Like so many people, I have recently been watching Heated Rivalry, the wildly popular streaming series about the relationship between two professional hockey players. I liked the books when I read them earlier in the year and I like the show. I did not, however, initially like the show enough for it to become my entire personality.
One day, though, I was scrolling Bluesky, like you do, and I clicked on an interview with the show's stars, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. That interview led me to another, and โฆ actually, I swear I stopped there. That day, anyway.
Ever since then, every algorithm-driven social media feed I have is nonstop Heated Rivalry. I am inundated with clips of Storrie and Williams joking around with each other (charming, to be clear), Storrie posing suggestively, Francois Arnaud (miscast as Scott Hunter) talking about whatever, and on and on. Day by day, it's ratcheting up the moderate level of interest I started with.
And I now understand so much more viscerally how social media wormholes lead to political radicalization. I have long been aware that this is a thing that happens โ that people watch something that is right wing-adjacent but not explicitly Nazi content and very quickly are being served up one Nazi video after another, sucking them in even if that wasn't their original intent. I have not previously experienced the phenomenon to this degree myself. But that's what it's like.
Obviously the specific content is very different. I have no ideological objection to being sucked into spending a lot of time a show about LGBTQ hockey players. It's good! You should watch it, and also read the Rachel Reid books it quite faithfully adapts.
But wow and also holy crap, I have a newfound appreciation for the power of a social media feed constantly serving up a specific kind of content. I spend much more time thinking about Heated Rivalry than I would have if I had simply read the books, then months later watched the show โ even given that I accompanied watching the show with a reread of five of the books in the series. (Only two of the books are about Ilya and Shane, but Ilya is a recurring character throughout.) I also spend time thinking about the future career prospects of Williams and Storrie, and what season two of the show might bring. (On the latter, I am rooting for the second season to include another book in the series, Role Model, just as season one included the first book in the series, Game Changer.) If Heated Rivalry were a set of political beliefs I had been mildly curious about, or had one opinion in common with without having previously held all of them โฆ friends, I would be well on the way to Nazism by now.
Luckily, I'm probably just going to go reread either that book in the Game Changers series I hadn't yet reread or one of Reid's other books.
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