u/Reach_blueDot

I don’t know if this has been covered anywhere, but I have to believe that Jacob Tierney knew exactly what he was doing to a huge chunk of his queer audience with that long, drawn out, driving sequence behind the final end credits.

Raise your hand if you were yelling at your screen for Shane to keep his eyes on the damn road, or at least seriously considering doing so.

I’m willing to bet it wasn’t just me.
So many of the queer folks old enough to watch this show are of generations that have been conditioned to expect a queer story to end in tragedy (at least for productions as well done and widely distributed as HR was).

I Know how the romance genre works, I Knew they weren’t going to finish the credits with them in a fiery wreck. And YET. And yet, I was still waiting for it.

AND THE RELEASE OF TENSION WHEN THE SEQUENCE FINISHED. I hadn’t realized I’d been building that tension through watching the entire show. And then it was gone. And I knew I had to watch it again from the beginning. Have a chance to experience the story without that tension I hadn’t even realized I was feeling. And it was such a different experience. So much easier to sit in the feelings of the individual scenes as they were, instead of keeping one eye on the future, wondering when that shoe will drop. It was so nice. And so I did it again.

I’ve heard this show gets an unusual number of rewatches. And I think this is part of why. And I think the show’s creator absolutely knew what he was doing. He found a way to leverage our (and his) collective trauma (for lack of a better word) to serve the story he was trying to tell, and he did it in a way that wasn’t callous, it was healing.

At least it was for me.

I love seeing the ISO specific fic posts! They are great for finding excellent stories to add to the TBR. However, I’d feel bad keeping this info to myself. The method isn’t always successful, but it’s served me pretty well.

When searching through tags fails me, here is how I find a specific Heated Rivalry or Game Changers fic on AO3 with only a few scraps of memory and some search syntax. I hope it’s helpful for others!

[Editing for clarity: this is good if you need to search the Body of the fic itself. As commented, if you’re searching the fic’s associated information (basically everything but the body text of the fic) then the AO3 search and filter function is awesome and you should use it!]

This full text gets pasted in the search bar. (Substituting your specific search terms of course)

Site: https://archiveofourown.org AND ((Heated rivalry) OR (game changers)) AND (“A SPECIFIC WORD OR PHRASE I KNOW SHOULD BE IN THERE” other terms that I remember in connection with the work, like character names etc.)

Sometimes I read a fic and think, “how far can heteronormativity actually take you?!?” And then I remember hockey players have literally hit on each other in multiple social media post, or tweeted [steers and queers, and I’m not a cow], without people asking any serious questions other than ‘homophobia?’, and honestly? I’ll believe in anything.

All this to say, Ilya could absolutely say and do and wear some really queer shit and the hets watching would probably just call him a homophobe.

I know there are a lot of great fics that explore this, and I love them, if you’ve got favorites please share!

ETA: I’m not suggesting that the assumption of a ‘no homo’ culture in men’s professional sports is a good thing. I am simply pointing out that it is A thing.