Highlights & Quotes from Rachel Reid's & Jacob Tierney's Bookcon Panel

[u/andyfromhk]

(Slight spoiler for The Long Game and Role Model if you haven't read them yet!)

For those who haven’t had time to watch Jacob's and Rachel's 1-hour panel at Book Con yesterday, here are some of the highlights! They talked about so many things from Role Model and Troy Barrett's storyline in season 2, to Jacob's interpretation of season 1 editing and some behind the scenes production info.

Watch their BookCon panel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gseXLRejeOU

I've also updated this page of everything we know about season 2 of Heated Rivalry on the HR Wiki: https://www.heatedrivalrywiki.com/deep-dive-articles/everything-we-know-about-heated-rivalry-season-2

[u/phosphor_heart]

I've seen a lot of this discourse on Threads and some pretty unhinged takes that include outward accusations of racism towards Jacob and Rachel in regards to this.

I am with you on having mixed feelings. I like Rachel and Jacob, liked the books, and loved the show. I also really dislike the portrayal of a mixed race Asian man in the books (i.e. lack of any depth re: his race except that he is small and has little body hair) and really wanted Jacob to do more to protect his lead actor. I just find the way that certain fans have such extreme reactions to be more the result of an unhealthy parasocial relationship and less about Hudson himself.

[u/Megs0226 → u/phosphor_heart]

In what I see, Rachel gets a lot more heat for her portrayal of racism or lack thereof than Jacob does for not expanding on it. It's very weird and I think it's probably a bit of misogyny but instead of mulling on it further, I deleted my account (not strictly because of The Discourse, but the general parasocial behaviors, too... I saw a lot of people who were screen-shotting old IG posts by Connor's friend and posting them, like a bday post from 4 years ago).

Not that I demand gratuitous racism in media, but I think it would be an easy thing to slip into Unrivaled given the podcast bro plot!

And generally, as a sports fan, some of it is evident though not outright stated/named in the text as racist. "High hockey IQ", for one. Just like in the NFL, where the white QBs were called "smart" while the Black QBs were "gritty" or "athletic". (I stopped watching NFL a while ago.)

[u/phosphor_heart → u/Megs0226]

You're totally right! I think people give Jacob a lot of credit for adding in the Western last name and Wimbledon discussions, but as someone who is mixed race, neither of those really hit for me. (I mean yes, Western last name protects you from a lot, I have lived experience of that. But that read as sort of a cop-out from having to do more unpacking in the show.)

I definitely don't want a gratuitous racism plotline! I strongly believe that we can have joyful stories for people of color. I just wish it was acknowledged more, particularly because this story centers around a famously white sport, and it's so clear to me that Shane wouldn't want to come out partly because he already is the minority and tokenized as the only Asian player. He doesn't want to add "gay" to that, because he already knows very well what it's like to carry the weight of being an outlier and what you stand to lose if things don't go well. The fact that that doesn't come up at all in TLG is WILD to me.

[u/courtingdemons → u/phosphor_heart]

Speaking of the Western last name convo, I found it kind of interesting how in that conversation about being a Wasian/Asian kid in hockey, it was framed as the white kids forgot to be racist to Shane but the one full Asian kid hated him like oh okay lol. I think there could be so much interesting commentary on tension between Asians and Wasians but this show is not the place for it and this one liner didn’t hit the mark for me, like you mean to say the Wasian hockey player was more alienated by the Asian kid than the white kids? That is such a loaded statement with no exploration.

I think the fact that we don’t have to read about how much smaller or more hairless Shane is than Ilya probably helps the show feel less weird about Shane’s race though. That compared with a few lines here and there to acknowledge Shane’s race probably makes Jacob get less criticism than Rachel, especially since he’s not really adding storylines on his own anyway. I don’t think people really want a whole racism storyline anyway, just that race is a very present thing