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On May 12, Amazon Prime Video dropped Season 1 of Off Campus, a steamy, friends-to-lovers story adapted from a book series by Elle Kennedy. At first glance, the show reads as the heterosexual rebuttal to Heated Rivalry, the HBO Max syndicate that dominated the final months of 2025. Both focus on hockey, and both include their fair share of full-frontal nudity. Both have soared in popularity: Heated Rivalry shattered record after record for the Home Box Office, while Off Campus earned 36 million viewers globally in its first 12 days of release.
But really, the show is another in a lineup ushering in a new era of hot guys. They’re both mega-popular love stories, but the men at the center of these shows aren’t the big beefy hunks that defined male ideals in the past. They’re smaller, softer, prettier. What is it about these guys that drives women crazy?
“Off Campus and Heated Rivalry are both nontraditional love stories for the average woman who dates men,” says Margeaux Sorenson, 27. For her, Heated Rivalry’s appeal comes from its love interests, Shane and Ilya, existing on a level playing field as two masculine-presenting men in a patriarchal world. She says those equitable power structures are adapted for a straight relationship in Off Campus, where “there wasn’t some weird patriarchal dynamic emphasized from the start.”
In the first three minutes of Off Campus, viewers are greeted by the traditional heartthrob stuff of the washboard abs and bare butt of Garrett (played by Belmont Cameli), hockey star at the fictional Briar University. The plot thickens as we meet Hannah (played by Ella Bright), a brainiac music major who strikes a very 10 Things I Hate About You deal with Garrett—she’ll tutor him if he poses as her boyfriend to attract the attention of her real crush, Justin (played by Josh Heuston). Of course, Garrett and Hannah naturally evolve into something real.
At this juncture, the show adds nuance to its soapy plotline. While Heated Rivalry challenges gendered paradigms by centering a gay relationship, Sorenson feels Off Campus challenges similar tropes through Hannah’s history of sexual assault. “When [Hannah] finally discloses her sexual assault to Garrett, she’s really emphatic that it doesn’t define her life and she doesn’t want him to see her differently because of it,” she explains. “[Garrett] 100 percent lets it be on her terms, so instead of having some weird savior complex, which is a trope we see so much in romance content, the woman has already saved herself.”
Valeriya Chupinina, 32, was pleasantly surprised by the men in the show, from Garrett’s teammate, John, suggesting he serve Hannah a sealed can of beer at a party, rather than a Solo cup (“Closed cans are safer, bro”), to the moment Garrett learns that Hannah’s assailant is on an opposing hockey team. “You think he’s going to explode, but he responds in this very supportive and caring way, which is kind of shocking,” she says. “It kind of made me believe in men again.”
Chupinina is responding to the modern construction of masculinity heavily influenced by the manosphere, where men are praised for devaluing women and treating other people poorly, where violence is all but a KPI of manhood. Figures like Clavicular have prioritized physical attractiveness above all, measured by a pseudoscientific scale of muscles and symmetry. And then there’s Andrew Tate, who equates women to children.
“We get so much content about toxic masculinity nonstop,” says Sorenson. “I think women are fiending for some representation of a man that isn’t just a big bully, who can also be vulnerable.”
In light of Heated Rivalry, some viewers have applied a queer lens to their favorite Off Campus guys. Countless TikTok fancams feature the show’s multiple male leads, set to a viral voice that demands, “Computa, make these guys super gay and horny.”
Sure, their on-screen hangouts include playful nipple pinches and crush-related gossip during practice, but Off Campus’s hockey boys are canonically straight. To viewer Mariana Carolina, 24, the show is less about queer-baiting, and more about male characters eschewing the “too cool” attitude associated with traditional masculinity. She points to a scene in which a teammate, Dean (played by Stephen Kalyn), offers Garrett advice for making a woman orgasm. “She’s just got to feel completely safe,” he declares between reps in the weight room. This stands in direct contrast to Clavicular’s recent claim that he doesn’t care about making women come because “the amount of extra effort that’s required to do that is just not gonna have much ROI.”
“They’re not scared to be perceived as soft and gentle,” Carolina says. “They’re not scared to embarrass themselves, and they’re very chalant. Being nonchalant is no longer something that you want.”
Enter the antidote: The hot guy who caters to the female gaze. “At least me and my friends and the women around me, we want softer men,” says Carolina. “The people who make us say, ‘He was written by a woman.’”
On social media, the phrase “written by a woman” is used to compliment men who display high emotional intelligence, who seem like they’d prioritize a woman’s desires to the same extent that women prioritize theirs. In Episode Four of Off Campus, Garrett prepares for a hookup with Hannah in ways he knows will matter to her. He makes sure her clothes are comfortable, asks her to pick a song, and as they get going, consistently checks to make sure she likes the pace they’re moving at.
That’s the new heartthrob archetype. It highlights the desires of women like Sorenson, Carolina, and Chupinina, which is what they love most about Off Campus.
“The first time Garrett and Hannah slept together, I cried,” says Chupinina. “I feel like a lot of women haven’t had that kind of experience sexually, so it sort of makes you feel seen and want that and hope there are men out there like that.”