Quote: Romance fiction has surged in popularity recently, thanks in part to dedicated BookTok and Instagram communities, and several subgenres have emerged – gone is the tame bodice ripping of your grandma’s Mills & Boon novels. Now it’s romantasy, paranormal romance, dystopian love and, perhaps the fastest-growing of them all, sports romance. And then there’s a sub-subgenre: queer sports romance.


To get even more specific, one sport above others has been the setting: the uber-macho world of ice hockey.


No, I don’t know why, either. But fans – interestingly, mostly young women – were outraged when Heated Rivalry was initially set for release only on Canadian streaming service Crave. Following much online chatter among fans about how they could watch the series – piracy, setting up VPNs – HBO Max picked it up at the 11th hour.


The first TV adaptation in the subgenre, Heated Rivalry is based on the steamy book of the same name by bestselling author Rachel Reid, from her Game Changers YA series. Although this series is decidedly more A(dult) than it is Y(oung).


Set in Canada, in Major League ice hockey (a fictionalised version of the National Hockey League), Heated Rivalry is the story of a secret years-long love affair between two closeted gay players – the wholesome Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), who plays for the Montreal Metros, and Russian player Ilya Rozanov (Texan actor Connor Storrie, doing a reasonable accent), who has been drafted to the Boston Raiders – who are the “two most talked-about prospects in the world”.


The pair meet before they make it to the big league, in 2008, and we follow their careers as they work their way up, becoming rivals on the ice – badmouthing each other before matches, WWF-style – and then secret lovers off.


The series is set across eight years of their clandestine affair, but it’s only 13 minutes into episode one before they’re alone in the locker room showers and furtive glances lead to the first of several very graphic sex scenes.


Across years, hockey seasons, and even countries – they’re in Russia for the 2014 Sochi Olympics at one point – Ilya and Shane studiously avoid each other in public while sexting in private, using false names lest anybody stumble upon their text messages (although those dick pics are something of a giveaway).

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Quote: Plato's Allegory of the Chariot

In the Phaedrus, Plato (through his mouthpiece, Socrates) shares the allegory of the chariot to explain the tripartite nature of the human soul or psyche.

The chariot is pulled by two winged horses, one mortal and the other immortal.

The mortal horse is deformed and obstinate. Plato describes the horse as a “crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow…of a dark color [black], with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.”

The immortal horse, on the other hand, is noble and game, “upright and cleanly made…his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only.”

In the driver’s seat is the charioteer, tasked with reining in these disparate steeds, guiding and harnessing them to propel the vehicle with strength and efficiency. The charioteer’s destination? The ridge of heaven, beyond which he may behold the Forms: essences of things like Beauty, Wisdom, Courage, Justice, Goodness — everlasting Truth and absolute Knowledge. These essences nourish the horses’ wings, keeping the chariot in flight.

The charioteer joins a procession of gods, led by Zeus, on this trip into the heavens. Unlike human souls, the gods have two immortal horses to pull their chariots and are able to easily soar above. Mortals, on the other hand, have a much more turbulent ride. The white horse wishes to rise, but the dark horse attempts to pull the chariot back towards the earth. As the horses pull in opposing directions, and the charioteer attempts to get them into sync, his chariot bobs above the ridge of heaven then down again, and he catches glimpses of the great beyond before sinking once more.

If the charioteer is able to behold the Forms, he gets to go on another revolution around the heavens. But if he cannot successfully pilot the chariot, the horses’ wings wither from lack of nourishment, or break off when the horses collide and attack each other, or crash into the chariots of others. The chariot then plummets to earth, the horses lose their wings, and the soul becomes embodied in human flesh. The degree to which the soul falls, and the “rank” of the mortal being it must then be embodied in is based on the amount of Truth it beheld while in the heavens. Rather like the idea of reincarnation. The degree of the fall also determines how long it takes for the horses to regrow their wings and once again take flight. Basically, the more Truth the charioteer beheld on his journey, the shallower his fall, and the easier it is for him to get up and get going again. The regrowth of the wings is hastened by the mortal soul encountering people and experiences that contain touches of divinity, and recall to his memory the Truth he beheld in his preexistence. Plato describes such moments as looking “through the glass dimly” and they hasten the soul’s return to the heavens.