I'm All Caught Up On Gay Hockey Smut, So Lesbian Hockey Smut is Obviously Next

The Long Game by Rachel Reid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Long Game represents, or perhaps is a reflection of, or maybe just came at the right time for me to find the similarity with my own disappointment at falling out of love with men’s professional hockey. I’ve complained over and over again throughout this series that I don’t get what the big deal is about dating your “rival,” that I don’t understand why Ilya and Shane, if nothing else, didn’t at least actively rewrite the myth of their rivalry (it would have been so easy, considering that they’re not actually rivals off the ice!), and that I don’t agree with their assumption that in the universe in which they live, they simply have to stay closeted until retirement. And so in this book, we finally get the big moment in which everything that I’ve been complaining about will be resolved, and I get to see the ultimate plan that will make everything I didn’t understand or agree with make sense.

And… huh.

So, okay. On the one hand, The Long Game does clarify a few things, mainly how impossible it would have been for Shane to come out before this, what with his black and white, catastrophic thinking. He’s very autism-coded, and explicitly orthorexic, and has a few other characteristics that weren’t as clearly depicted in Heated Rivalry that do make me see how he’d choose this closeted life for himself, and for Ilya by default. But then that just leads me to the dead-end that perhaps they’re not as well-matched a couple as they’d like to believe, because Ilya so very clearly needs to be out, deserves a vast found family and support system, and is suffering in this self-imposed isolation of their secret. Add to that the fact that both men are palpably miserable when they have to play their “we’re rivals on and off the ice” roles, and this depiction starts to make it seem like they should part from each other with love.

But that’s obviously not where the book wants to go with their relationship, which I guess leads to this forced outing, since letting them come out on their own terms isn’t a very dramatic conclusion to this angsty and dramatic state of being. I don’t like it for them, but whatever.

I just hate that everything has to be as black and white as Shane’s internal monologue! We’ve got to get Shane onto the Centaurs with Ilya, but he can’t just choose Ilya even though he loves his team--nope, he’s got to get completely emotionally destroyed by people he thought were his friends, and betrayed by a team he’s always been devoted to. It’s as bad as that time that I was so excited one morning to watch the Men’s USA hockey team win Gold, and then they immediately managed to perform toxic masculinity so passionately that by the evening I was no longer a fan of the NHL. It’s fine, though, because the PWHL is even better.

Along those same lines, that’s kind of why I’m not very excited to hear that Reid is working on another Ilya/Shane book next. I know they got their happy ending and almost all of our favorite queer men in hockey are now on the same team so at some point we’ve got to have a book in which Gay Hockey Wins the Stanley Cup, but I dunno. Even with that happy ending and the queer hockey revolution to look forward to, that forced outing and team betrayal have just left a bad taste in my mouth, and I’d rather have a reset, or at least a palate cleanse first. What I really wish is that Reid would write a women’s professional hockey book or two. There are so many adventures she could write about a fledgling professional sports league, so many queer stories to tell in which getting outed doesn’t have to be a plot point, and it would be so restful to have fun reading about hockey and romance in a profession in which toxic masculinity can take a backseat for a change.

Actually… that surely already exists, right? I mean, romances between people and dinosaurs exist--OBVIOUSLY PWHL-adjacent romances exist! Off to research queer women’s hockey romances!

A special shout-out just for the audiobook: I love that when Ilya speaks to his therapist his accent disappears and he talks just like a regular bro. Because of course he doesn’t have a Russian accent while he’s literally speaking Russian, but also? He’s just a guy! We are a world away from Kip’s speech-impedimented Brooklyn accent that the series’ previous narrator subjected us to, and I am SO happy about it.

Game Changer Reviews:

1. Game Changer, or, the Captain America AU hockey fanfic one
2. Heated Rivalry, or, the best one
3. Tough Guy, or at least it's not the real NHL
4. Common Goal, or, I hate Kyle
5. Role Model, or, a bully meets a nice guy and they fall in love
6. The Long Game, or, this is actually really depressing but I guess not as depressing as it could be *cough, cough* Brokeback Mountain *cough*

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