Seven years after getting a heartfelt recommendation for this wonderful little series, and nearly ten years after its release, I finally watched it this January and fell in love with it so fast and so hard, it puts to shame all my previous fandoms.
I’ve grown used to having something to watch, so yesterday, I started watching Yuri on Ice, which I’ve known about forever. It’s very anime. But lovely!
Yuuri is a top Japanese figure skater who’s about to give up on his skating career after the huge disappointment of placing last in the Grand Prix Finals, when a video of his practice, where he skates the routine of his lifelong idol and crush, the reigning World Champion, Viktor Nikiforov, goes viral. Viktor sees it, falls in love with it, and offers to coach Yuuri. There’s a third character, another Yuri, only Russian, who’s madly jealous of these developments, and though he’s only 15, he turns into a fierce rival for Yuuri.
I’m amazed at how readily this… cartoon… stirred my feels, when Heated Rivalry, with all its many and indisputable wiles, just… didn’t.
January 4, 2026
At the time of the journal entry above, fresh from watching both series, I was very interested in the how and why of that final sentence, because HR was so aggressively omnipresent in the fandom communities I frequent. But it’s been six months since, and I’m not all that interested in it anymore. In hindsight, I am simply grateful to HR for revealing that I have an itch and then failing to scratch it, because otherwise I might’ve never discovered YOI. And what a loss that would’ve been!
Watching YOI was such a precious, beautiful experience. In part, because I entered it completely blind. Whatever the friend who made the recommendation might’ve told me, way back in 2019, had been long forgotten. I knew it was about figure skating: two friends, or rivals, or perhaps even brothers? And I knew there was something gay about it, but I didn’t know if the gay thing was canon.
Throughout the intro sequence and the opening credits, my impressions were mostly clustered around the admiration for the drawing and the animation. Now that I dabble in the arts myself, I can appreciate the incredibly successful simplifications of incredibly complex movement, and the equally incredible consistency and expressiveness of faces represented with only a handful of lines. Later, I learned that the skating animations were done through a fairly involved process, whereby professional figure skaters were recorded performing the routines on the ice, then the recordings were rendered as animated 3D models by some pre-AI software magic, and then the artists sketched over those 3D animations to form the basis of the final result. To my delight, the digital art software used for this was none other than Clip Studio Paint, which is the thing my humble ass uses too! Amazing.
All that was to say, I loved YOI at first sight.
At the same time, I did find it a bit difficult to get used to the anime of it all. To the exaggerations and oversimplifications employed in some scenes, especially those depicting comedy, and the over the top acting in the original, Japanese version. I also had trouble following the subtitles, which occasionally show up at the bottom and the top of the screen at once and change very quickly, following the somewhat breakneck pace of the first half of the series. The multitasking required to read while also trying to absorb the astonishing density of visual information sometimes overwhelmed me to the point where I had to pause to give myself time to study a frame, or rewind a scene several times till I see and read everything in it. On my second viewing, with English dubs, I had a much easier time accepting the humor because the acting was more accessible, and my attention was no longer divided between the visuals and the reading. As a bonus, the different translations for the dubs and the subs provided an additional layer of insight. How I wish I knew Japanese!
Obviously, none of these small frustrations stopped me from becoming entirely addicted in record time. The series has only one season (😭) with twelve 20-minute episodes. Restraining myself against binge-watching the entire thing in a single sitting was a Herculean effort. Even so, it didn’t take more than a few days.
I am here fresh from watching the incredibly tense and emotional finale of Yuri on Ice, which made me cry for about 30 minutes straight, even though it’s arguably the happiest ending ever. It’s been a long time since something hit me so hard. I’m positively aching for more: for art, for fic, for company to gush with over the perfection of it.
I am… this close to starting to research figure skating for fic. But I’m afraid that, if I let myself get pulled into this, I might neglect Harry/Draco, and I really, really, don’t want that.
January 6, 2026
Which very quickly devolved into:
I am so fucked. I can’t take my mind off Yuuri and Viktor. They make my insides move and twist in knots. It’s been a while since I felt that! In fact, I could probably count such moments in general — a lifelong sum — on my fingers. And I owe it to myself to give into them. To let them in, open my heart to them. Because it might be very literal years before I get another such moment. I might be [redacted] years old then!
Last night I was considering my options regarding this, but this morning I no longer feel like I have much of a choice.
January 7, 2026
Ha. Like I ever had a choice in matters of the heart fandom.
In the weeks following that first viewing, I was very literally lovesick about it. And then truly and fully heartbroken when I learned that there was supposed to be more: a feature film titled “Ice Adolescence” that promised to shed more light on Viktor’s past (which must’ve been lonely indeed to inspire the image of an ice wasteland where Viktor’s only companion is his poodle, Makkachin, on the poster below), which was tragically cancelled after years of production and controversy. I only know what little I was able to gleam from old Tumblr and Reddit posts, themselves full of speculation, but it sounds like the reason was the gay of it all.
Namely, the series tries very hard to to steer clear of gay romance, while at the same time being very much about gay romance. The way I understand it, the creators didn’t want to risk YOI getting tagged as a boys love anime, because then it would likely be ignored as a sports anime. And to be fair, it is a sports anime first. One created by great fans of figure skating — an aspect I couldn’t fully appreciate before I, too, became a great fan of figure skating. I will return to that later. For now, I wish to dwell on the gay of it all.
