Meet toxic masculinity’s final boss: Ilya Rozanov from Heated Rivalry

Although I was pretty offline (for me) in December and January, the rising clamour of Heated Rivalry mania still reached me.
“Have you heard about the gay hockey romance?” My husband asked. I hadn’t, but next time I scrolled TikTok the algorithm fed me a 42yo Australian mother of 3 who’d just got her second Heated Rivalry-inspired tattoo and I knew I’d be watching it.

When a piece of art or culture inspires this level of global mayhem, my consumption of the phenomena is inevitable. I know for the contrarians among us this kind of hype has the opposite effect. Don’t get me wrong, I have a contrarian streak — but I seem to be satisfied with asserting my uniqueness through interpretation rather than rejection. The thing I wanted to understand when I embarked on this particular journey? Why is this series so beloved by straight women in my feed? Aside from the obvious 🍑.

My husband and I watched the first episode together and it was a lot. Everyone knows there’s no shortage of sex in this show, but I interrogated myself (and my husband) afterward and neither of us thought the actual sex scenes were the primary source of our discomfort, it was the emotions they evoked. 

I think I was triggered by the emotional unavailability of one of the main characters, Ilya Rozanov. Like most straight women, I’ve experienced my fair share of emotionally stunted and toxic men in my lifetime (luckily I married a living, breathing green flag). Witnessing another toxic man on television made me feel a little ill, in fact, bearing witness to Shane Hollander’s psychological danger in that first episode was akin to hearing an alarm blaring inside my head.

Despite my fear response, this toxic trigger was also the hook that kept me watching. There’s a reason ‘enemies to lovers’ is my favourite romance trope. The appeal of seeing a bad character transformed by the experience of love is one of the most common in western romance, and for good reason. Here’s the cynical read: it serves the status quo because it re-brands bad behaviour as a ‘cry for help’, and keeps women under the patriarchal thumb by giving them an illusion of agency: you can be the hero! You can save this lost soul! All you have to do is pour all of your energy, love, care, and talent into the empty vessel of this emotionally unavailable man, and when you’re spent — an empty husk — only then will you have earned your ‘happily ever after’ (hint: a lifetime of domestic slavery). 

A poisonous idea, really, but I can’t get enough. Blame it on my mum’s Mills & Boon novels.

The revolutionary thing about Heated Rivalry is there’s no woman in the romantic dyad so you get to see the enemies to lovers trope play out within a 100% masculine context. Watching Ilya Rozonov transformed by his love for Shane Hollander is like witnessing the death of the patriarchy in slow motion. He’s the final boss of toxic masculinity, and you get to see him shed his emotionally unavailable skin, layer-by-layer, episode-by-episode, until he arrives at the cottage in episode 6 with his soul laid bare.

It's so powerful, and as one of my friends put it, “also, they’re both super hot so that’s nice.”

I’ve watched part 1 of Bridgerton Season 4 this week and it feels old and tired by comparison. It’s not enemies-to-lovers but a re-telling of Cinderella: landed gentry falls for servant girl. They’ve done their best to handle the unequal power dynamic with sensitivity. Our leading man Benedict may be a rake, but he’s a woke rake. He’s bi! He pays no heed to class or rank! And yet the story is unfolding with trudging predictability. 

Maybe I’m the problem, though. After all, I consumed nothing but romance novels for years following the birth of my children and there’s no trope I haven’t done to death. Everything is predictable at this point, and subsequently the romance genre has lost any element of fantasy for me. With Heated Rivalry and queer love stories in general, this trope-y path is less worn. Perhaps queer fantasies feel more potent because my lived experience doesn’t undermine them. 

All this to say: Heated Rivalry is the best thing I’ve seen so far in 2025 (which is saying something because I just finished Season 1 of The Pitt 😭), and regardless of your stance on popularity, I would class it as a #mustwatch.