Honestly, I wasn't sure I was going to have time to write anything about Heated Rivalry this week, but coffee and spite might very well be the things that fuel me to get it done

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My WIP theory is that they saw the story begins with the MCs meeting as teenagers, but didn’t read far enough along to account for the multiple timejumps

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That’s also very likely, especially if they didn’t read further to see there are time jumps!

I don’t even think this is coming from critics who know or have read the books, TBH, but it’s also possible they image-searched the covers on Google and came to a certain conclusion!

But mostly every time I see Heated Rivalry described as a YA romance adaptation a part of my soul shrivels up and floats away

I feel like a lot of it can be broken out into: readers who are passionately protective of the books, critics who aren’t romance readers engaging without that genre knowledge, folks unknowingly relitigating old discourse about m/m romance, and then the hot take dispensers that the algorithm boosts

It’s probably a good thing that most of the discourse about this show has shot past me because even the summarizing takes about it have been infuriating!

Truthfully, I have an Idea for a piece about this week’s episode but I have to see if there’s time to write it!

I feel like performance effectiveness is probably its own separate discussion — I'm only going off of the more general observations I've read about the show validating a closer watch in the unfortunate era of second-screen viewing, rather than anything focused on acting capabilities.

That could be! I haven't read the books myself, so I don't have the original writing to compare it to, but I have read a lot of romance so that may be making it easier to pick up on the no-dialogue moments in which the acting is successfully capturing the introspection

This — I think the interiority of romance is something that TV has long struggled with adapting, so when a show gets it right through the writing and the acting, it gets distilled through a certain lens (which is where, I assume, the "microexpressions" shorthand is coming from)

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