Uneducated Guess: Heated Rivalry

 

So I was talking to my buddy my pal Justin today and we got to the topic of hit movie "Crazy Rich Asians" of which neither of us have seen (edit: I haven’t seen it, but Justin has), and he made a good (probably satirical) question about the movie's big reputation "Do you think people just say it's good because if they say otherwise it'd be racist?". I found this extremely funny and accurate and so I was inspired to start this series, Uneducated Guess, where I will write blogs about works I do not want to see, probably won't ever see, and make up scenarios about what I think it is about and why I won't see it. I can either be completely SO off, or 1000% accurate, but overall, no one can make me start the series or movie and that's the satisfaction I get about just blindly firing into the dark here.

So the first victim is Heated Rivalry. I'm an avid consumer of yaoi, let me come out the gate and say this right now. I like a good casual read once in a while, making ships (at an appropriate level, some of you are insane), and exploring queerness in television and literature. So when Heated Rivalry came out and everyone was freaking out about it I thought eventually I should give it a try. THEN it started becoming TOO popular and I lost interest because I HAVE to be different (it's actually about how the more popular a queer piece is, the less likely it'll actually be about romance but rather fetishization but that's a whole other blogpost). 

What I saw of the series:

- The first 5 minutes (I don't like to watch the series if it takes too long to get in the action so hard pass)

- Some edits (some raunchy ones, was not appealing)

- Some information about the author on Twitter (notoriously reputable news source)

- RELENTLESS MARKETING OF HUDSON WILLIAMS WEEKS BEFORE I EVEN HEARD OF THE DAMN THING. 

Firstly, I think that Heated Rivalry follows a same old "enemies to lovers" trope, which has been written about since B.A. (Before AO3). There's a real problem here with oldheads of Wattpad having latched onto this trope and not letting go since 2012. I believe in the indomitable human spirit, but truly at one point we have to retire some of these themes. ESPECIALLY if you're not going to write it in any other different fashion. 

Guy meets guy > They hate eachother >  Hate sex > One guy has a mental breakdown, they both have hidden pains > Hate sex > Love???

So they're both humans, in the current century, who just happen to be the peakest form of human beings but somehow still realistic, literally just two top athlete dudes. That's just fanfiction writing. 

Yet another similar series is Red, White & Royal Blue (RWB). Similar to HR (Heated Rivalry), RWB was also a big deal in its early days. Enemies to lovers of the SON OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and the SON OF THE KING OF ENGLAND. Come on now, at one point you have to think about at least giving one of them horns or magic or SOMETHING?? I genuinely (unfortunately) saw the entire thing and can tell you now, no part is memorable nor is it remarkable in any way. There's really no struggle to yearn for one another, if you're two of the most important big deal characters in your universe, hence there's no tension to see where the couple goes. Badly written novels about romance tends to focus on a rushed summary of the internal monologue of characters, instead of any research on the people or any regard to the surrounding characters/environment to contribute at all, leaving a bland husk, unecessarily decorated with meaningless sex bait. 

Which brings me to my second point, lust. I saw a reel the other day, a skit about a woman's friends reassuring her dead body in a coffin that they'd deleted all of her pornography and cleared out her room. One friend mentioned she'd deleted Heated Rivalry from her devices, which made me realize that for the first time in my life, a hobby of mine is actually extremely mainstream, so much so that straight women are participating. And straight women? They treat queer art like straight men do, with the bravado of someone who has never/will never experience it, and thus applying their learned perception of what a "spicy" romance is like. With its painful lack of plot aside from the scrambled together familial trauma and stress from being the top athlete ever, the story serves as goon bait for the average heteronormative/mainstream viewers, reducing the characters to men who make love and are attractive, making it easy to flaunt as cosmetically attractive and encouraging viewers to the honestly lackluster writing. The characters are presented exactly as they are, assumptions from a straight woman about how gay men must make love, projected onto straight men. 

Maybe it's a disjointed perspective of women in the patriarchy, playing along to a set of rules that neither benefit them nor were created for them at all. Society as we know it as women, coexisting with men has always been like playing a video game with your big sibling, convinced that you’re contributing on the same level, blissfully unaware the controller has been off the entire time. This is why, straight or gay, any time I'm faced with a straight female-written gay relationship, I’ve always been a little bit more reserved to explore the type of media to straight up mentally boycotting it.

——————————————————— 3 months later (11/08/2026) ———————————-

Hi, I’m back from a while of not blogging/lowkey forgetting about the blogs i was mid-writing. 

Still haven’t watched HR, still not going to watch it, and have been vindicated by all of the stuff coming out about Hudson Williams!!!!!!!!

Life is good when things go my way. Never giving a gay life action romance a chance unless it’s between two heavily researched historical/sci-fi/supernatural mains ever again. At least with the other one it gives the incentive to do some exploring on how gay people are like/what we actually want, preventing the furthering of misunderstanding and distancing a lot of us from mainstream media.

Existential Dread #2

 

Manufactured Insanity: The Preconceived Notion that Insists on Itself. 

A.k.a Making fun of Finance Bros. 

Today, I was on Facebook when I saw a post from my mom's acquaintance - a news-reporter-turned-finance-bro. She's always been quite a stickler for "breaking out" of the norm of the average office worker, to be something greater (financially) and more superior (capitalistically). To be short, she's a go-getter.

