lol it’s toned down from the books, there he has his own ice rink at the cottage!

I kind of wish they could make a Scott/Kip spinoff series -- fill in the stuff we didn't see, continue to Kyle/Eric, have Ilya and other characters sometimes stop in at the bar, and the bar setting leaves a lot of room for new stories and new characters. Then that would leave the original series more focused on the Canadian teams and the storylines more centered on Ilya and Shane. Lots of potential for crossover episodes.

This would require a lot more money than they seem to have, though, and more time than Jacob Tierney probably has available.

I binge listened to the Empty Netters podcast reviews of the episodes on my long drive today and man, that kind of renewed my faith in straight men, hearing them love on it?? Amazing.

The algorithm has been serving me Empty Netters clips, and I am completely charmed by them. (Of course, the algorithm is now also serving me clips from their regular episodes where they talk about real hockey, and while I'm sure those are also very charming, that's not what I logged in here to see.)

They were talking about the show in their regular episodes but then just put out only the show parts, if you search their podcast. I wasn’t willing to dig through two hours of hockey talk for the show recaps but with them pulled out, I listened to like six hours of review on my roadtrip yesterday. It was great.

Dear lord, I took a look at AO3 and there are over four thousand fics. On the one hand, I can wallow in the universe for longer. On the other hand, that is too much and I am overwhelmed!

And they're getting hundreds of kudos and comments within a couple hours of being posted.

I swear, I've seen about a hundred "You can tell Heated Rivalry was written by a woman because..." takes in the past few weeks, and not a single one of them has made any sense. And a lot of them contradict each other. (And one of them led to me discussing fandom history with someone who linked to TV Tropes to explain something, which is how I just discovered that TV Tropes treats "ho yay" as a term from "the old days" whose origin is lost to the mists of time, and I just noped out of that conversation because I just couldn't.)

which is how I just discovered that TV Tropes treats "ho yay" as a term from "the old days" whose origin is lost to the mists of time

INSERT STANDARD TVTROPES REACTION HERE BUT, LIKE, EVEN WORSE BECAUSE OMGWHAT

IME all of the "tells" between men and women romance writers disappear once the overall quality of the writing rises above a certain bar, which Reid's does.

I will say that the one bit I've read so far, the "My dinner with Hayden" short story, seemed to employ slash fiction clichés I read on livejournal back in the late 2000s and 2010s. The best friend raising outraged objections to the main character's choice of partner as if he could argue him out of his relationship, one member of the couple using "pervert" as an ironic endearment during foreplay, etc. I don't know that those are specific to being written by a woman so much as arising from slash fiction culture. Which is where the stories started if I understand correctly, Heated Rivalry having originated as Sidney Crosby/Alex Ovechkin RPF and Game Changers as a Steve/Bucky AU on AO3.

That was a concern of mine when starting the show, but if the novels use a lot of those tells Tierney and the production have done a good job of removing them in the adaptation.