If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the last like six months, you’ve felt the Heated Rivalry shockwave. The Canadian hockey romance about Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, two (heated) rival players hiding a decade-long relationship, became the number one show on HBO Max and turned a generation of viewers into people who suddenly have a lot of feelings about fictional hockey.
I’m one of them. The yearning is immaculate. I yearn to yearn.
But this isn’t really about the show. It’s about a six-minute scene at the end of episode four, “Rose.” Shane and Ilya are at a club, each there with someone else, and they spend the whole sequence locked in eye contact across the room while everything else falls away.
The yearning.
And the song playing over it is “All The Things She Said.” The original t.A.T.u. version starts, and then, in a move that’s almost too perfect, it morphs mid-scene into a pulsing dance cover by a London producer named Harrison. The old version becoming a new one, right as you watch.
The needle-drop went nuclear. The week after the episode dropped, t.A.T.u.’s original more than doubled its streams to 1.3 million in four days. Harrison’s cover, which had been sitting basically unnoticed since 2022, jumped a frankly unhinged 114,173 percent to over 685,000 streams, and went on to land at number 55 on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100. A twenty-three-year-old song got a second life because a queer show used it to say something true.
Which is where it gets complicated. Because here’s the thing nobody screaming this song on TikTok this winter seems to know: “All The Things She Said” has one of the grimmer backstories in pop music, and the fact that it’s now soundtracking pure queer joy is either the most beautiful kind of justice or a really efficient way to bury a body. I genuinely go back and forth.
So consider this your “in case you didn’t know.”
The setup
t.A.T.u. was Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, two girls from Moscow. The whole project was the idea of a man named Ivan Shapovalov, who before he got into music was, and I want you to sit with this, a child psychologist who then moved into advertising. Keep that resume in mind. It matters.
In 1999, Shapovalov held auditions for a teenage girl group. He picked Katina and Volkova. They were fourteen. Both of them. Fourteen year old children.
And the concept he built around these two fourteen-year-olds was that they were a lesbian couple. Specifically, a pair of schoolgirls secretly in love. The band’s name, in the original Russian, is slang that translates roughly to “this girl loves that girl.” The whole brand, from the jump, was underage girls in school uniforms making out.
Shapovalov has been pretty open about where this came from, and it’s exactly as bad as you’re bracing for. He’s talked about being inspired by the internet’s appetite for, and I’m putting this more delicately than he did, content involving young girls. He’s reportedly described the concept as an “underage sex project” meant to provoke. The video for “All The Things She Said,” the famous one with the two of them kissing in the rain behind a chain-link fence while disapproving adults look on, was made when Katina and Volkova were fourteen and fifteen.
I want to be clear about what that means, because it’s easy to let it slide past as trivia. A grown man with a background in child psychology engineered a sexualized image of two actual children, sold it to the world, and made a fortune. The “forbidden lesbian love” framing wasn’t a brave statement. It was pedo bait. The disapproving adults in that video aren’t the villains. The guy who built the video is.
The part where it stings
Here’s where it gets complicated for someone like me, a queer woman who genuinely loves this song.
For a lot of people, “All The Things She Said” was the first time they ever saw two women kiss on a screen. This was 2002 and 2003. There was almost nothing else. No streaming, barely any representation, “The L Word” hadn’t even aired yet. For a closeted kid flipping past a music channel, two girls singing about a love that everyone around them was trying to shut down hit like a lightning bolt. A whole generation of queer people, especially queer women, claim this song. It still gets played at every gay bar I’ve ever set foot in. The longing in it is real, even though the people performing it were faking.
That’s the cruel little knot at the center of this. The feeling was real for us even though it was fake for them. Katina and Volkova came out as straight in 2003 and confirmed the whole thing was a marketing strategy. Honestly, fine. They were teenagers handed a script by a predatory adult and told to perform it. I don’t blame two kids for what a forty-something man built around them. They’ve said themselves they were told what to do and even what to say in interviews. That part isn’t on them.
What is on them, or at least on one of them, is what came later.
In 2014, Volkova went on Russian television and said some genuinely vile things about gay people. She said she could accept lesbians because they’re nicer to look at, but that she’d never accept a gay son, that she’d want him to be “a real man.” She used a slur. This is the same woman who built her early fame pretending to be a lesbian, cashing checks that queer fans helped write, and then turned around and said she’d be ashamed of a gay child.
That’s the one that gets me. Not the marketing scheme, which is gross but at least makes a cynical kind of sense. The betrayal is the after. It’s taking everything that community poured into the song and spitting it back.
What Heated Rivalry actually did
Now put that next to the show that just revived it.
Heated Rivalry is the exact opposite of t.A.T.u. in every way that counts. It was developed, written, and directed by Jacob Tierney, who has said he was drawn to the project for its “pure queer joy.” It’s adapted faithfully from a novel by a queer author, Rachel Reid. The leads were cast with real intention. It’s a sincere queer love story made by queer people for an audience that’s been starving for exactly this. Where t.A.T.u. was queerness manufactured by a straight man as bait, Heated Rivalry is queerness made from the inside, on purpose, with care.
And that show reached back twenty-three years, picked up the most notorious fake-queer pop song ever recorded, and used it to score one of the most genuinely yearning scenes on television. In doing that, it kind of finished a job the fans started in 2003. We spent two decades insisting this song meant something real despite where it came from. Heated Rivalry took that insistence and made it canon. The song finally got to be the thing we always pretended it was.
That’s the beautiful reading, and a real part of me believes it. There’s something almost restorative about it. The artifact got taken away from the creep who made it and handed to the people it was stolen from. The cover morphing out of the original in that club scene is the whole story in miniature: the old exploitative thing transforming, in real time, into something new that belongs to us now.
The thing I can’t stop turning over
But reshaping a legacy cuts both ways, and I’d be lying if I pretended the hopeful version is the whole story.
Because there’s a kid right now who just watched episode four, felt their chest crack open during that club scene, and went and added “All The Things She Said” to a playlist with zero idea that two fourteen-year-olds were sexualized to make it. They don’t know about Shapovalov. They don’t know about the video. They sure don’t know about Volkova in 2014. To them this is just the gorgeous song from the gay hockey show. And every reshaping of a legacy is also an erasure of the version underneath it.
That’s the actual consequence of changing what a piece of media means. You can reshape it right past the harm. The more beloved the new context, the more completely the old one disappears. A song that should arguably come with a content warning is now wrapped in so much sincere queer affection that the warning will never reach the people inheriting it. Reclamation and laundering can be the exact same motion. It just depends on whether anyone remembers to tell the story underneath.
So I don’t have a clean landing for you, and I don’t really want one. “All The Things She Said” is a perfect pop song built on the exploitation of children, later disowned by one of the women who sang it, and now lovingly resurrected by one of the best queer love stories on TV. All of that is true at once. You’re allowed to feel your chest crack open during that club scene. You’re allowed to scream it on the dance floor. I do.
Just know what you’re singing. That’s the whole ask. Reshape the legacy all you want, take it, make it ours, let Shane and Ilya have it. But don’t let the new version be so pretty that the fourteen-year-olds vanish completely. They’re the reason the song exists. The least we can do is remember they were there.
Doesn’t make it slap any less. That’s kind of the problem.
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