{"id":285738,"date":"2026-02-15T20:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T20:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/285738\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T20:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T20:33:09","slug":"heated-rivalry-doesnt-need-food-to-be-sexual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/285738\/","title":{"rendered":"“Heated Rivalry” doesn’t need food to be sexual"},"content":{"rendered":"

Banana, cake<\/a>, peach<\/a>, eggplant, sausage, whipped cream, cherry. Something about certain foods steers the brain towards images of the erotic, and entertainment media knows it.<\/p>\n

In visual mediums, food is often shorthand for sex. A cheeky, not-so-sly metaphor. Romance in particular loves edible innuendo. It\u2019s easy to use a juicy, dripping peach or artful dollops of whipped cream as a stand-in for what you really want your audience to be thinking about.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d<\/a> is different.<\/p>\n

In what is arguably the year\u2019s hottest television show, both in popularity and sensuality, food is everywhere. But it isn\u2019t erotic. It isn\u2019t teasing. In a show defined by sex, food becomes the language of vulnerability.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d <\/a>is a relatively low-budget Canadian television show \u2014 based on the \u201cGame Changers\u201d romance novel series by Rachel Reid \u2014 that streamed on HBO Max earlier this year. The steamy, enemies-to-lovers show follows two closeted hockey players, Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) as they navigate their turbulent situationship on top of their budding professional hockey careers.<\/p>\n

Against all odds, \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d became a breakout hit, reaching 324 million streaming minutes in its first week \u2014 that\u2019s ten times the viewership of \u201cBridgerton\u201d season 4<\/a> in the same time frame \u2014 shooting its stars and creators to a level of fame that feels unprecedented<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Less than a year ago, Hudson Williams and Connor Storie were waiting tables<\/a>, now they\u2019re hosting \u201cSNL<\/a>,\u201d presenting Golden Globes<\/a>, and carrying the Olympic torch<\/a>. Hansel wishes<\/a> he was as hot as these two right now.<\/p>\n

In \u201cHeated Rivalry,\u201d the sex is nearly immediate. Physical intimacy is not the obstacle, emotional intimacy is. And food bridges that gap.<\/a> Even in the early days of this nearly decades-long situationship, the boys are using food (if you can count water as food) to show their interest in each other.<\/p>\n

In episode one, we see Shane and Ilya on Major League Hockey draft day \u2014 where they\u2019re the second and first overall picks, respectively. After a suit-and-tie celebration, which neither seems too celebratory about, Shane leaves his hotel room in a huff and escapes to the hotel gym for a late night stationary bike ride. Ilya soon appears on the bike next to him. What ensues next can only be described as the most tantalizing, sexually tense stationary bike race ever recorded on video.<\/p>\n

After this first charged encounter, the initial gesture between them is not seduction. It\u2019s nourishment, hydration.<\/p>\n

They sit toe to toe on the gym floor, and Ilya offers a red-faced, panting Shane his water bottle. Ilya shakes the bottle a few times, almost daring Shane to take it. He finally gives in, their fingertips graze, Ilya holds the contact just a second too long when accepting the bottle back, and that\u2019s how it begins.<\/p>\n

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon\u2019s free food newsletter<\/a>, The Bite.<\/p>\n

On this day, they cemented not only their professional rivalry, but also their prolonged and (at the moment) unexplainable connection to each other. In a genre that often codes food as indulgence, this is maintenance. Care, not consumption.<\/p>\n

Shane and Ilya continue sporadically meeting in hotel rooms. They text regularly (under the aliases \u201cJane\u201d and \u201cLily\u201d). Even after Shane wins the MLH championship, he\u2019s not thinking about this major career accomplishment. While his teammates are enjoying frenzied, champagne-spraying <\/a>locker room celebration, Shane\u2019s face is buried in his phone and visibly smirking while texting Ilya.<\/p>\n

The tuna melt<\/p>\n

Their emotional tip-toeing reaches a breaking point in episode 4 with the tuna melt scene, arguably the emotional hinge of the series. By the time Shane ends up at Ilya\u2019s apartment for the day, the sexual tension is long established. What\u2019s new is the kitchen.<\/p>\n

Ilya passes Shane his signature ginger ale across the counter and says, \u201cYou like tuna melt?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to make me a tuna melt?\u201d Shane replies with a slight quirk of his lip.<\/p>\n

The scene is quiet, domestic, almost disarmingly ordinary. They eat on the couch. They talk \u2014 not about bodies or strategy or rivalry \u2014 but about family. About the shape of their lives outside hotel rooms and hockey rinks.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s here, over melted cheese and toasted bread<\/a>, that Ilya admits something far riskier than desire: that he likes Shane. The sandwich doesn\u2019t escalate lust. It transforms the energy of the room, of the relationship, from erotic heat to a loving warmth. Then they say each other\u2019s first names, a quiet \u201cShane\u201d and \u201cIlya\u201d just for each other.<\/p>\n

