The ‘Heated Rivalry’ Mystique Reference Is More Than Just a Movie Gag

It’s not very often the chance to write about a gay hockey romance sensation pops up at a website that covers sci-fi, fantasy, and genre pop culture, but something caught my eye recently watching one of the last TV show sensations of 2025, Heated Rivalry, and it wasn’t just the steamy, sentimental love story between Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.

In episode five of the series, a brief phone conversation between the aforementioned Hollander and his former romantic partner, Rose Landry, sees Rose—an actress and one of the few people that knows that Shane is actually gay—take the call mid-makeup session from a movie trailer. She’s apparently filming for a superhero blockbuster and is presently being painted head-to-toe in dark blue body paint, as she laments to Shane about doing reshoots. “I miss being kidnapped,” she says. “I regret shapeshifting.”

If the blue body paint and the scarlet wig in the background of the makeup trailer weren’t obvious hints enough, that line should be the moment you realize that this is, of course, a nod to Mystique and the Fox X-Men films—a reference series showrunner Jacob Tierney confirmed in press interviews as the Canadian series’ tribute to Montreal’s superhero moviemaking legacy (and Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of the character in particular). It’s perhaps oddly fitting that Rose also briefly complains that the movie makes no sense, considering original Fox X-Men Mystique actress Rebecca Romijn recently discussed how she was filming her return to the character in Avengers: Doomsday while the script was still being finished, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’s a nice nod, especially considering that, in a roundabout way, Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, which serves as the show’s source material, had a brush with Marvel movie fanfic in its own origin story. There were plenty of female mutants Tierney could’ve thrown a nod to in Heated Rivalry to make that gag, but as brief as it is, there’s something incredibly fitting about Mystique being the one the show chose to give to Rose in this moment, considering the character’s own long stint in the glass closet in Marvel’s comics.

While Mystique was introduced by her creators Chris Claremont and David Cockrum in the pages of Ms. Marvel in the late 1970s, her transition to a regular mainstay of Claremont’s legendary run on Uncanny X-Men shortly after rapidly intertwined Raven’s personal life with that of Irene Adler, the precognitive mutant Destiny, when the latter was introduced as a member of Mystique’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in 1981. From the get-go, while never explicitly stated, it was clear that Raven and Irene had a deep bond together that went beyond merely comrades in arms.

Destiny and Mystique comfort each other among other members of the Brotherhood in the Chris Claremont-penned Avengers Annual #10. © Michael Golden, Armando Gil, and Joe Rosen/Marvel Comics

The only other female member of Mystique’s brotherhood at the time—and the only other member Mystique actually even remotely got along with, let alone was as friendly with as they were—over the next almost-decade before Destiny’s death (have no fear, it’s X-Men comics; she got better, multiple times even), Raven and Irene were depicted with about as much intimacy as could be gotten away with at the time without explicitly describing them as lovers, to borrow a term that Shane hates. The two lived together and helped raise Rogue as adoptive mothers; upon Destiny’s death, she left a message for Mystique after she scattered her ashes, predicting that the latter would find romance and solace after her death with Forge (which she did, for a brief time).

Claremont stated multiple times over the years that it was always his intent that Mystique and Destiny were in a queer relationship together—and that Marvel editorial hesitance and the lingering threat of the conservative censorship of the Comics Code Authority prohibited them from being presented as such during his run time on X-Men. It would take another 30 years, well after Marvel had started slowly incorporating more and more queer characters into its comics, for Mystique and Destiny’s relationship to become explicit during the Krakoan Age of X-Men comics, when Mystique demanded that she wanted her wife to be resurrected from the grave in 2020’s X-Men #6. It would take another three years, at the twilight of the Krakoan Age, to confirm another of Claremont’s long-held plans for the duo: that Mystique’s vastly powerful shapeshifting powers allowed her to change her genetic material so she could impregnate Destiny, making them both the biological parents of their other mutant child, Nightcrawler.

Even before it became explicit in Marvel continuity that they were lovers and had been for decades (they’re even married now, renewing their vows in Marvel Comics’ first on-page same-sex female wedding in 2024), Mystique had long been an influential and enduring element of queer readings of the X-Men comics and the mutant metaphor’s parallel to gender and sexual identity. Not just for what was still obvious in the text—that she was a queer person herself existing outside of the gender binary—but for what she represented as a queer character who couldn’t be identified as such due to years of homophobic standards and perceptions. She represented not just queerness in herself, but what happens when people try to sweep that identity under the rug and deny what has always been there.

So it’s fitting, then, that Heated Rivalry gives Rose the role of Mystique—and fittingly leaves it directly unsaid, no doubt for legal reasons as much as dramatic ones—in a moment where she is one of the only people Shane has been able to confide in about his own identity as a gay man and is encouraging him to start sharing that identity with the people he loves. Heated Rivalry‘s creative team may have only intended the moment to be a nod to Canada’s superhero movie past, but in choosing Mystique, it added a wonderful comic book layer to the show’s queer storytelling too.

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