Heated Rivalry has been everywhere for the past few months. At least, nobody around me can seem to stop talking about it. The Canadian series about two closeted hockey players has taken over streaming platforms (an estimated 10.6 million US viewers) and social media by storm, increased interest in the sport like nothing before (weekly hockey ticket sales have jumped more than 20 percent since the show’s release, according to SeatGeek), and turned its leads, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, into overnight stars.
I gotta say: a queer love story getting this much buzz? That feels new. Refreshing, even. I’m loving it, and there’s no other word for the enthusiasm bubbling in me.
But straight women buzzing around homoerotic stories? That’s actually not new. It’s a century-long trend that can be traced back to the Samurai era.
(This isn’t to dismiss the large number of queer and male viewers. This analysis is based on estimates showing that two-thirds of its audience was female—a majority presumably straight. It’s worth highlighting given what I’m about to unpack.)
Shane and Ilya’s romance, originally from the Game Changers novel series by Rachel Reid, ticks all the boxes of a shameful genre we don’t often talk about publicly: Boys’ Love (BL). If you’ve never heard of it, here’s the classic formula: a homoerotic story written by a woman, for a women readership, with barely any women in it.
I had so much fun researching BL literature for Tatler Asia last year that I’ve been itching to yap about the leftovers ever since. Especially since tracking down sources took forever—BL scholars aren’t exactly easy to find. But I eventually landed on Dr. Kazumi Nagaike, and she spent hours walking me through the history of the genre. Turns out, a lot of it connects directly to the Heated Rivalry craze we’re seeing now.
So here are the parts that didn’t make the article: where BL came from (women’s empowerment), where it went wrong (homophobia among others), and where it’s going (international politics and the bigger questions about men, women, queer people, and everything in between).
A bit of history
How Samurai inspired your favorite BL work
This female fascination with homoerotic stories traces back to pre-modern Japan.
Dr. Nagaike explains that Samurai culture and the deep dedication they had for each other normalized homosociality. Between practices like shudō or oibara (some “Romeo and Juliet type of things,” she said), male same-sex dedication was elevated to “a supreme form of love” in the collective imagination.
It stood in stark contrast to heterosexual relationships, which came with weight: the duty of carrying on bloodlines, family expectations, the pressure of lineage. Male-male relationships existed outside all of that. (It’s something I also touched on in this article about female relationships, which historically have been considered less profound than male ones.)
And women, Dr. Nagaike notes, were drawn to the idea of same-sex male love precisely because it was free from the burdens they themselves carried—especially in the 1870s, during the Meiji Era.
To make it very brief: Japan, fearing Western colonization, rapidly adopted Western values. Society went into a clash of values. Women were grappling with new, restrictive gender roles. And, just as we still do today, many turned to literature for escapism. But they didn’t want stories about having babies or managing a household. They wanted to escape social identification entirely.
They wanted to impersonate men: to go to work, be active, avoid the pressure to settle down—but with a touch of romance. And that’s how the genre we know today as Boy Love—also called shonen-ai, tanbi, yaoi, Men Loving Men (MLM)—was born.
Homoerotic stories went through many iterations after that. It first reached the US through Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock fan fictions in the 1970s. In 2000s Japan, it evolved into an entire manga genre. For a lot of women my generation, we first encountered it through online fan fiction. Harry Potter, One Direction, Sherlock Holmes: it became a whole ecosystem on Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, and FanFiction.net (iykyk).
And look: it nurtured writing, drawing and creation. Probably better than scrolling on Instagram or TikTok all day. But there was also a dark side—as there naturally is when you let young girls experiment with love, relationships and sexuality completely freely within an echo chamber. It can get into dark places.
For all its progressive vibes, it wasn’t particularly a safe space for LGBTQ+ people. Depictions of sexual assault, rigid power dynamics, and characters who couldn’t be gay (but were “gay only for each other”) were rampant. It wasn’t written for the queer community either: the bishōnen style—androgynous, Western-featured—was crafted specifically for women readers. Junjo Romantica: Pure Romance, the first BL title to hit the New York Times manga bestseller list in 2011, is a great example of everything I’ve just described.
Obviously, this reflected society more than it did the teenagers and authors themselves, who probably found the exercise cathartic in many ways. But it still planted unhealthy standards—about love, consent, queerness itself—for an entire generation. Something the new wave of BL culture worked on.
“In the new wave of BL culture, post-2008, we’ve witnessed a huge diversification of male characters,” Dr. Nagaike says. “Less dominant/submissive dynamics, fewer pretty boys, and more consent, more diversity, and a more realistic depiction of same-sex relationships.”
With new values and better representation, BL culture has also expanded its fanbase. This includes new demographics—like queer people—but also new countries. And this is where the international politics comes into play.
The politics of Boys’ Love
China’s crackdown
BL is a big part of Japan’s soft power today. And given the country’s infamous history of colonialism, massacre and violence in the region, that doesn’t play well with many governments.
