by Morgan Dawson
As we glide towards the second quarter of 2026, ice skating seems to be on the top of everyone’s minds — from the stunning performances at the Winter Olympics, Alysa Liu’s usurpation of every corner of the internet, and the television series “Heated Rivalry.” Just a scant four months since its streaming release, this hockey romance-drama has swept the early-20s population with shocking speed and an honestly intimidating intensity. I don’t think I’ve ever known as much about ice hockey and the enemies-to-lovers trope as I do now. Amongst the influx of AI-voiceover fake stories, Minecraft parkour TikToks, and the plague of brainrot, “Heated Rivalry” marks an important stepping stone in our return to the golden age of the internet: the Load-Bearing Gay Ship.
The origin of the Load-Bearing Gay Ship is much debated in academia: from Kirk and Spock in Star Trek, the progenitors of the slash-fic (MLM) genre of fanfiction, to Achilles and Patroclus of Homer’s Iliad, and even to the characters Gilgamesh and Enkidu of the world’s oldest known written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh. However, the term as we know it gained cultural awareness in the early 21st century. If you, like me, made the poor, unsupervised decision to put yourself onto the internet in the mid-2010s, then surely you know of the infamous “Destiel”, the romantic pairing of the characters Dean and Castiel from the television series “Supernatural.” In that golden age, for better or for worse, for sites such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest, Destiel — along with several similar MLM-relationships in media, were a pillar of the online experience. As someone who has never watched a single episode of Supernatural, I know entirely too much about Dean and Castiel solely from online exposure. Every platform I was ill-advisedly on was crawling with fanart, fanfics, and fan-edits of these two to the point of inundation. But with the arrival of the 2020s came a shift in online culture: the masses moved online during the COVID-19 quarantine, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and Supernatural aired its final episode.
Since the quarantine, I haven’t seen a gay ship take the internet by storm in quite the same way, save for a brief revival with Steve and Eddie from Stranger Things — at least, not until now. Heated Rivalry, along with its central characters Shane and Illya, seem to be everywhere these days: from the innocent and unexpecting dashboards of various social media problems, to topics of conversation in the Cowan dining hall, to a category in a trivia game I recently participated in. I have yet to consume a single piece of affiliated media, and yet I know the location of their first kiss and all about their cabin getaway. It truly is, as some might call it, a yaoi renaissance — and in this time of constant upheaval, a return to form might be what we need.