When the finale of Yuri!!! On Ice (hereafter YOI) dropped on December 21, 2016, demand for watching and discussing the episode was so high that Crunchyroll and Tumblr crashed. The moment was the culmination of a 12-week period on the internet that started with cautious excitement for YOI’s October premiere—mostly from within the online anime community and sparked by a few promotional trailers—and snowballed from there. In a time before the Thai BL drama boom, or the release of English-language romances like Heartstopper and Heated Rivalry, YOI broke anime containment by depicting a world in which queer characters were not just featured, but were allowed joy, low-stakes intimacy, and a happy ending. Ten years later, it’s still special.
Yuri!!! On Ice begins when protagonist Yuri Katsuki (Toshiyuki Toyonaga) is at his lowest. A 23-year-old competitive ice skater struggling with anxiety and depression, he has just returned home to coastal Japan following a humiliating season. Yuri is seriously considering quitting the sport altogether when his idol and fellow competitor, Russia’s Victor Nikiforov (Junichi Suwabe), shows up at Yuri’s family onsen and volunteers to be his new coach. As the 12-episode season progresses, Yuri builds confidence in himself as a skater and a human, falling in love with Victor along the way.
Many of YOI’s initial watchers were intrigued by the figure skating subject, which felt unique as a subject in sports anime—or live-action TV drama, for that matter. “I love figure skating, so when I saw the news that a new sports anime about figure skating was coming, I was excited,” a 34-year-old European fan named Toblerone tells me of first watching YOI in 2016. “When the first episode aired, I was glued to my monitor. The episode was magical, and so much better than I had even dreamed. It was love at first sight.” Others were drawn in by the character design, animation style, and music teased in the promotional videos. Some were already fans of co-creator Sayo Yamamoto, who had previously directed Michiko & Hatchin and Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. (Yamamoto co-directed the series alongside Jun Shishido, and co-wrote it with Mitsurō Kubo.)
And, of course, there were those looking for more queer representation in their media. In 2016, it was more common for pop culture to queerbait than to depict explicitly queer relationships. Before the series premiered and in its first half, most viewers assumed any potential queerness would be kept as subtext. While anime had depicted queer characters and relationships before, such as in Revolutionary Girl Utena or No. 6, it was not common to see a queer relationship made canon in a mainstream sports anime. RedSkyLine, another online YOI fan who watched the show in 2016, calls the series fundamental to TV history. “I really think modern LGBT storytelling owes a lot to YOI,” they told me, adding that media today is “less ashamed of showing a more gentle side of male characters.” RedSkyLine was the same age as Yuri when the series originally aired, and the character helped them feel seen, represented, and “taught me what love is like.”
For Americans especially who did not seek out foreign-language media, anime might not have seemed like a particularly queer space. Some of the first anime series to be broadcast in the U.S., Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, were censored to downplay or remove queer storylines altogether. In 2016, anime was only starting to become mainstream in the U.S., where animation more broadly had historically been viewed as a less complex medium, made solely for children. Anime in particular was seen as a boys thing, in part because of import decisions in the 1990s and 2000s that prioritized shonen series like Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, and Naruto. Crunchyroll, which had launched in 2006 as a pirate site specializing in East Asian content before committing to legal licensing in 2009, was starting to complicate that perception, but it was still relatively uncommon for people in the U.S. to watch foreign-language media.
Yuri!!! On Ice contributed to that expansion. It was easily the most tweeted about anime of the fall 2016 season, getting 1,440,596 mentions on the platform. (For comparison, the runner up—Haikyu!, another sports anime with an exclamation point in its name—had 348,109 mentions in the same time frame.) For many Western viewers—perhaps especially girls, women, and queer folks—it changed the perception of what an anime could be, and who it was for.
In an internet era when Tumblr could build entire fan empires, YOI was inescapable on the fan platform. When Yuri and Victor apparently kiss in Episode 7 of the series (the lip-lock is obscured by Victor’s arm, but is broadly accepted as canon), fans on Twitter and Tumblr put out the Bat Signal: Here be queer, comforting media. Episode reaction convinced many who had yet to give the series a chance to finally try it (including future Olympic skater Amber Glenn). “I remember everyone talking about it and what convinced me was the entire world going crazy over the Episode 7 kiss when it dropped. I saw even people I knew irl who I didn't even know were into anime posting about it,” says Naghi, a 25-year-old fan from Italy. “[I] decided it was time [to check out YOI], considering I was also a fan of figure skating.”
Ten years later, YOI often gets recommended to fans of queer media, as it should, but its success as a series doesn’t come down to just one element. A sports anime first and foremost, the series is focused on depicting the inner worlds of male figure skaters competing at the highest international level, and often uses different animation styles to give viewers insight into a particular performer's mindset during a routine. We are introduced to skaters from Thailand, Canada, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, China, the U.S., and of course Japan and Russia, as these athletes seek to express themselves artistically in the ultimate display of mental and physical resilience.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/before-there-was-heated-rivalry-there-was-yuri-on-ice