It is handled with kid gloves so thick that, on first viewing, I wasn’t sure there was a gay romance happening in it, despite it very obviously being a gay romance, till the final few episodes. I know this sounds strange, but it’s true. Viktor is very obvious, over the top, even, with his flirting with Yuuri in the beginning:
And every sports-plot milestone is accompanied by a milestone in the intimacy plot which looks like a romance, sounds like a romance and smells like a romance — but lacks any overt depictions of romance (at least by the brutish western standards), so enough room is left for doubt even when Viktor kisses Yuuri in front of an audience of thousands, and on television to boot. But not even that was shown in sufficient detail to be undeniable!
Later on, they exchange wedding rings in front of a cathedral, but there are people (I kid you not), who actually bought Yuuri’s narrative about them being a good luck charm — even after Viktor finally, explicitly declares that they are ENGAGED.
I laugh now, but the truth is, it was only then I could fully believe the gay of it all, having sadly been trained by those same brutish, western standards of truth in fiction I complained about above. But you know what? The suspense, the lack of clarity, the not knowing, was a huge part of my wild and unrestrained enjoyment the first time I watched the series; and, going back to that journal note from the top, a huge part of what tickled my curiosity, imagination and creativity, while HR, being almost fully explicit, entirely failed to do so.
Within a month of that first, fateful viewing, I saw the series twice more, once alone and another time with a friend; but more importantly, I saw a lot of actual figure skating. At first, I looked for skaters that were rumored (or confirmed) to have inspired Viktor and Yuuri; those being Evgeni Plushenko (who has Viktor’s thinning hair and heart-shaped lips), Stéphane Lambiel (who has Viktor’s charm, brightness and the golden skate blades; and who delightfully appears in the series as himself!), and Tatsuki Machida (who retired in the middle of his competitive career after placing last in the 2014 GPF). But I quickly graduated to more recent competitors and competitions, so that, by the time of the Olympics, I already had a basic understanding of the elements and the scoring and a small inventory of tentative favorites. By the time the Olympics ended, I had already booked my trip to Prague for the Figure Skating World Championships. 😊
My latest viewing of YOI (4th? 5th? I kinda lost count!) was about a month ago, with more friends I had managed to rope into it. Although I know some parts by heart by now, I am still discovering details I haven’t noticed before: subtle —
and not so subtle —
visual clues about the characters, real world locations (like Pitchit’s home rink in Bangkok, that I only recognized a week or so ago, watching last year’s Junior Grand Prix series), and involvement of real people (like Stéphane Lambiel and Nobunari Oda), as well as little bits of dialog that I managed to miss (like when Viktor comments that Yuuri’s grumpy at the block championship). It’s extraordinary!
There is one aspect of the series I am not a fan of. I mentioned repeatedly how the first half of it is packed with so much information there’s almost no chance for the viewer to absorb it all the first time through. Which isn’t ideal, I don’t think, yet at the same time, I can’t help but admire the condensation. There’s an elegance to it, a genius worth studying frame by frame. Sadly, the second half of the series is nothing like that. From the moment Yuuri starts competing, most of the screentime is dedicated to the skating, and not only Yuuri’s: every major competitor gets at least one full runthrough of their short program and the free; some, like Yuri Plisetsky, more than one. The pace changes completely: from racing to dragging, while key milestones of the relationship between Yuuri and Viktor infuriatingly happen offscreen. I try to justify it to myself as… an attempt to evoke the experience of watching a Grand Prix series unfold, one competition after another, seeing some competitors only once, some twice, some thrice; or an effort to introduce a diverse cast of characters ahead of the planned Season 2, where they might actually play a role (because they really don’t, in Season 1); or a study in how different athletes cope with the pressure of competition. But in truth, it comes across as filler, and I inevitably wonder if it isn’t covering up for all the things that can’t be shown because they would be too gay. Sigh.
Six months ago, I set out to “research figure skating for fic”, but while figure skating has grown into a passion in its own right, I’m yet to write any fic, heh. Not for the lack of trying! I’ve been writing bits and pieces, isolated scenarios and scenes, almost daily this whole time. The problem is rather in my reluctance to commit, because I’m still not done with the Harry/Draco magnum opus that I was worried about in January. It’s a situation similar to where I was upon finishing Baldur’s Gate 3, with thousands upon thousands of words in handwritten drafts, but nothing fully formed and ready to share. And like I did eventually manage to finish and post some of that material for BG3, I believe I will eventually finish and post some of the material for YOI. I feel neither pressured nor concerned; in fact, for the first time in forever, when I’m writing for YOI, I’m writing… for fun? Huh!
I’m also drawing, though not nearly as much as I’d like. Here’s my one and only YOI piece so far:
To sate the hunger and the thirst, I’ve been feasting my eyes on copious amounts of fanart and drinking from the deep well of existing fic, and while I haven’t found anything that’s entirely to my taste with regards to the latter, I am grateful for the abundance of it. It’s hard to believe that YOI was once a huge fandom! It’s very quiet now, sleepy, or maybe outright dead; but its artifacts live on.
As does my fascination. I am so glad I didn’t attempt to smother it in its infancy! To this day, Yuuri and Viktor make my insides move and twist in knots. And who knows? Maybe, inspired by the success of HR, someone sees what an awesome opportunity YOI might be as a fully and unashamedly gay and sports series, and reignites the production of the movie? Or, dunno. Makes Season 2, taking it to the promised next level?
A fan can dream.