In Defense of Heated Rivalry
What a supposedly shallow romance gets right about masculinity and love
I almost quit early.
Not out of offense. Out of boredom. The opening stretches move fast and loud. Beautiful men. Perfect bodies. Sex scenes stacked close enough together that my thumb kept hovering, trained by years of scrolling to skip ahead. Everyone is objectively hot in a way that starts to feel impersonal. Efficient. Disposable. Like the story knows exactly what it’s doing and is content to keep doing it.
If you stop there, you’ll think you know what this is.
You don’t.
You have to push through.
I came to Heated Rivalry without having read any of the books in the Rachel Reid series. No loyalty. No prior affection. No interest in defending it. That turns out to be exactly the right posture, because the show assumes you might leave. It lets you underestimate it. It even encourages that mistake.
Then it quietly refuses to stay shallow.
Early on, sex is the engine. Explicit enough to feel like the main attraction. Frequent enough to feel repetitive. That’s deliberate. You’re meant to read it as spectacle at first. But over time, something shifts. The sex scenes begin to fade to black, not because the show gets coy, but because it no longer needs them. By then, you already know these men are in love. You see it in how they speak to each other, how they fight, how they circle back. Sex becomes confirmation, not propulsion.
That transition is easy to miss if you leave early. And that’s the point.
What Heated Rivalry is actually doing isn’t rearranging sexual roles for shock value. The old top-versus-bottom obsession is played out. What’s far more interesting, and clearly deliberate, is how masculinity itself is portrayed. Across both relationships, the same quiet argument keeps surfacing: real strength isn’t swagger, force, or performance. It’s steadiness.
Kip makes that clear almost immediately.
He isn’t dazzled by Scott’s fame. He isn’t intimidated by it either. That alone cuts against a deep cultural reflex. The famous athlete is supposed to carry the power. Kip refuses the premise. When he draws the line. I’m not willing to be closeted for you. it isn’t framed as rebellion or ultimatum. It’s self-respect. Calm. Non-negotiable.
That’s masculinity in a classic sense. Knowing who you are. Knowing what you will and won’t accept. Being willing to walk if necessary.
Scott, by contrast, is the one burdened with the stereotypical baggage. He’s the star athlete, but he’s also closeted, careful, scared. When they’re alone, the swagger drains out of him. Public confidence doesn’t translate into private ease. The power dynamic everyone expects collapses the moment no one’s watching.
The same pattern repeats with Shane and Ilya.
On paper, Ilya looks like the obvious center of gravity. Big personality. Loud. Charismatic. He talks openly about liking both women and men while insisting he could never be open in practice. It isn’t confusion. It’s armor. He understands the cost of visibility before he understands the value of choosing it. His confidence early on is performative. Protective. Designed to keep the world at arm’s length.
Shane is the opposite.
He’s elite. First-class athlete. Physical authority without question. And yet there’s no swagger. He’s kind. Thoughtful. Considerate. He listens. He doesn’t posture. Crucially, the show never codes that decency as weakness or passivity. Shane doesn’t give off “bottom energy” because the show refuses the idea that emotional literacy diminishes masculinity.
In fact, no one in either relationship gives off “bottom energy” at all. Everyone is grounded. Assured. Self-directed. Which is why it’s genuinely surprising when our assumptions about traditional roles quietly fail. Ilya’s swagger doesn’t disappear in private. It follows him into the bedroom even when he’s the more passive partner. The same is true with Kip and Scott. Confidence and dominance don’t map cleanly onto position, and the show never pretends they should.
I realized some of my surprise wasn’t really about the characters at all, but about the fantasies I’d absorbed. A whole generation of gay men grew up eroticizing force. I know it may be trite, but for me the Russian accent still conjures Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. The idea that masculinity announces itself through physical domination, dragging you off with a grunt and a threat. “If he dies, he dies.” That script runs deep, even when we think we’ve outgrown it.
Heated Rivalry doesn’t mock that fantasy. It simply outgrows it. What replaces it isn’t softness or passivity, but flexibility. Swagger without fragility. Desire without hierarchy. Men confident enough that intimacy doesn’t require reenacting power.
Late in the story, when Shane bottoms for Ilya, it doesn’t read as reversal or revelation. It reads as trust. As choice. As heat without hierarchy. The moment works because masculinity here isn’t tied to position, control, or performance. It’s tied to confidence. And confidence, the show insists, is flexible.
Ilya’s growth mirrors that philosophy.
What finally changes him isn’t pressure or persuasion. It’s example. When Scott kisses Kip at the end of the championship game, it lands like a permission structure snapping into place. Someone went first. Someone survived. You can feel Shane and Ilya watching the future become visible. Suddenly the risks feel survivable. That’s why Ilya’s decision to go to the cottage matters so much. He refuses at first because refusal has always kept him safe. Saying yes later isn’t surrender. It’s growth. It’s him choosing presence over distance once he understands the world won’t end.
Across both couples, the men with less public power are the ones most at ease with themselves. The men with fame, status, and external validation are the ones carrying fear. Strength consistently lives with those who know themselves well enough to set boundaries and keep them.
That’s not accidental.
And it explains why the sex recedes. Once you understand how these men relate to power, intimacy no longer needs spectacle. You don’t need anatomy or choreography. You already know what’s happening. Love becomes legible in tone, routine, memory, and care. Sex becomes a subplot because the relationships have outgrown the need to prove themselves.
Is this Emmy-worthy? No. It isn’t trying to be prestige television. Will it single-handedly change the narrative for gay men? Probably not.
What it does instead is quieter, and in some ways more useful.
It tells a happy story.
With a happy ending.
That doesn’t apologize for itself.
In a media landscape where gay male stories are so often tragic, ironic, or conditional, that refusal still matters. The refusal to punish desire. The refusal to equate masculinity with damage. The refusal to confuse swagger with strength.
You can stop early and dismiss Heated Rivalry as surface-level fantasy. But if you stay long enough, the fantasy changes shape. It becomes a story about men who are strong without being brittle, confident without being cruel, and secure enough to insist on being fully known.
That may not be revolutionary.
But it is deliberate.
And that makes it powerful in its own way.
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