I want to preface this by saying I am not a good writer by any means and don’t have much experience writing outside of academic contexts.
How I will be interacting with texts in this piece is best described by Erving Goffman (whom I will discuss) as follows:
"The illustrative materials ... fit into a coherent framework that ties together bits of experience the reader has already had and provides the student with a guide worth testing in case-studies of institutional social life" - Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Preface
It will have references, excerpts and quotes scattered throughout the piece, as well as personal explorations and tangents. These will be denoted using footnotes; please keep an eye out for [these] ! References, supplementary text and resources will be in my are.na channel (https://www.are.na/meirisoda-soda/the-performance-and-heated-rivalry).
(This essay was originally formatted on Google Docs)
I think for what Heated Rivalry is advertised as, a gay sports romance, it touches on human interaction, social dynamics and identity struggles in an accessible yet extremely nuanced way (which is why people love it so much). I do not seek to speak on the cultural significance of the books/show and what it can mean for people, but rather to sound out some thoughts I’ve had regarding Heated Rivalry and how it relates to my life, and it might resonate with some people as well. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be commentary or a character analysis but it’s something for sure. Maybe closure.
Since watching the show and reading the two Shane/Ilya books (and many pieces of fanfiction), there have been two phrases that I can’t seem to get out of my head: ‘performance of perfection’ and ‘control’. Maybe these themes are particularly important to this point in my life right now, but something just cracked open in me and I needed to get it out. I also want to note that this particular piece will be focused on Shane, as I realized I needed to stop somewhere because this project had become something much bigger than I had anticipated. I have been working on the Ilya portion, and am hoping to get it out in the next couple weeks. On Performance
When I speak about ‘performance’, I’m mainly referring to ‘the act of doing’, but also the other definition, ‘how well something is done’. Everybody performs to some extent in the daily, and different situations elicit varying degrees of said performance. How you perform yourself is different at work versus at home versus at church (or similar settings).
Erving Goffman's theory of dramaturgy, as discussed in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) uses theatre as a basis to explain human behaviour - that our daily social interactions are essentially theatrical performances. We have a "Front Stage", what we continually show to others, and a "Back Stage", a private area where the performance ends. We are all actors trying to control how our "audience" perceives us. Goffman is not suggesting that humans and social interactions are fundamentally manipulative and are set up on lies, but rather indicating that social life requires a degree of acting and signaling in order to function smoothly. We constantly shift between different roles and adjust our masks depending on the situation.
Performance also doesn't necessarily mean something done strictly towards other people: it can also mean towards one's self. In this case, the "Back Stage", the hidden area in which one can let go and live their authentic self, disappears. We begin to treat our own private thoughts, feelings, and bodies as a "prop" to be managed, to a point where the individual becomes their most demanding critic.
For Shane Hollander, his perfection is to play his Role: a perfect hockey player, rule-abiding and disciplined, a reminder to the many Asian kids that they, too, can succeed in an extremely competitive and underrepresented sport, a hero and a captain that leads his team to the win. His role is something greater and beyond himself. Other people’s expectations of him are high but in the end, Shane’s own expectations of himself are higher. Everything in his life is deeply controlled and Shane does genuinely enjoy the discipline and the structure it gives to his life. It’d be naive to deny that his autism has no role in this, and it may have definitely started as a way to regulate, to expect things and to maintain routine and structure: wake up at six o’clock, go for a run, eat the same (healthy) breakfast every day, the list goes on. He is a man of routine.
What begins as an internal drive for excellence slowly morphs into a twisted internal performance of perfection, one in which it becomes indiscernible what is desire and what is performed. With each passing year and as his life stabilizes, Shane has more to protect. He becomes trapped by the very facade of success that initially gave him stability. The Spectacle
Recently I read (or attempted to read) Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Although this text is a foundational critique rooted in Marxist theory, it does touch on a lot of psychoanalysis and concepts that can be applied to the greater perception of self.
