Is Heated Rivalry foidslop?
A hockey romance between two rival players that started as a novel, became a TV show, and turned a lot of people who don't watch hockey into people who talk about hockey.
Heated Rivalry is a 2019 novel by Rachel Reid, part of her Game Changers series, about two star hockey players on rival teams, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, who spend years sleeping together in secret. The TV version, with Hudson Williams as Shane and Connor Storrie as Ilya, premiered on Crave in Canada in late 2025 and on HBO Max in the US, and it became one of those shows everyone's group chat was talking about at the same time.
The audience is the interesting part. It's a love story between two men, but a big share of the people who made it a hit are women, which is how a lot of romance publishing works and how fan fiction has worked for decades. When Slate listed examples of foidslop in October 2026, it named Heated Rivalry right next to Barbie and get-ready-with-me videos, as the kind of story about two boys falling in love that women are expected to be embarrassed about.
Season 2 was filmed in Canada in the summer of 2026 and is due in spring 2027, with Williams and Storrie back and more couples from the book series added. So whatever the verdict is, the show isn't going anywhere. The question is whether a show can be foidslop when the main characters are two large men who hit each other for a living.
Yes, because
- Slate named it as an example of foidslop, more or less word for word
- It's a romance novel adaptation, and the fandom is mostly women
- Half the clips going around are of the two leads doing press, not the hockey
No, because
- It's a gay love story, and calling it foidslop erases who it's actually about
- A lot of men watched it too, some of them because of the hockey
- Critics liked it, which is not usually how slop goes
More on the words: what hetslop means. More like this in foidslop shows, books and movies.