Treena Orchard

It is fabulous to be here.

Well, when I first saw it, and I should say that I'm on my fifth viewing.

No, no, no, no.

When I first saw it, I didn't know what hit me.

I didn't know what to expect.

I hadn't read any of the books.

I'm not a huge romance fan.

I know nothing about hockey.

And I was hit with, like, a bag of bricks.

I was... Well, first of all, the main characters, Shane and Ilya, are sumptuous to look at.

And you could... Just the amount of tension between them.

It was so... It was electric.

It was charged.

It kept me wanting to know what is going to happen, you know?

And I was just... I was hooked immediately.

And I had...

No idea how much I would fall in love with this show, like so many people, and how much of my time it would soon occupy.

I think it sometimes has to do with who's writing the books and who's producing the media.

Because if it's sort of the normal cis het kind of folks writing the books and being the producers and directors and showrunners, we're going to get some of those same sort of myths and stories repeated.

And I think that having queer folks in important positions of power producing media, we are going to get stuff that is much more representative and that makes space for