In Chapter 1 (Separation Perfected), Debord writes about the shift from a state of having/being to a state of appearing: all authentic life (being) is replaced by a 'false self' that only exists to be looked at (appearing). We spend our lives reconciling the split senses of self, trying to live up to the impossible, imaginary perfection of the Ideal-I. The 'Ideal-I' is a term coined by Jacques Lacan[1] in his 1949 essay, Mirror Stage, meant to refer to an image that is outside and beyond oneself. It is a unified, whole object that we perceive to be ourselves. We project our desires onto this figure, identifying with an illusion rather than living our own authentic lives. Shane's position as the perfect, model hockey player holds an incredible amount of weight and expectation to live up to. The flawless, disciplined, emotionally contained hockey player who puts hockey first is Shane's Ideal-I. [2]
At a certain point, Shane accepts his relationship with Rozanov - a purely physical arrangement. A physical relationship makes it easier for Shane to fit this, whatever it was, into his life; shape the relationship into a compartmentalized box and then Shane didn't have to think about it. But true intimacy is inherently messy and cannot be controlled. The beginning and end was simple. But acts of domesticity - eating a tuna sandwich that Ilya made for him, watching the game together, cuddling together after sex - meant that there was some sort of barrier that had broken down between them. It meant stepping out of a performance of sexual rivalry, a simple arrangement, and into a directly, lived and true experience. It meant they had accepted each other's presence as a whole.
Because (over the course of years) Shane fuses his identity and sense of self with this Ideal-I, his actual desires - his love for Ilya, his sexuality, his desire to indulge - feel alien and threatening to his well-being. The discipline and control he enacts over his life is to constantly validate his proximity to this Ideal-I. Discipline
It seems as though Rachel Reid intended for readers to notice Shane's increasingly dysfunctional relationship with food in The Long Game to illustrate how discipline and control has consumed it. Shane's diet is stripped of joy and is heavily regulated: salmon with no sauce, sparkling water, substituting rice with extra kale. While he outwardly defends these patterns as a "strict performance diet", it becomes clear that Shane's diet is less about his actual physical well-being and performance and more about maintaining the 'performance' of a perfect athlete. In a world where now external threats to his career exist (his secret identity and his relationship), his diet is the one variable he can completely and entirely dominate. Shane himself acknowledges this - "I keep saying it does, but it might be the discipline that makes me feel better, not the food". He craves that effort-reward process to be rewarding, the pure knowledge that he is executing perfect self-control. It is the discipline that Shane consumes to feel worthy. But if he admits the diet doesn't actually make him play better, he has to face the reality that all of his restriction and suffering and sacrifice were for nothing. [3]
This all-consuming need for control is also heavily tied to a recurring motif in his life: a desperate urge to be "clean". Most of the time it manifests physically - carefully folding clothes, maintaining a spotless living space, cleaning up after sex - but it also carries heavy undertones of traditional morality, conservatism, and the pursuit of an "untainted" perfect self. Unfortunately, Shane's pursuit of perfection does not exist in a vacuum, but is actively weaponized and presented against his desires as a professional requirement rather than an internal pursuit. Roger Crowell says it himself:
"What I'm saying is I appreciate the way you handle yourself, Shane. I know you put hockey first and keep your private life private. That keeps everyone comfortable, and keeps the focus on hockey."
This directly feeds Shane's deepest anxieties by implicitly validating the idea that Shane's dreams and perfect role require the sacrifice of his personal desires. [4]
Interestingly, once Shane accepts his identity as a gay man and his relationship with Ilya, he manages to find a way to further integrate this 'shouldn't' relationship into his performance of control. He reframes the secrecy of his relationship with Ilya as a victory of discipline. And Shane is fully aware of this - "The forbidden aspect of their relationship - the discipline it took to hide how hot they were for each other - still did it for Shane. It was sexy." Again, for Shane, his Ideal-I is the pristine, untouchable archetype of the Perfect Hockey Captain. By turning his relationship into a game of self-restraint, Shane is trying to synthesize his authentic reality with his Ideal-I.
Lacan states that the pursuit of the Ideal-I and reconciling the shattered self is fundamentally alienating, as it's forcing one to identify with an unattainable illusion of self rather than the authentic reality. As his discipline twists into something darker, it stops rewarding him and begins isolating Shane. The Ideal-I cannot experience true intimacy; it can only perform, as any internal experience that contradicts the Ideal-I (vulnerability, messy desires, deviation from social norm) is now deemed a threat to one's identity. And consequently, Shane does not let himself lean into his desires because his entire existence, his Perfect Role, is dictated by what he "should" and "shouldn't" do.
I think what it really comes down to is that Shane’s "performance of perfection" is fundamentally unsustainable. What probably started as a way to handle the pressure, be the perfect captain, and embody that Ideal-I, eventually morphed into a trap where his own authentic desires became a threat. By trying so hard to control every variable, he basically forced his entire existence onto the Front Stage, actively scrubbing away the messy, uncontrolled reality of actually being alive. To really love Ilya, and honestly, to just survive his own life, Shane has to figure out how to stop performing. And Shane does reach this conclusion: "He'd decided he was done with fighting the future, and with trying to be perfect."
