourse keeps pointing back to fanfiction and fujoshi culture as incubators of desire that could be tested without consequence, which is why stories like Heated Rivalry operate by different rules, loosening the hierarchies that dominate real-world sex and replacing them with systems built around curiosity and negotiation.

Heated Rivalry’s success lies in treating fantasy as a legitimate site of meaning rather than an indulgence to be somehow justified. Sometimes the cultural intervention arrives through praxis, and sometimes it arrives through two men who cannot keep their hands off each other despite every incentive to stop. Both can coexist.

Your week might get suspiciously better after watching two outrageously hot hockey players go feral in a hotel room, and honestly, that kind of improvement deserves more respect than it gets.

Heated Rivalry begins streaming Friday, February 20 on Lionsgate Play

Published – February 19, 2026 06:11 pm IST