S07.33: Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

Fated Mates - Romance Books for Novel People

Fated Mates

Documentary, Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.9 • 964 Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2025

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we're headed back in the time machine to before the pandemic when everyone but us read this one m/m hockey book and lost their collective minds! Heated Rivalry is one of those books that romance lovers place high up on their keeper shelf, and we're talking about why, about how it really knocks sports romance out of the park (yes, we're aware that there is no knocking out of parks in hockey), and how it might be one of the books that launched a thousand hockey ships.

We're talking about erotica vs. erotic romance vs. romance, about sexy secrets, about first names and about why it's always sexy when people say "I love you" in a foreign language.

If you want more Fated Mates in your life, please join our Patreon, which comes with an extremely busy and fun Discord community! Join other magnificent firebirds to hang out, talk romance, and be cool together in a private group full of excellent people. Learn more at patreon.com.

The Books

Notes

Visit the Fated Mates Collections Department for great romance recommendations organized by micro tropes, characteristics, subgenres, or things like Virgin Heroes. Check out Jen’s collection Hoop! (There It Is) and listen to the 1993 hit song, Whoomp! (There It Is) by Tag Team.
Barnes & Noble and Amazon holding sales during Independent Bookstore day felt super icky. If you missed it this year, maybe you can find a great indie to visit next year. It’s always the last Saturday in April.
Alan Ritchson is Jack Reacher, Alan Rickman is not.
On the road to the NHL, the World Juniors is pretty important.
Professional sports are notably homophobic, especially the NHL despite its history of hosting pride nights. Luke Prokop is the only openly gay professional hockey player, but he does not play in the NHL at this time. The professional sports league with the most openly queer players is the WNBA, which also has a past history of enforcing certain gender norms and gender presentation for its players.
Leagues create rivalries between players and teams in order to promote their brand and ratings. A WNBA case study is Angel Reese & Caitlin Clark.

The Rest

For even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2025/4/28/0733-heated-rivalry-by-rachel-reid
If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It’s so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates.
Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough.
If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Right before I walked into my office, Jen, Eric said to me, don't forget to talk about the collections.
0:06.4	Bring up Virgin Heroes. That'll set Jen off.
0:09.1	Oh, my God.
0:11.6	Okay, so first of all, I am obsessed with collections.
0:16.0	Okay, tell everybody what they've won with collections.
0:18.7	So Eric had this great idea, which is that we should
0:22.7	essential, like, you know, like our, we have pages that are like, okay, it's enemies to lovers. You can
0:27.2	look at these books. But we really, there's so many people who have great ideas about like
0:32.0	microtropes, right? Like smaller, like, right, a smaller way to organize or collect a series of books.
0:37.4	And one of the reasons that
0:38.9	this becomes, I think, especially important now. And this was, I think, Eric's idea, too, is that it is
0:43.9	harder and harder to find good lists of romances on the internet. Right. When you and I started,
0:49.4	you could easily be like, all right, give me, you know, blah, blah, blah romance. And you could
0:53.7	easily find people's lists. But now, oh, blah, blah, romance, and you could easily find
0:54.4	people's list.
0:55.2	But now, oh, the internet is just slop.
0:57.9	It's so hard.
0:58.6	It's too big.
0:59.5	There's impossible to discover things.
1:01.1	Right.
1:01.4	It's, right.
1:02.3	And so he was like, let's get, you know, people essentially like, our listeners, authors,
	...

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