This piece/project has become something quite different from when I started it. Initially it was meant to be a not-very-deep and short analysis of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov through the lens of maladaptive behaviours and control and perfectionism, and how it relates to the Spectacle (Guy Debord) and my own life. It was meant to be a fun exercise on applying critical theory to gay hockey bros. What this piece ended up being is an essay-character analysis-theory-journal entry amalgamation of sorts.
I specifically did not want to delve into Shane’s Asian identity because not only would it have been so much to unpack, but it personally hits hard for me because it’s still something that I am trying to figure out myself as a second-generation Korean American. In my case, my parents are first generation immigrants, so analyzing whatever work I’m putting in to create balance between my heritage, my home, and the society that I grew up in becomes all the more heavy. But I couldn’t ignore it because what more can contribute to a deeply internalized pressure to perform perfection than an Asian identity? [5] [6]
All texts and theory referenced in this piece (Debord, Lacan, Goffman) have their fair share of criticism and flaws, as they are not meant to be an all-encompassing theory of life and everything inside it, but rather a focused method of analysis in concentrated disciplines (political theory, psychoanalysis, sociology). It was just fun to draw parallels between pieces of theory and gay hockey romance. Footnotes
[1] Jacques Lacan, Mirror Stage, Lacan’s Concept of Mirror Stage – Literary Theory and Criticism (http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/rrushing/581b/ewExternalFiles/Lacan,%20Mirror%20Stage.pdf)
[2] "Thus all the physical and mental senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses - the sense of having." - Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1, Theory 17
[3] There is something to be said about Rachel Reid's non-acknowledgement of Shane's dysfunctional relationship with food - she never explicitly calls it an eating disorder (orthorexia) - as well as the growing sentiment in the community that Shane as a character is not as well explained in the books as Ilya. I have written a portion on Ilya and his performance of perfection (as it pertains to his relationship with his father, and what family means to him) but as I'd analyzed Shane and re-read the books and watched the show many times over, I realize that Shane is such a compelling and complex character, with a lot of nuance that is pretty difficult to articulate. A lot of Shane is dependent on several layers of internalized, self-projected perception of perfection - what Role is Shane meant to play, not only as a hockey player, but in his own life? This grows more complex as external factors begin to arise (Roger Crowell, the NHL's expectations, Montreal Voyageurs) and the stakes grow higher. Now it's not just his own self-imposed but a very real threat looming over him.
To accurately describe this lived reality and how it affects oneself and others? It’s already difficult for someone who thinks and acts similarly to Shane to recognize and articulate their own thought processes and motivators, but to weave it into a cohesive story with another equally complex character in a lighthearted, palatable story would be an extremely difficult undertaking and a high bar to clear. Personally, I thought Shane’s motivators and characterizations were quite obvious once you analyze the subtext of the books (especially in The Long Game) and that Rachel did a pretty wonderful job of doing so. Obviously, I do have my gripes on the lack of mention of Shane’s Asian background.
[4] Now this is purely speculative on my part and is not meant to project anything onto Shane Hollander, but there are undeniable ties with cleanliness to conservatism and morality. To be "clean" is to be free of "sin", free of deviation from an accepted (or self-imposed) norm. Shane's fixation on cleaning up after sex may honestly just be a sensory issue, but by extension, it treats physical intimacy as something inherently dirtying. It becomes an almost ritual-like act of washing away a stain in Shane's perfect, clean life and temporarily restoring him to a state of societal perfection.
[5] I've tweeted about this before, mostly pertaining to Hudson Williams: “I have many thoughts on the simultaneous tokenization of Asian people and the performance of assimilation not only in the character Shane Hollander but also in how the greater media has been interacting with non-stereotypical presentation of Asian-ness: aka, how Asians in Western cultures have [typically] been portrayed in society - [via] categorization (ie. ABG, FOB), [a journey of self-discovery and] connection to their "roots", complete erasure of Asian heritage in the efforts of inclusion. Which has historically been dominated by Chinese Americans, and this is a first that a person of Korean heritage has this amount of rise and reverence in Western media (so far) and yet because of his white side and his character/personality being not of a typical Korean boy ([as seen in] K-pop/K-dramas) that his Asian side is being erased or minimized in the way media is interacting with him.”
[6] Kevin Ng, Heated Rivalry is a Step Forward for Gay Asian Representation (https://reactormag.com/heated-rivalry-is-a-step-forward-for-gay-asian-representation/)