Hockey romance Heated Rivalry just wrapped up its first season on HBO Max—meaning fans of the show will have to turn to other sources to get their steamy fix. There’s always the source-material books, Rachel Reid’s Game Changers; the TV show adapts the first two, but there are six total in the queer, sports-themed series. And now there’s an adjacent option that will especially appeal to io9 readers: Heated Rivalry stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams are entering the realm of romantasy.
As Variety reports, “The actors are set to narrate Ember & Ice, Quinn’s three-episode immersive audio romance. Per the official logline, Ember & Ice follows fae princes Dane and Finn from rival Solari and Lunare kingdoms. The series, ‘set in a richly imagined fantasy world shaped by history, duty, and forbidden desire,’ is ‘a story about choosing love in defiance of expectation’ and amplifies ‘every moment of tension, longing, and intimacy.’”
All that’s missing, in other words, is an ice rink. Quinn, described by the trade as “the leading audio erotica platform and the destination for female-first audio erotica,” will drop the first two Ember & Ice episodes December 30; the third one arrives January 6, according to Cosmopolitan. You can find out more and listen to a preview here.
Romantasy might have once been a bit of a punch line, but those days are well in the past. Not only is the genre presently stuffed with bestsellers from authors like Rebecca Yarros, Sarah J. Maas, and Carissa Broadbent, but it’s also filtered into other parts of culture: Hulu’s animated alien show Solar Opposites had a whole romantasy-author subplot in its final season. And Carol Sturka, the wry main character in the Apple TV sci-fi series Pluribus, just so happens to be a famous romantasy author.
“I read a couple of chapters of a couple of different styles, just to hear some different cadences, and frankly I was more surprised by, I’m embarrassed to say, the breadth of different styles of the romantic genre,” Pluribus star Rhea Seehorn told io9 in a recent interview. “It’s not like they’re all written like these steamy novels. I went to the Ripped Bodice, which is a romance novel store here in Culver City, and I was blown away by how many subgenres there are and how specific it gets. And I went to a couple of book readings, and just listening to the fans talk about the author was very eye-opening.”
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