espresso depresso

Day and Night

“when in distress, draw a dude in a dress” is what i always say

I can’t tell if this is an unpopular opinion or not, because even 6+ years later, the Yuri on Ice fandom is rich and wonderful. It’s a fandom where there seems to be something for everyone.

But one thing I do see a lot of, and at least if @rikeijo​‘s takes are correct (and given her translations, I believe them), there is a rabid subset of YOI that firmly stand in the uke!Yuuri and seme!Victor camp, to such a degree that there was backlash about seeing long-haired young Victor because it did not fit the mold of perfect masculine boyfriend assertive Victor and soft feminine timid Yuuri.

Which… <points to canon> Yuuri has something to say about that.

When we first meet Yuuri, he’s a ball of anxiety and self-doubt. He’s had a horrific debut at the GPF, and his dog has died.

Yet, his first encounter with Victor Nikiforov, his idol, is him turning away from an offer of a commemorative photo. Turning down and walking away are already not behaviors of someone who is timid. Ashamed and depressed that his idol didn’t even seem to recognize him as a competitor? Yes. Timid and uke? Nope.

I often wonder if the timidity idea came from the other first encounter, yes, that one. Naked-and-confident Victor in the onsen declaring himself Yuuri’s coach. Yuuri shell-shocked and overly accommodating. On top of that, Yuuri lets Yurio bulldoze him, lets Victor set the terms of the Onsen on Ice, and goes along with it all with nary a complaint.

At least at the beginning, we know Yuuri thinks of Victor as a god. We see him do a dogeza for being late, see him flustered with the touch and attention that Victor gives him, see the way his face goes moony each time Victor speaks.

And then… as Victor is telling Yuuri to remember sometime how it felt being with a lover, Yuuri reacted like this:

Yup. That is the face he made as he shouted “huh?!” at Victor, before he came back to himself and apologized profusely. That “huh?!” is not timid.

Personally, I think this Yuuri, the “huh?!” Yuuri is the real one, sliding behind the mask of deference because his idol is coaching him, scared that Victor might lose interest and abandon him.

And from that “huh?!” moment onward, we get more and more of the real Yuuri.

We get eye rolls when Victor changes into a suit for the regional competition.

We get full on insubordination when Victor says to cut some of his quads.

We get battle-mode Yuuri letting Victor apply his lip balm.

And it all goes downhill from there.

In Beijing, Yuuri scolded Victor for interrupting his interview to talk food. He refused the food that would turn his stomach (as well as the alcohol), and finally… when Victor totally fumbled on coaching Yuuri through his panic attack, Yuuri… unleashed.

(gif source here)

You know who acted like the experienced and assertive one after this conversation? I’ll give you one hint. It wasn’t Victor.

Yes, Victor absolutely was the one who initiated that kiss. But even Yuuri’s reaction to it (after the initial shock of kissing Victor on live TV) was “oh!”

Yet, these moments are not even the cream of the crop. There is one moment that stands above them all. Yes, I am referring to the tie.

Victor is hamming it up for the audience in Russia. He is not paying all of his attention to Yuuri. Yuuri takes issue with this.

There is nothing timid or uke about that tie tug. That is the type of tie tug that awakened something in Victor Nikiforov (if it had not already been awakened by his gorgeous chaos goblin boyfriend already.)

This is not to say that Yuuri has no shy and tender moments, he absolutely does. This is not to say that Victor is actually the uke, he absolutely is not.

This is just to say that the thing about Yuuri and Victor that make them compelling and wonderful is that they cannot be fit into obvious little boxes like uke and seme.

It’s what is so wonderful about Victor and Yuuri. That we can imagine them in whatever configuration we want to, and it works!

This is probably much more true for the Jp side of fandom, but yeah, for people interested in this issue: to this day many people are (unfortunately, if you ask me) obsessed with the idea of semes and ukes. There are still such awesome, wholesome terms in use, like 一棒一穴 for example, “one rod, one hole”… Usually, it’s 完全固定, one seme, one uke, or something like 総受け, one character always uke, with different semes (yes, I cringed while writing this…). And from what I’ve heard, there are people obsessed with who’s top and who’s bottom in Eng fandom too, so of course, I don’t think that’s only Jp thing.

