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No, unfortunately Mrs. FiveHour watched it with one of her (horny, sad) friends who loved the books over the holidays, and there unless they were doing the lovey-dovey stuff every time I left the house, it was mostly just butt fucking and occasionally skating. The main characters fucked before they ever said more than five words to each other, and that's mostly all they did in between, saying as little as possible to each other (because they hate each other, they are rivals ya know?) and then meeting up in a hotel room to fuck. The show isn't really built around emotions beyond being gay, it's built around scenes of as much and as explicit of gay sex as can be done without showing an actual erect penis or an actual asshole. Which, honestly, is disappointing: if you're gonna make porn just go whole hog. But it is really focused on ripped abs and men groaning each other's names, the emotions are just kind of assumed to exist afterward.
My criticism of what I saw of the show is that it was clearly written by a woman/gay men, with nobody having any idea how heterosexual men functioned at the relevant times. While I've never played ice hockey, I was a hetero frat boy during most of the years the show is set, and the dynamic just doesn't make any sense, it's like they have the idea that straight men have no friends and no intimacy and don't hang out. The closet cases' strategy for staying closeted is to never, ever be seen together, seen talking to each other, seen being friends. When, frankly, in 2012 the most heterosexual thing you could do was have a best buddy you drank with and joke about being gay together. There's like a half dozen scenes where they have to, secretly, give each other their hotel room numbers and, secretly, sneak into each other's hotel rooms to, secretly, hang out. And it just feels odd, because when me and bunch of other 20 year olds had hotel rooms in the same hotel the most normal thing in the world would be to say to another guy "Hey I'm room 567 grab a case of beer and swing by." Shane is TREMBLING walking to Ilya's hotel room at the thought of anyone catching him, when if he just had a bottle of whiskey his cover is impenetrable. And frankly, if you're in love with a rival hockey star for YEARS, just get your agents on the line and try to get traded to the same team. A-Rod and Jeter it up! The sports media is still dopey enough that they'll publish puff pieces about how it's soooooooo funny that the two stars for Montreal are soooooo close that they have to live right next door to each other.
There's a second gay romance plot (apparently hockey is nothing but closet cases in this universe) where the captain for the Rangers falls in love with a guy who works at a smoothie shop, but their love must remain SECRET, and he can never be seen at his apartment! And once again I'm like, if you're a star player, having a weird smoothie twink living in your house as part of your entourage wouldn't even be all that odd.
A lot of twitter hockey fans complained that the climactic scene of that plot didn't make any sense, when the captain brings the smoothie twink onto the ice for a kiss after winning the stanley cup at MSG and the crowd applauds. I can only assume the complaints came from fans who have never seen their team win a championship. Jalen Hurts could have shown up to the parade in a fur suit last year after smoking Mahomes and the Philly fans would have applauded. Hell, for the most part, if right after the win a player started kissing a man on the field, I wouldn't even process that it was gay, I would just think he was really excited and got his wires crossed.
Sports guys kissing their team mates after a victory is old hat in soccer 😁 Heck, "heterosexual life partners" is old hat.
I'm glad (I think) that the show was "gay sex all the time for the ladieez" because there was a lot of the relationship discussion stuff online. But your review of it, having seen it, makes sense to me. The plot is dumb, because yeah: what, guys never hang out together? Sure, if they're meant to be hated rivals on teams that hate each other, then hanging out might seem odd. But I think the whole "sneaking around because HOMOPHOBIA" is a large part of the appeal, the "oppressed" and allies sure love stories reassuring them that they are "oppressed" for being gay etc. See the transgender day of remembrance list of trans murder victims where "getting hit by a car = murder" because systemic racism, transphobia, something something.
Not really, low key most of the big players hang out together, and while we love team rivalries, we love chivalry and sportsmanship between players. "Beat the piss out of him, but when the clock hits zero go get a beer" is pretty much the male ideal.
If anything, the one actual homosexual superstar in US sports history responded by being so out-there party-hardy macho that he ultimately killed a bunch of people to prove how tough he was. Which is a shame, because if he had come out instead of shooting those immigrants outside a night club, we'd probably have the Aaron Hernandez Supportive Teammate Award given out every year in the NFL. And it would have been fine because he played with the one white QB in the NFL who worships the devil instead of Jesus Christ.
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