Heated Rivalry: Why Even Women Enjoy Watching 'Boy Love' Genre?

Since its release, Heated Rivalry, the steamy gay hockey romance adapted from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers books, has become a cultural phenomenon. What began as niche genre fiction has snowballed into a mainstream hit, drawing tens of thousands of women, queer viewers, and even casual fans into its orbit. But what exactly explains this widespread appeal? The answer lies at the intersection of psychology, gender politics, and fantasy.

A Romance That Doesn’t Reinforce Misogyny

Part of Heated Rivalry’s popularity, particularly among women, stems from what it doesn’t depict: stories defined by gendered power imbalance.

As the Guardian reports, many female viewers find the romance between its two closeted hockey players refreshing precisely because it sidesteps the kind of misogyny and hierarchy so common in heterosexual romances.

Fans describe Heated Rivalry as a space where romance feels equal, where neither partner holds power over the other simply by virtue of gender, giving a sense of liberation.

Scholars have long pointed out that conventional romance narratives, both literary and onscreen, often rely on male dominance and female submission as structural pillars.

In contrast, the male-male love stories that define Heated Rivalry and boys’ love (BL) allow women to engage in erotic and emotional fantasy without placing themselves in the role of the object of male desire or the bearer of vulnerability. 

BL and Yaoi: A History

To understand Heated Rivalry’s place in this lineage, we need to look back at the origins of boys’ love and yaoi.

Beginning in Japan in the 1970s as homoerotic manga created largely by women for women, these genres evolved through fan communities and amateur parody before becoming commercial mainstays of anime and manga culture.

Yaoi, an acronym playfully understood as “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi” (“no climax, no ending, no meaning”), was originally used to describe sexually explicit fan works that prioritized desire over plot.

Over time, boy’s love (BL) became the preferred catch-all term in Japan and abroad for romantic and erotic male–male narratives.

The academic literature on BL highlights that this genre functions as a form of gender play: it allows readers to explore masculinity and femininity outside the constraints of biological sex or heteronormative roles.

Roles like seme (dominant) and uke (submissive) are not fixed by gender but by relational dynamics, revealing a fluid interplay of traits rather than a strict male-female binary.

A 2025 study by Ágnes Zsila, Dru Pagliassotti, and colleagues breaks new ground by systematically measuring the full range of motives behind yaoi media consumption with a large international sample.

Using the newly developed Yaoi Consumption Motives Questionnaire (YCMQ), the researchers identified nine major motive dimensions for consuming yaoi media:

• desire for romance beyond gendered expectations
• deflection and using stories to understand one’s own emotions or identity
• attraction to intense feelings and narrative affect,
• preference for alternatives to stereotypical female-centred narratives
• erotica structured around women’s preferences,
• fantasy and relief from daily life
• visual or emotional beauty in character and composition
• enjoyment and relaxation
• erotic stimulation and fantasy fulfillment.

The researchers also looked at how motives differ by gender and sexual orientation: women scored higher on motives tied to female-oriented romance and erotics, while male fans tended to score higher on identification/self-analysis.

Non-heterosexual readers scored higher on almost all motives except the female-oriented erotic dimension, indicating that BL and yaoi often serve as meaningful representations for queer audiences as well.

This reveals that while specific motives vary, many consumers share a general enthusiasm for the genre as a whole, in line with the idea that BL and yaoi offer multitudes of pleasure rather than catering to a monolithic appeal.

Whatever the motive, it speaks to a fundamental shift in how audiences want to experience love stories: not dominated by gender hierarchy, but freed from it.

Views expressed by the author are their own.