China, for one, has enforced a harsh crackdown on Boys’ Love literature—locally called danmei—along with dramas and webtoons. Zhang and Zhang (2022) described this ban as an attempt to save women from a “toxic Japanese cultural invasion.” But really, it’s about pushing traditional gender roles and cleaning up internet culture. BL is deemed “unhealthy” and “immoral”—and forbidding it alongside “effeminate men”, the logic goes, could “correct women’s sexual orientations” and “encourage them to bear more children”.
With danmei squeezed tight by censorship (novels banned, authors arrested, adaptations quietly strangled) creators have learned to slip through the side door. Queer-friendly Taiwan, in particular, has become that door: a place to publish, print, host and adapt Boys’ Love stories beyond Beijing’s reach. Platforms like Haitang operate under Taiwanese jurisdiction, allowing writers to release uncensored work and ship physical editions to international fans.
But the loophole is hardly a sanctuary. Authorities have cracked down on writers still living in China, charging dozens in recent years. Even selling Taiwan-published books into the mainland has been prosecuted as “illegal business operations”. Actors face quiet punishments too: careers cooled, public appearances curtailed. The offshore route creates breathing room, not safety. For those at home, the state still insists these stories are foreign contagion—not lived reality. The tension feeds itself, adding another layer to an already fragile China-Taiwan relationship.
For my article, I also spoke to Jidanun Lueangpiansamut, a famous Thai BL author and the youngest-ever recipient of the SEA Write Award. She’s been invited to Taipei multiple times—for awards, residencies, and more—and was struck by how the use of traditional and/or simplified Chinese characters affected its distribution.
She told me that, given the situation, she felt sad she wouldn’t be able to meet her fans. Luckily for her, many travel to Taiwan for that, or to Thailand, her home, which has become the new epicenter for BL.
Thailand’s takeover
“The fact that BL became so big in Thailand came as a surprise to me,” Lueangpiansamut told me. “I grew up looking up to Japan, and then to South Korea for this kind of content. I never thought my country was cool enough.”
Over the past years, through its artistic, musical and culinary scenes, Thailand has become one of the trendiest cultural hubs in Asia. But its “coolness” isn’t the only reason it’s been taking over the BL market: this takeover is actually a political one, according to Dr Nagaike: Thailand has been embracing women’s rights and the LGBTQ+ community over the past years, while Japan hasn’t.
“[This] allows Thailand to transcend the drawing or writing format to a live-action format—it was a great way of boosting the BL culture and economy,” she says, adding that a lot of Thai series include QR codes supporting same-sex marriage at the end of each episode. “In comparison, Japan is still very traditional, even homophobic sometimes, and it has directly impacted the development of the Japanese BL scene.”
In Thailand, BL dramas have become successful launchpads for actors. Vachirawit “Bright” Chivaaree, Suppasit “Mew” Jongcheveevat, Kanawut “Gulf” Traipipattanapong and many others all started their careers in BL. The genre is so popular that Thailand has moved away from adapting Japanese stories, prioritizing homegrown scripts instead. Lueangpiansamut’s City of Stars (2024) was recently adapted into a drama—one of many examples.
Yet, BL culture still has a long way to go, especially in terms of representation. Lueangpiansamut was mentioning that in Thailand, actors who are playing “tops” were more likely to get out of the BL genre, get brand deals and sponsorships, than “bottoms”.
But coming back to Heated Rivalry: the actors of Ilya (typically the top) and Shane (typically the bottom) don’t seem to follow that pattern. Both actors have reached equal fame—at least judging by their Instagram followers and media presence, even though Google Trends shows a slightly bigger interest for Hudson Williams (which, nonetheless, goes against the pattern).
And that might be the manifestation of something else.
Gender roles, bromaxxing and conservative values
Actually, this stuck with me when two friends told me in separate conversations that they loved Heated Rivalry because “you know, it just feels so good to watch men being so open about emotions.”
It reminded me how much context matters. In an era of bromaxxing, Andrew Tate fanatics and trad wives, the show lands differently. It challenges hyper-masculine norms. It shows romance without hierarchy, without misogyny.
Look at some of the romantic franchises that dominated the past two decades: Twilight, Fifty Shades. They’re both built on extreme gendered power imbalance and toxicity. Vampire and weak mortal (woman). Billionaire and working class (woman). Heated Rivalry rejects heteronormativity, and thus, this narrative.
This matters because right now, heterosexuality feels broken. Women are hyper-aware of sexual violence. Of sacrificing for male partners’ careers. Of rights disappearing. Of dating that disappoints. Vogue recently asked if having a boyfriend is now embarrassing. Some women are swearing off men entirely, and go “boy sober”.
Sounds familiar? We talked about it earlier: women, faced with restrictive roles, looking for an exit. A century ago in Japan, they found it in stories about men loving men—free from the burdens they carried. Today, it’s Heated Rivalry.
Same escape. Different century.
Heated Rivalry offers what those Samurai-era stories always did: a world where no woman suffers. No microaggressions. No casual sexism. No hierarchy. Just two human beings being soft with each other.
No wonder we can’t stop watching. We never could.
It's escapism for women because we're not in it at all...? That's a little sad.
Great article btw, I appreciate your research.