The story of Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romance that went from a small-budget Canadian production to a streaming hit and global phenomenon, feels like a fairy tale in many ways. The show, which is based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, has reportedly drawn an average of 9 million viewers per episode on HBO Max in the United States since it debuted last November, making it one of the streamer’s top scripted shows of the year. It has been credited with serving up a stunning level of mainstream representation of explicit queerness, something that has been enjoyed by multitudes of gay viewers, straight women, and even straight guys. Fans are flocking to Heated Rivalry–themed club nights, dance parties, and look-alike contests; on my own sojourn to one such event, I met someone who told me she’d watched each episode 25 times, and another who runs a Heated Rivalry Discord chat with 250 members. The series’ breakout stars, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, have also experienced a stratospheric rise in fame that’s been compared to Beatlemania, having been mobbed outside of late-night TV appearances and selected as torchbearers for the Winter Olympics.
In short: Heated Rivalry psychosis is real, and for the most part, it’s been glorious.
And yet, there’s a darker side to the fandom. In certain corners of the internet, obsession can quickly turn into oppression. Criticism of the show and its depictions of gay life—even those coming from gay men, whether they be I Love LA actor Jordan Firstman or other queer people—has been seized upon and neutralized by overly zealous Heated Rivalry loyalists. Some of these stans see it as their duty to not just promote the show’s young stars but shield them from almost anything—an infantilizing attitude that has even led to their co-stars being pilloried. Such actions actually harm more than help the series, Moises Mendez II wrote in a recent op-ed for Out magazine that urged fans to “cool it,” because they come at the expense of the very real people behind the show and on the other side of the keyboard. “Maybe it’s time to take a good hard look in the mirror,” Mendez urged these hardcore warriors, “and start to wonder if this is all worth it.”
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I had assumed that much of the divide between the positive and negative parts of the Heated Rivalry fandom could be explained through an online–offline lens. The internet does have a way of flattening our experience of things, after all, so it felt to me that, in the absence of any new episodes to watch (the show’s first season ended on Dec. 26), certain terminally online fans had started to treat the world around the show—from its cultural reception to the personal lives of its stars—as texts themselves. In this soap opera, the plot never stops, and you, too, can be a character, a writer, and a director, sometimes all at once.
To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, I went to someone who knows a thing or two about ugly fandoms, who encouraged me to think differently about what’s happening. Mel Stanfill is an associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida and the author of Fandom Is Ugly, a 2024 book about the sometimes toxic elements among die-hard fans—or, in academic-speak, “networked harassment in participatory culture.” When I called them up last week to discuss the drama around Heated Rivalry, Stanfill told me that what was likely really surprising me was the divide between a subculture and the mainstream. Argumentative fan practices have actually existed for a long time, Stanfill said, but what’s new is that less-intense fans are now bearing witness to them on social media sites built on algorithms that prioritize fighting and drama. “Those kinds of conflicts that used to just be happening on Tumblr somewhere are now happening in the mentions of the actors on social media,” Stanfill said. “Those distinctions between spaces have gotten really blurry.”
In our discussion, I presented Stanfill with two elements of the Heated Rivalry fandom that I felt had started to turn particularly ugly: one related to the show itself and another to its stars. In the first, any critiques of the show or its intrinsic worlds, like its characters or story arcs, can be targets for harassment. This is something that Firstman, an openly gay actor who plays a gay man on the HBO series I Love LA, learned when he criticized what he felt was the show’s unrealistic depictions of gay sex, before eventually backtracking amid harsh reactions from fans and Heated Rivalry actor François Arnaud. (It wouldn’t surprise me if HBO executives also had something to do with it, given the two shows’ shared streaming home.) This censure even extends to fan fiction, in which fans will lambast any notion that the two main characters, Ilya Rozanov (Storrie) and Shane Hollander (Williams), might switch up their sexual positions.
While these fans may believe they’re defending the show’s vision, what they are really doing is silencing queer people with different perspectives as they try to police gay life. “These fans see themselves as defending representations of queerness,” Stanfill said, “and because they see themselves as defending marginalized people, they don’t understand how they may, in fact, be going against other marginalized people.”
“Fans are so used to thinking of themselves as downtrodden that they cannot understand that they may have power, and that they may be able to hurt other people.”
For Stanfill, this behavior evokes the actions of some queer fans of The 100 who attacked showrunner Jason Rothenberg in 2016, after the series killed off a lesbian character. Some fans led a boycott campaign intended to compel the show’s cancellation, but others went so far as to send Rothenberg antisemitic messages and death threats. “Fans are so used to thinking of themselves as downtrodden that they cannot understand that they may have power, and that they may be able to hurt other people,” Stanfill said. “They saw themselves as the victims and didn’t think they could possibly be doing harm to anybody else. Individually, every one of those fans doesn’t have a lot of power, but as a group, they have incredible power.”
The second element of toxic fandom Stanfill and I discussed centered on the extent to which some people are working to protect the show’s stars. Initially, this began with efforts to shield the actors from questions about their sexuality, but it has since ballooned into an effort to attack a co-star of Williams and Storrie. Rumors that 25-year-old Storrie and 40-year-old Arnaud (who plays hockey player Scott Hunter on the series) may be dating have led to some fans attacking the older actor as a “creepy pedo” because of the pair’s age gap—and, seemingly, because of the notion that Storrie could be coupled with anyone other than Williams, both on- and off-screen. Arnaud, facing a deluge of online hate that still hasn’t abated, says he has even briefly unfollowed his castmates and blocked Twitter from his phone. “I don’t want to know what people are saying in that cesspool,” he told Men’s Health last week.
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Stanfill said the Arnaud attacks are classic evidence of the parasociality that can occur between fans and actors, especially on social media, which can create a fuzzy and false sense of intimacy. But Stanfill also linked this development to purity culture, a practice that, they said, spread during the pandemic, as bored teenagers discovered digital fan spaces in which there is often graphic sexual fan fiction. Those teens’ discomfort, Stanfill explained, then prompted them to police content they felt was inappropriate, whether because it involved underage characters or featured pairings with an age gap. “It’s had a scope creep,” Stanfill said. “Now it feels like that practice that’s happening in subcultural fandom is getting mapped onto the actors. But it’s also parasocial: ‘We know your life, and we are entitled to have an opinion about your life.’ ”
Is it too late to save the Heated Rivalry fandom from getting overrun by such toxicity? Perhaps not—but it depends on fans remembering a few key things. For one, that actors are real people, not characters, and it’s not correct to believe that you may know them on some deep, authentic level as a result of their interviews or Instagram. Second, consider that those you’re interacting with online about the show are also real people and should be treated as such. Finally, embrace the show’s positivity and channel it into kindness. “This is supposed to be fun. It’s not life or death,” Stanfill said. “But good luck convincing somebody of that just by telling them.”