You would think that for two people who\u2019ve known each other for years and have seen and experienced every inch of each other\u2019s bodies this wouldn\u2019t be a big deal, but the first name crosses the line. It takes their relationship out of \u201ctwo guys who are intrigued by each other and hook up occasionally\u201d into \u201ctwo guys who know all of each other\u2019s quirks and idiosyncrasies and may just be starting to fall in love, or (even more terrifying) they\u2019re already there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without the tuna melt, I don\u2019t know that Shane and Ilya would\u2019ve had this emotional breakthrough. Using each other\u2019s first names, especially in such an intimate moment, completely changes the nature of their relationships. It breaks down all the walls (no matter how flimsy) the two had tried to set up to deny their feelings for each other. In most romantic media, food heightens sensuality. Here, it marks the moment when desire softens into emotional risk.<\/p>\n

Being as dysfunctional as they are and seeing that neither are ready to admit what this relationship is (an actual relationship) and what it means to them, this moment naturally leads Shane into a full on panic, and they don\u2019t talk or see each other for months.<\/p>\n

The smoothie<\/p>\n

While Shane and Ilya are having their turbulent back and forth of will-they-won\u2019t-they-admit-they-have-feelings-for-each-other, there\u2019s another love story going on: Scott Hunter and Kip Grady.<\/p>\n

Their relationship starts with a smoothie. Not champagne, not whipped cream, not a strategically placed strawberry. A smoothie<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After a run through the streets of New York City, Scott Hunter (pro hockey all-star and captain of the New York Admirals) stops in health food store Straw+Berry for a post run drink. That\u2019s where he meets struggling grad student Kip Grady. Kip makes him a special version of the store\u2019s blueberry smoothie (he just adds banana). It\u2019s awkward. Slightly stilted. They\u2019re testing the waters.<\/p>\n

Scott starts to linger longer than he needs to. The conversations stretch a little further. Scott keeps coming back \u2014 not because he\u2019s suddenly developed a deep passion for (in my opinion) way too watery fruit-based beverages, but because Kip is there.<\/p>\n

Food here isn\u2019t flirtation. It\u2019s repetition, ritual, a reason to return back to the person you can\u2019t stop thinking about.<\/p>\n

Kip gifts Scott a pair of blue socks with bananas on them, a physical manifestation of the smoothie for when Scott\u2019s not in New York, and he wears them during every game. A small, almost comical callback to the smoothie that started it all. It\u2019s romantic in the way inside jokes are romantic. It\u2019s not sexy. It\u2019s not a metaphor. It\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n

In romance media, food often escalates toward seduction. In \u201cHeated Rivalry,\u201d food settles into consistency. It\u2019s how relationships grow roots.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Kip stays over in Scott\u2019s apartment, Kip still makes the smoothie in the morning. The gesture continues and evolves as their relationship gets stronger. It becomes less about the drink itself and more about what it represents: \u201cI see you. I remember how we started.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though, objectively speaking, that smoothie looks like something I would not be able to keep down, it means something to them. And that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

In romance media, food often escalates toward seduction. In \u201cHeated Rivalry,\u201d food settles into consistency. It\u2019s how relationships grow roots.<\/p>\n

The show refuses the glossy aesthetic of \u201cfood porn.\u201d The tuna melt looks like a tuna melt. The ginger ale is flatly branded Canada Dry. The lighting is not indulgent. Nothing drips in slow motion. Nothing is consumed theatrically.<\/p>\n

Because this isn\u2019t about appetite. It\u2019s about offering something you made and waiting to see if it will be accepted. That dynamic deepens when viewed through Shane\u2019s characterization.<\/p>\n

Shane Hollander is branded by the media and hockey world as the \u201cboring\u201d and \u201cserious\u201d hockey prodigy, especially in comparison to the ladies-man-bad-boy Ilya Rozanov.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s rarely without his Canada Dry. He\u2019s on a so-called macrobiotic diet. His teammates tease him for eating what they call \u201cbird food.\u201d He orders the same salmon and brown rice at restaurants. His routines are meticulous. His preferences? Predictable.<\/p>\n

Rachel Reid addressed this in an \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d on Reddit,<\/a> explaining that while she didn\u2019t initially write Shane as neurodivergent, after her own experience parenting a neurodivergent child, she came to see him differently. By the time she wrote the \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d sequel, \u201cThe Long Game,\u201d Reid noted that she \u201chad a better understanding of Shane\u201d and \u201crealized that, yeah, he\u2019s probably autistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

That context reframes everything. The always perfectly folded clothes before sex. The seeming rigidity. The public perception of him as boring or robotic. The fact that people who actually know him always describe him as funny.<\/p>\n

