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inspired by this meme comic thing goin around 

 i’m very hesitant to post my opinions, and I’m not sure if people will take this criticism well.

disclaimer: i’m kind of sick, so it might affect the writing in this.bear with me.

let me start off by saying i am queer. i’m a pansexual nb person and i value representation in the media i consume more than many things in this world. i want to feel validated by the things i watch.

when people told me to watch Yuri on Ice because it had “canon gays” or whatever the kids like to call it, I had great expectations. Another sports anime I can enjoy, probably, even though sport animes aren’t really my thing, and the only one I’ve watched was Free!…Aside from that, I had watched series like No. 6, Nabari No Ou and Samurai Flamenco that surpassed my expectations, and ended up being good series.

Yuri on Ice is…okay. But it’s not the ~* groundbreaking anime of the century*~ everyone is making it to be, and I’m fairly certain the only reason people say that it is because it features a same sex couple. It didn’t become the engaging anime I thought it would be. I’m pretty sure the series was also  written by a fujoshi, and it’s not actual LGBT rep when it’s literally another form of BL bein sold to the public and passable as representation. just because it’s not junjou romantica doesn’t mean it’s not baiting the female population to fetishize m/m relationships (and well, as it turns out, most of the fanbase is female)

Certainly, it did have it’s good points. Some side characters are downright lovable. Yuri and Victor are shown to be so blatantly into each other by the end of the series, it’s hard to prove that they’re not into each other. I’m grateful for that.

However…what I value in a series is good, consistent writing, and this series definitely fell short of that. No. 6, for example, was a Sci-Fi series that had a romantic subplot between 2 of the male leads as a focal point of it. It was successful in weaving the two narratives together because we got to see the plot progress through the lense of their relationship, if that makes any sense.

1.) weak plot and character development

this series’ goal was supposed to be about sports and a romance between two boys. both narratives fell through because the writers could not properly mesh together these two themes. a good story incorporates these things together solidly through a main theme in a way that the viewer can understand the progression of the plot and the characters in a consistent manner. literally what everyone is working towards is ice skating competitions. that’s the only thing driving the plot forward! yuuri and victor’s romance was something developed separate of ice skating, and while I saw the attempts at connecting their romance through ice skating, it fell through because their characterization was virtually nonexistent and it made it uninteresting to watch. 

2.) where was the individual characterization ?

Yuuri wasn’t confident, and he was fat and a mess at the beginning of the series - that much the show made clear to me. i didn’t really like the attack on body image but I took the message for what it was. I figured it’d be some sort of Zero to Hero thing (but I was wrong. By Episode 6 Yuuri had already hit his Hero phase)

So…by the end of episode 2, he wanted to get back into ice skating because of Victor. I barely got to know of Yuri as person before the series took off when Victor showed up. I didn’t know who Victor was at all. I didn’t have an attachment to either of the characters. And as soon as they met, they threw baity romantic tropes at me to establish a connection between them.

I didn’t feel anything but a little confusion, and as they kept going with the series, I felt literally nothing. I read a similar criticism from someone else on tumblr in that these two were just pretty cardboard cutout characters that looked good together, and literally EXISTED to look good together.

2.) the only thing interesting about Victor and Yuri’s characters was their relationship with each other

There was virtually no build that attracted me to these two as a pairing.

We never got a proper platform to develop Yuri and Victor as characters so that we could see their individual purpose and identities, and thus experience their character development as the series went on.

When your characters completely revolve around their relationships with each other and literally nothing else, it makes it uninteresting (unless you’re sold on their relationship, of course). 

Yuuri’s archetype is supposedly to be the hardworking protagonist, but it falls flat and disappears as the anime progresses, because once he teams up with Victor, this protagonist-coach duo literally becomes the only thing central to their side of the anime. Both he and Victor became unsympathetic characters in comparison to Yuri, who still had his flaws and still had his work cut out for him. We had seen him train a lot more than Yuuri in comparison, and around episode 6, Yuuri’s role as a foil character to Yuri also falls through.

Yuuri and Victor’s flaws are also only ever barely grazed over, but never entirely addressed. they are not as compelling of characters as Yuri, who had his flaws out there for everyone to see since the first episode.

this anime turned into a Cinderella story typical of the shoujo genre - Yuri being the plain person blossoming into a beautiful flower with the help of Victor, the handsome seductive prince, noticing him. It’s not very compelling to me and if I didn’t want to see it in a hetero romance, why would I want to see it depicted in a m/m romance?

3.) Did it make no one else uncomfortable that Victor fell in love with Yuri while he was drunk? Like…anyone? hello? Victor’s static, unchanging ambiguous character is confusing and flat as a board and doesn’t make me feel like any of this is romantic. So he ended up choosing to coach Yuuri out of impulse and dropped everything….for some drunk dude who hit on him? a groundbreaking romance, i guess.

4.) Yuri Plisetsky was the only thing motivating me to finish this series. No, I haven’t finished it yet but that’s because it’s kind of hard to watch without gettin bored? But unlike Yuuri and Victor, Yuri had time to exist separately as his own character with his own motivations. He also clearly had his own personal issues that allowed for potential character development - I wanted to see him learn, and I wanted to see him win something. As opposed to Yuuri and Victor, whose only motivations seemed to be each other.

5.) the fandom itself is a little unbearable. granted a lot of them are younger than me, and I cannot refuse them the right to consume and enjoy media when they probably haven’t had the same experiences i have had.

however! the fandom is literally eating everything without critically thinking and that shows a massive difference in how I personally consume media. the overwhelming amount of fujoshi culture i also see in response to this series is uncomfortable but i probably should have expected it. i’ve seen the fandom go so far as to endorse the purchasing of YOI merchandise so that we could tell Japan that we love the gays!!! when they don’t actually realize that’s not helping the LGBT community at all over there

Yuri on Ice, to me, was like a fan fiction with open ended threads and plot devices that were sort of made up as it went along. It had potential at the beginning, but fell through once the middle of the series hit. It also had plenty of fanservice with little substance…like a porn without plot, essentially, lmao. 

some of the characters are really cute. yuuri and victor are aesthetically pleasing and i’m grateful that there is an anime showing a healthier depiction of a m/m, despite it still pandering to the female crowd in doing so.