I recently asked for her help on some job searching, and in response she made me fill up a full self-assessment of my strengths and weaknesses + all the things I thought I could pitch for myself as an individual. She was real good at her job of persuasion and "selling" oneself, I'll give you that! But it all felt like a gimmick to me.

Obviously, everything I'm mentioning here has been discussed by someone before, it's all the "hype" right now, discussing and disparaging late stage capitalism, pointing out big corps and their monopolizing, so it may not seem like a hot take, but there's a plot twist!

So after I'd done all this work that I deemed meaningless, put on a narrative that I'm this great cog in the machine, and sent it to her, she is then unable to get back to me or help me in any other way past her initial critique that I wasn't "putting in enough strengths". None, zero updates, zero responses, no type of additional help whatsoever after I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and commodified myself. 

And that's just the thing that capitalism would do to you. Sometimes, it feels as if there's an invisible standard where only some people are capable of unlocking: doing JUST enough to still get paid, but at the same time doing WAY too much for the pay you're given. I believe the essence of capitalism is that of a young man who uses "negging" on women, where he deliberately insults/teases her to make her lower her values and self-esteem so he can actually win her over. Capitalism makes you feel as if you're never enough but at the same time too much to handle, and that's how you stay manageable while also being helpful to it. 

If I'm being honest, I don't want to participate in capitalism, I don't want to benefit the people who won't even see me or know who I am/what I do. It feels all very redundant and suffocating, but I KNOW that I will have to one way or another, as my worth is marked by how many dollars I have, that my kindness, my wit and my lived experiences are either tied to it or was created from it. 

It's really stupid, really - sometimes it makes me dissociates altogether. What if when I was born, I made up this whole scenario in my head that "capitalism" and "job" was a real thing, and I've just been living in a fever dream this whole entire time? It could be so, and they'd call it maladaptive daydreaming, and refer me to a doctor who then will take my hard earned money to tell me I should spend more of it on medication that will make me want to spend even more money. Because behind all of our wants, needs and interests that make us human, doesn't capitalism just reduce us to walking money bags of different sizes?

And now to the finance bros - to be able to participate in such a system, one has to be so down bad to prove themself that it borders on ridiculous. If you'd told me, as a flex that you were at Silicone Valley doing a procedure, I'd have thought you were getting a BBL! I'm not sure what they got going on, or what kinda way you have to be raised to become such a lifeless, unthinking machine who's willing to ignore everything meaningful for profit. I once saw an international-student-influencer bragging about how he was going to Wharton to study finance, and he'd added Donald J. Trump as a prominent figure who'd also gone there. Oh great! So you went to poop school, where fart also attended! At least pick a less obvious bad guy, like Obama or something.

It's one of those jobs that fund everything, but are never talked about. It's really thankless, in the way that the people holding these jobs will never ever thank their loved ones for placing the stepping stones to help them get to where they are more than they thank the shareholders that made small talk with them two times at an event where they serve tiny little olives. They'd never thank the prominent figures in history that stood up so they could go to school and be successful (looking at you, AI-promoting influencers who came from a marginalized community). Rather, they'd clown on those people for being activists and caring about the environment, or the communities under active attack. 

Maybe ungratefulness and unfulfillment are the twin brothers that make up Finance as a major, and the more you put in the less you take out.

Existential dread #1

Unfinished Works vs Atomic Bombs

 I feel as if I worry about too many things, and they won't ever be accomplished, as in the grand scheme of things I am but a little space dust born from two old space dusts who work at space dust broadcasting station in a little country.

So I limit myself to just thinking of the simple things when it comes to things that would actively be useful to me in my life, or in case of an apocalypse, but pour my heart and soul into researching stuff that seem so far away (and are far away) to feign interest in things that realistically don't involve me at all (whether it will affect me or not is a different story/blog post entirely).

For example, Charlie Kirk dying... will it affect me? Yes, a maniac is in office and adores that guy, I live in Canada, we can all get nuked immediately tomorrow. But does it involve me? Not really, will a letter from the white house be sent to my doorstep asking about why I talked so much shit about him pre-mortem and even more post-mortem? Not likely. Logically I know to obsess over that too much isn't normal nor is it healthy. BUT I do anyway, because deep down I correlate that to all the times I wasn't popular in high school and so wasn't in the know for a loooot of stuff, so I wanted to be included, I guess. But the nerd/inferiority complex having individual inside of me wants/wanted to be included in things that are cool and big and important. 

Surely, talking about big stuff others don't usually talk about as they're busy having a life and living in the moment would make it so that the attention would fall onto me. And I love it when I have everyone's attention. We talk shit about the people who were never popular in high school, so they turn that resentment into bullying others in spaces that they are popular in later in life, just to experience what it's like. I like to think my version is one of the less toxic option to be born out of that type of environment.

Now on the OTHER hand, I didn't know WACK about keeping a space tidy for productivity, having an efficient workflow to do art, or how to do an interview with a lady I've never met before to work some lame office job for 35 years. They seem important, but for my dopamine addicted brain, they seem so far away and boring... I should probably change that.

I think artists' works reflect their current state of mind as well, and mine are clumsy, unfinished and get forgotten a lot. It could be something positive, like there's room for improvement, something like that. But also, when I have an unsteady perspective or it feels floatey, I get a bit nauseaus spacially and emotionally looking at it, if that makes sense.