Hudson Williams\u2019 quiet portrayal of this character has resonated so well with fans and viewers who also have autism. Anni Malter, a German journalist based in Japan, called Williams\u2019 portrayal of Shane, \u201cone of the most honest and recognizable depictions of an autistic character I\u2019ve seen in a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHis autism is not framed as a reveal, a problem or a lesson. There is no diagnostic scene, no moment of narrative reassurance. Shane doesn\u2019t even know it himself. And yet, within the first ten minutes of the first episode, it was unmistakable,\u201d Malter wrote in a Substack<\/a> after interviewing Rachel Reid about the book series and show.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat \u2018Heated Rivalry\u2019 understands \u2013 quietly, confidently \u2013 is that autism does not announce itself. It reveals itself in patterns, in pressure points, in the way a body moves through the world. And once you know what you\u2019re looking for, you don\u2019t need it explained.\u201d<\/p>\n

One obvious pattern for Shane is the food.<\/p>\n

Safe foods are common in autistic individuals: predictable textures, reliable flavors, minimal sensory disruption. So when Ilya offers him a tuna melt in episode four \u2014 something warm, messy, unfamiliar \u2014 and Shane accepts without hesitation, it\u2019s not small.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s trust. It\u2019s vulnerability. It\u2019s: \u201cI am letting you disrupt my routine.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could argue that the tuna melt is the most intimate thing that happens in that apartment.<\/p>\n

A comically large pot of pasta<\/p>\n

The most quietly devastating food scene in the show doesn\u2019t happen in a bedroom. It happens at a kitchen table.<\/p>\n

After Shane\u2019s father accidentally walks in on him and Ilya at the cottage, everything implodes. Shane spirals. Panic sets in. The secret he\u2019s been carrying for years is suddenly inches from exposure. Shane\u2019s father wordlessly speeds away from the cottage. Shane and Ilya follow right behind. Shane is essentially forced to tell his parents not only that he\u2019s gay but he\u2019s also been in a relationship with who they thought was his arch-enemy for the better part of a decade.<\/p>\n

And what does his mother do?<\/p>\n

She makes pasta. A massive, almost comically large pot of pasta<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They all sit at the table \u2014 Shane, Ilya, Shane\u2019s parents \u2014 and the conversation unfolds over noodles.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no metaphor here. No erotic coding. No wink at the audience. Just four people eating dinner. And you can feel, watching it, that everything is going to be okay.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something deeply maternal about it. Something grounding. A silent message of: We are still a family. You are still my son.<\/p>\n

Cooking has been shown to mitigate psychological distress and reduce stress levels. Research <\/a>has shown that engaging in cooking activities can improve emotional wellbeing and decrease anxiety. Preparing food becomes a regulatory act \u2014 a way to channel overwhelming emotion into something tactile and nourishing.<\/p>\n

Maybe Yuna Hollander didn\u2019t consciously think, Let me deploy culinary therapy in this moment of crisis. Maybe she just did what mothers do.<\/p>\n

But the effect is the same.<\/p>\n

The pasta becomes a stabilizer. A unifier. The physical act of twirling noodles while discussing something as monumental as coming out diffuses the tension just enough for honesty to survive.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no metaphor here. No erotic coding. No wink at the audience. Just four people eating dinner. And you can feel, watching it, that everything is going to be okay.<\/p>\n

We are conditioned to see food in media as sensual. Food is frequently eroticized<\/a> \u2014 aestheticized into spectacle and coded as appetite. \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d refuses that framework. The tuna melt is\u2026 a tuna melt. The smoothie is slightly watery. The pasta is just pasta.<\/p>\n

Critics<\/a>, casual viewers, and obsessive \u201creheaters\u201d<\/a> (the nickname fans have dubbed re-watches of the show) have noted how grounded and character-driven the storytelling feels despite the explicit content. The sex is explicit. The food is ordinary. And maybe that\u2019s why it hits so hard.<\/p>\n

Because the show doesn\u2019t need food to heighten desire. The desire is already there \u2014 loud, obvious, borderline operatic. Food, instead, marks the moments where desire softens into care.<\/p>\n

Shane and Ilya are elite athletes. They can take hits. They can endure overtime. They can perform in front of tens of thousands of people. But they cannot, for the life of them, articulate how they feel.<\/p>\n

So they cook. They pass water bottles. They make tuna melts. They sit at kitchen tables and eat pasta. They drink Russian vodka.<\/p>\n

In a show driven by sex, it would be easy \u2014 almost expected \u2014 to use food as one more layer of innuendo.\u00a0 But food has no place here as metaphor. Food is the place where they risk being known, seen. It\u2019s how they test the possibility of letting their walls down, of staying.<\/p>\n

And when the words \u201cI love you\u201d feel too destabilizing \u2014 too irreversible \u2014 there is always another, softer confession available: \u201cYou like tuna melt?\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

about queer romance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Banana, cake, peach, eggplant, sausage, whipped cream, cherry. Something about certain foods steers the brain towards images of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-285738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}