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Yuri!!! on Ice, thoughts as of episode 7
It's still absolutely stunning how the sport bits are the best of it. I wonder if it's because they're really good or because of that inherent fear that they're going to fall.
Yeeeeah so my one complaint about Free! was that for all that the final episodes are absolutely golden, the first half of it is just Japanese school club shenanigans (and the entire second series is just fanfodder with a light dusting of angst). Yuri!!! on Ice, centred on already professional athletes, can't take the easy way out and let's all off our thanks to the lord for that. I think the thing I find most captivating with this story is that outset: Our Hero needs to decide if it's worth it to keep on as an athlete, and later on acknowledges that what is happening here is his last chance at reaching the very summit. This reminds me a lot about Hikaru no Go, where it is a real issue for a lot of the young hopefuls that they're going to have to make the choice between pursuing a career in professional Go or to secure their future through studies and a real job. Yuri's issues remind me of Isumi's, issues which eventually made the awkward and self-doubting guy in a Shounen Jump manga go from being off the radar to topping the popularity poll with three times the votes of #2 (the second one, and GO READ THE HIKAGO IF YOU HAVE'T). High school sports is fine but the stakes are unquestionably a lot higher when it's about truly devoting your life to the sport without having to doubt your choice everytime you get out of bed. Turning back to Free!, part of the reason the second season failed to engage was that the supposed conflict was one that the first series had pretty much buried for good. Haru was thoroughly established as a character whose personal ambitions had little to do with the life of a professional athlete. Did he ever care about winning? No, what Haru cared about was his friends, and his swimming with or against Rin was about friendship (see: won against Rin, gave up on swimming b/c Rin was upset about this). I never, ever could believe that Haru truly wanted to swim professionally, and neither did the writers, since that point was downplayed and glossed over until the last possible minute. But in YOI, that answer is given, and the difficult decision isn't about following a dream, but knowing when to let it go.
So the big issue isn't how the Grand Prix is going to turn out. No, the thing that keeps me hanging on here is whether Yuri is going to retire or not. He describes himself as "a dime a dozen", someone else claims that what he had wasn't talent, but spare time to practice. He's got the passion, he's growing the self-confidence, but has he got the skills/talent to keep up for much longer? And IF he continues and assuming that Victor returns to competing again, will Yuri be able to keep going without him and to go all out against him in competitions?
...Having typed that sentence, I just realised that there's an 80% chance of a second series devoted to just that if the first one is popular enough.
Secondly, WHAT IS YURIO'S PLACE IN ALL OF THIS. The very title of the series technically refers to BOTH the Yuris, and Yurio is prominently featured in both the OP and the ED. If they gave him the same name as the protag and so much paratextual attention to just have him play the role of the recurring rival, then that's some supremely shitty writing going on. And we're past the halfway mark of the series and Yurio is still just the bitchy rival, so mark one more up for a follow-up. Also I like him ten times more than Victor, which is very important.
The third thing I'm curious about is, of course, whether or not the series is going to have the guts to follow up on the sex stuff.
I won't call YOI BL more than Free! is BL, which is to say "lolno, but it sure knows how to cater to that audience". The only time I've seen serious gay relationships portrayed in a manga that wasn't announcing from the get-go that THIS IS ABOUT GAY, it was in Antique Bakery (and how much of that would be "not announcing" anyway is questionable, and also it was always secondary stuff, never between main characters). But YOI, oh, just went and made eros the centre of the main character's professional growth. To nail his competition programme, he needs to nail sex, and this he does by wearing a costume that was intentionally made to signify some union between the masculine and the feminine, by channeling a woman trying to seduce a man, and then to make his coach be the target of his artistic/athletic seduction. And this brings about a professional rebirth because prior to this, he was just the twentysomething who had never had a girlfriend and whose idea of sexually desirable object was katsudon.
I'd make the cake jokes here, but of course Yuri DOES nail the sex on the rink in an act of androgyny that is aimed directly at his equally androgynous coach. Who of course is the token "you inspired me to be serious about this sport" character. If YOI goes there, then it's really interesting because I'm pretty sure it's going to be the first major m/m romance in a show that wasn't announced from the get-go that it was about that. I mean, arguably Utena did the lesbian version way back when, but that's Ikuhara hell and YOI has none of those artistic aspirations.
(as an audience, however, I'm currently not sold on that romance because a) I Do Not Get Victor, and b) up until the second half of episode 7, the idol-fanboy/coach-athlete dynamic was not one that made it look like anything remotely like a healthy relationship between two equal parts. That seemed to have changed after the Yuri-bawls-on-Victor bit, so let's hope that keeps up)
Yeeeeah so my one complaint about Free! was that for all that the final episodes are absolutely golden, the first half of it is just Japanese school club shenanigans (and the entire second series is just fanfodder with a light dusting of angst). Yuri!!! on Ice, centred on already professional athletes, can't take the easy way out and let's all off our thanks to the lord for that. I think the thing I find most captivating with this story is that outset: Our Hero needs to decide if it's worth it to keep on as an athlete, and later on acknowledges that what is happening here is his last chance at reaching the very summit. This reminds me a lot about Hikaru no Go, where it is a real issue for a lot of the young hopefuls that they're going to have to make the choice between pursuing a career in professional Go or to secure their future through studies and a real job. Yuri's issues remind me of Isumi's, issues which eventually made the awkward and self-doubting guy in a Shounen Jump manga go from being off the radar to topping the popularity poll with three times the votes of #2 (the second one, and GO READ THE HIKAGO IF YOU HAVE'T). High school sports is fine but the stakes are unquestionably a lot higher when it's about truly devoting your life to the sport without having to doubt your choice everytime you get out of bed. Turning back to Free!, part of the reason the second season failed to engage was that the supposed conflict was one that the first series had pretty much buried for good. Haru was thoroughly established as a character whose personal ambitions had little to do with the life of a professional athlete. Did he ever care about winning? No, what Haru cared about was his friends, and his swimming with or against Rin was about friendship (see: won against Rin, gave up on swimming b/c Rin was upset about this). I never, ever could believe that Haru truly wanted to swim professionally, and neither did the writers, since that point was downplayed and glossed over until the last possible minute. But in YOI, that answer is given, and the difficult decision isn't about following a dream, but knowing when to let it go.
So the big issue isn't how the Grand Prix is going to turn out. No, the thing that keeps me hanging on here is whether Yuri is going to retire or not. He describes himself as "a dime a dozen", someone else claims that what he had wasn't talent, but spare time to practice. He's got the passion, he's growing the self-confidence, but has he got the skills/talent to keep up for much longer? And IF he continues and assuming that Victor returns to competing again, will Yuri be able to keep going without him and to go all out against him in competitions?
...Having typed that sentence, I just realised that there's an 80% chance of a second series devoted to just that if the first one is popular enough.
Secondly, WHAT IS YURIO'S PLACE IN ALL OF THIS. The very title of the series technically refers to BOTH the Yuris, and Yurio is prominently featured in both the OP and the ED. If they gave him the same name as the protag and so much paratextual attention to just have him play the role of the recurring rival, then that's some supremely shitty writing going on. And we're past the halfway mark of the series and Yurio is still just the bitchy rival, so mark one more up for a follow-up. Also I like him ten times more than Victor, which is very important.
The third thing I'm curious about is, of course, whether or not the series is going to have the guts to follow up on the sex stuff.
I won't call YOI BL more than Free! is BL, which is to say "lolno, but it sure knows how to cater to that audience". The only time I've seen serious gay relationships portrayed in a manga that wasn't announcing from the get-go that THIS IS ABOUT GAY, it was in Antique Bakery (and how much of that would be "not announcing" anyway is questionable, and also it was always secondary stuff, never between main characters). But YOI, oh, just went and made eros the centre of the main character's professional growth. To nail his competition programme, he needs to nail sex, and this he does by wearing a costume that was intentionally made to signify some union between the masculine and the feminine, by channeling a woman trying to seduce a man, and then to make his coach be the target of his artistic/athletic seduction. And this brings about a professional rebirth because prior to this, he was just the twentysomething who had never had a girlfriend and whose idea of sexually desirable object was katsudon.
I'd make the cake jokes here, but of course Yuri DOES nail the sex on the rink in an act of androgyny that is aimed directly at his equally androgynous coach. Who of course is the token "you inspired me to be serious about this sport" character. If YOI goes there, then it's really interesting because I'm pretty sure it's going to be the first major m/m romance in a show that wasn't announced from the get-go that it was about that. I mean, arguably Utena did the lesbian version way back when, but that's Ikuhara hell and YOI has none of those artistic aspirations.
(as an audience, however, I'm currently not sold on that romance because a) I Do Not Get Victor, and b) up until the second half of episode 7, the idol-fanboy/coach-athlete dynamic was not one that made it look like anything remotely like a healthy relationship between two equal parts. That seemed to have changed after the Yuri-bawls-on-Victor bit, so let's hope that keeps up)