type_wild | On the trope of the Eternal Rival (Reply)

I haven’t watched a whole lot of sports anime, but I have watched Hikaru no Go, and I wonder if Yuri!!! On Ice is trying to subvert the idea of ~ the eternal rival~

In Hikago, Our Hero is motivated specifically by a wish to prove himself to the One True Rival. It's a fairly regularly recurring thing that Hikaru is all “are you watching me now, Touya? Do you see how I am growing?” Sure, he wants to prove himself to whoever he's playing at the time, but there's always that background nagging question of does Touya know about this and what does he think of me now. Hikaru, like Yuri, pursued a sport out of admiration of another performer. But what Hikaru admires is initially Akira’s passion for a game that Hikaru himself doesn’t care for at all. Hikaru grows to share this passion, and even before Akira accept him as his equal, Hikaru has long since learned to strive to be the best out of love of the game, not because of Akira.

Look then to Yuri!!! on Ice, where our protagonist - at the point we’re following him, since we’re told diddly squat about how and why he became one of the best in the world - is motivated solely because of his idol seeing him. Not the rival he needs to either defeat or prove himself to - no, Yurio is just a presence like all the rest of the Grand Prix skaters, it’s just that this one has some kind of history with Victor and takes his life decisions personally. This would explain why they added Yurio into the OP and ED and spent the beginning of the first episode on establishing him as the unsympathetic jerk with no respect for the protagonist: He’s put into the frame of The Eternal Rival, but Yuri doesn’t need one of those. Skating, to him, was motivated by his admiration of Victor and at the point where Yurio debuts on the same stage, is driven by whatever the hell that's going on between him and Victor ever since Victor became his coach. Moreover, Yuri isn’t some hotblooded teenage protagonist and even if he was, it wouldn't be Yurio he'd choose as his ultimate challenge. Can you see him up and declaring to anyone that by god, his goal in life is to best Victor Nikiforov? What happens instead is that the one obviously slotted to be the ultimate rival for whatever unknown reason just decides to be his coach, while the one narratively framed as the rival is just another guy. Instead of watching someone strive to prove themselves to a hostile competitor, YoI is about proving yourself to your idol/coach/apparently-but-really-weirdly-written love interest.

To do the token comparison to the other sports anime I’ve watched, Free!: are Rin and Haru rivals? Well, Rin certainly seems to function on that mentality in the beginning, what with how he measures his entire worth as an athlete by his ability to best Haru. But unlike Hikaru, Rin is already one of the best around and what he needs in order to move forward isn’t to prove himself against the best competition available, but to get back to the place where he can accept the love of his friends. I guess this was why S2 always felt like nothing but fluff to me - it was already obvious that Rin would reach his dream, and Iwatobi and Samezuka were never really rivals who where emotionally invested in defeating the other team. They were friends who happened to compete in the same races and there were no huge consequences if the other team performed better. The conflict, meanwhile, is ~mystery Sousuke~ and Haru hating career counseling. Sure, the whole rival thing falls apart in the first series too, but that's because we so very painfully learn that the rival thing was never the true issue. Rin doesn’t need to be beaten, Rin needs a hug.

In Free!, the core of the story was never about being great at swimming, but about being friends, and Free! only plays surface tribute to the ideology that you need a rival in order to have the motivation to continue improving at whatever it is you’re doing. In a way, it looks like YoI is trying to disprove the trope entirely. There is a character following the trope to a T, but that’s not the protagonist. I guess this could explain why Yurio is so much younger than Yuri - they’re competing on the same field, but they’re on completely different stages in their lives. There’s a huge, huge difference between being fifteen and being twenty-three, and YoI isn’t a high school anime. Yurio is the representative of the high school sports clichés; Yuri of the issues I expect you’re a lot more likely to face IRL. If YoI, as I speculated after watching the first episode, is actively trying to pick up where Free! ended, this actually makes sense: Free! was about friendship and fujobait, and the moral was that being with your friends is more important for your own wellbeing than being the very best like no-one ever was. The logical conclusion to that would of course be that love is all you need and the fujobait is canon now, bitches.

The problem, of course, being that both Hikago and Free! show that the Eternal Rival isn't a prerequisite for reaching the summit, and it is fully possible to be excellent without a special person. Rin, by the end, is heading for a promising future without having to cross “beat Haru” off his to-do list. This is made even more powerfully clear in Hikago where spoiler stuff happens and the one who convinces Hikaru to sit down and play the game isn’t Akira, but Isumi. Isumi, who is gentle and polite and nurturing and who oh idk just has to deal with the exact same issue that Yuri does and who deals with them and grows out of them, who ends the series as one of the most fearsome junior players around and who never needed a special person, just the right advice. And Hikaru, by the end, has long since graduated from “grrr gotta show Touya my true ability” and is truly playing out of love of the game and a wish to grow stronger. The presence of the One True Rival is ultimately about bringing about that final bout of excellence in already existing geniuses (Akira is a marvel even without Hikaru around, but Hikaru makes him better; Haru is a prodigy who only ever cares about his performance if it is compared to Rin's). But as Hikago certainly showcases with Isumi, Ochi, Ko Yongha, Zhao Shi, Kurata, Touya Meijin, Kuwabara Honinbo, for fuck's sake, Sai - and Free! establishes with Rin: you can be among the very best just out of love for what you're doing.

I mean. Compare, if you wish, Sousuke's ill-advised actions because it was so important that he got to ~swim with Rin~. I assume that YoI is trying to be super romantic or something, but substituting the Token Rival with whatever they mean for Victor to be hasn’t been terribly helpful for Yuri’s performance, and sure as hell can’t be it in the future until Yuri - like Rin and Hikaru - learns to embrace his sport for himself, regardless of whether or not Victor is there to see him.

That, or do as he speculated about in the first episode - give it one final shot, and quit his job to get married. And I'm pretty sure I'll never forgive them if that's the way they end it.