I absolutely agree that Yuuri isn’t timid, and I agree that everyone should be able to enjoy the show the way the like, even if they have a preference for bottom Yuuri, e.g., or idk, ship Yuuri with Yurio.

I sometimes mention this “seme uke issue” together with my translations not in the context of actually arguing about sexual preferences of fictional characters, but because imo, the problem is that this kind of obsession with gender and sexual roles in Jp actually gave birth to a lot of big fandom drama, in case of YoI… And I really believe that it caused some troubles even to the creators. Imagine you release a new merch, art, trailer, whatever, and the first thing that fujos, who make up the majority of online YoI fandom, talk about, scrutinize, is if Yuuri looks uke enough and Victor looks seme enough and, of course, throw hate your way if you don’t meet their uke seme demands. People were seriously mad at Mitsurou for drawing Yuuri lifting Victor up (his lithe uke body shouldn’t be able to do that >.<), or for drawing Victor that “looks like a transvestite with fake eyelashes”, and a lot of other things that disagreed with their doujinshis…

i’m ok

Pff well, thanks for waiting for a whole month and a bit. I don’t even know if you’re still interested in this, but there is one small part of the vocabulary and grammar which wasn’t, and can’t easily, be translated into English, and I’d like to explain it a little.

「ところでゆうり、話って、、、何」

(tokoro de yuuri, hanashi tte … nani)

“By the way Yuuri, what was it you wanted to talk about?”

「うん。ファイナルで終わりにしよう」

(un. Fainaru de owari ni shiyou)

“Yeah. At the final, let’s end this.”

This was the short exchange between Victor and Yuuri at the end of episode 11, and the basic anwer is, the translation conveys most of what is said, but loses what has been inferred. What’s important here is the form 「にします・にする」(ni shimasu/ni suru) or in this case「にしよう」(ni shiyou) which means “to come to a decision”. For example, if you’re ordering food at a restaurant, and you say「かつ丼にします。」(katsudon ni shimasu), you’re saying “I decide to have the katsudon” but it will be more naturally translated to “I’ll have the katsudon”. This is important because Yuuri could’ve said

「ファイナルで終わろう。」(fainaru de owarou)

which would be correctly translated to what we have in the subtitles “At the final, let’s end this”.

When it’s over  let’s end this. Lets end this coach stuff! What I feel for you it’s more than feeling of the figure-skater to other skater. You were my Idol. I wanted be like you and I though that was my meaning of life. But I was wrong… Victor, could you be mine? Would you devide with me sadness and happiness? Would you love me like I do? Would you be my life? The part of it?

don’t even ask

We know Victor arrived in Hasetsu with some <cough> expectations. Not his fault, obviously (a drunken dry hump BE MY COACH will do that to someone), so it must have physically HURT to see Yuuri putting up walls and avoiding contact like that.

It threw Victor through a loop. We find out that he stayed up drinking all night a few times, and although at the time it was played as a "ugh irresponsible Victor", we know differently. It was because he'd made this giant leap and put his career on hold, and everyone in the press was talking about that.

Yet Yuuri wouldn't let him in (both figuratively and literally). That HURT, and I'd bet meant a couple of Nikiforov panic attacks.

Then Yurio arrives. And Victor has a chance to hit the emergency eject button.

What if Yuuri can't skate his choreography? What if Yuuri doesn't let him in? Ever?

Victor can declare Yurio the winner and head back to Russia, experiment never completed. But we see his face just before Onsen on Ice starts: the fear that this was a bad idea.

I can't imagine the relief that must have washed over him when Yuuri pulled him in for that hug, just before heading out onto the ice.

And I can't imagine the surprise and joy Victor must've felt to watch Yuuri nail it.

At the end, as Yuuri stood and accepted his accolades, he visibly relaxed into Victor's touch.

Victor probably understood that he still had a long way to go, that this adventure was not going to look like what he thought it was going to look like, but that it was going to be okay.

The YoI collaboration with Cheburashka is all sorts of cute♥（*‘∀'人）

Error 404: Yuuri’s self-confidence not found

Bonus: