"We can now look back on November 28, 2025, as the start of a mass-psychosis event. In an era of neo-puritanical television slop, a fresh, horny breeze swept in from Canada: Heated Rivalry, a six-episode series about two professional hockey rivals turned lovers, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, stirred something deep in the American psyche. Ordinary taxpaying adult women, many of them my friends, suddenly lost control of their faculties over "the gay hockey show.""
""Dude, I have the sickness," wrote one. "I don't like men," said another. "I don't understand why I'm so drawn to them." The most common reaction to watching it for the first time was either to watch it again or to go to the source material: a six-book series by Rachel Reid called Game Changers. The memetic experience was re-created online through fan edits, reaction videos, and scenes restaged in Animal Crossing."
"People were learning Russian because Ilya speaks Russian. "I put myself fully offline for the month of December and missed the entire life cycle of Heated Rivalry airing in real time," says Casey McQuiston, the author of the gay romance Red, White & Royal Blue. "I came back and was like, What the fuck is going on? What's happening to the American audience is truly 'If you give a Victorian child a Doritos Locos Taco.'""
Heated Rivalry, a six-episode Canadian series about rival hockey players turned lovers, unleashed an unprecedented cultural frenzy among American women. Viewers repeatedly rewatched episodes, sought the original six-book series Game Changers, and created fan edits, reaction videos, and reenactments in Animal Crossing. The series provoked candid confessions, libidinal desire, and midlife emotional reckonings across heterosexual and queer audiences. Public gatherings multiplied—dance parties, look-alike contests, and themed fitness classes—and some viewers immersed themselves so deeply they temporarily went offline and missed live broadcasts. The phenomenon spread memetically online and prompted intense curiosity, bewilderment, and behavioral change.
Read at Vulture
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