On Love Eros showcases of how a figure skating routine evolves over a season
If you’re an avid figure skating fan, you have probably noticed that skaters grow into their programmes as the season progresses and that sometimes elements (especially jumps) are rearranged or replaced when the skater struggles with them or to increase the programme’s base score. Since Yuri On Ice!!! is a realistic depiction of figure skating, we see changes to the programmes as the season progresses as well, most prominently in Yuuri’s and Yuri’s programmes. In this article, I will break this down for Yuuri’s short programme On Love: Eros, which provides the most comprehensive data on the subject.
Figure skating is, to somewhat extent, acting. To convey a programme to the audience, skaters must often assume a role and need to acquire basic expression and projection skills. Some skaters even take acting classes to portray the protagonists of the stories they tell on-ice. As someone who wears his heart on his sleeve, Yuuri skates at his best when he skates true to his feelings and gets rewarded with high programme component scores (PCS), which help him to compensate for technical mistakes like falls. But when Viktor assigns On Love: Eros to him, Yuuri has no idea how to skate it. For how shall he express something he hasn’t experienced before?
Yuuri has never thought about love much less had a relationship. He says of himself that he ignored the things happening around him because he focused on skating since. However, Viktor’s demonstration of On Love: Eros has inspired a story:
A playboy comes to town and bewitches the women left and right. He decides to pursue the most beautiful woman in town, but she isn’t swayed. As they play the game of love, she finds it difficult to make the right choices and ends up falling for him. Then, he casts her aside as if he’s tired of her and goes off to the next town.
This story is a strikingly accurate description of how Yuuri perceives his situation after Yurio showed up in Hasetsu, including his fear that Viktor might abandon him for the teenage boy. (Ironically, the story also tells the events from the Sochi banquet as Viktor must have seen in the following months, but that’s beside the point.)
His lack of self-confidence and sexual experience inspires the belief in Yuuri that he is unsuited for the role appearance- and experience-wise. As a result, he struggles with his new routine until Viktor’s old Lilac Fairy costume spark a last resort: Swapping roles. To win the Onsen on Ice, Yuuri must alter the concept to something closer to how he feels and thus becomes the woman and seduce the playboy (Viktor) to stay. It’s unclear whether “how he feels” also refers to his unique notion of sexiness as a queer man. Since queer people are less likely to adhere to cishet stereotypes, Yuuri could have very well a feminine side. However, if such a side of him existed, it would not be isolated to his short programme—at least not in the queer utopia that the world of Yuri!!! On Ice is.
The feminine presentation of Eros is portrayed through 1) Minako teaching Yuuri feminine moves, 2) Yuuri using female pronouns during his first two performances of his new short programme (the female Japanese “I” is “atashi”), and 3) Yuuri’s voice becoming softer. To cover up for his sexual inexperience, he uses his favourite dish as a workaround, which, ironically, is a wrapper for his desires: 1) to win, 2) to eat katsudon with Viktor and 3) for Viktor to stay his coach (and maybe other things Yuuri is not yet able to express).
Yuuri’s approach to expressing Eros is how actors approach the portrayal of an experience they never made themselves or an emotion that is hard to conjure. Switching the viewpoint character is a trick many writers use when a scene just doesn’t work the way they want it to.
Fast forward to episode 5, where the story Yuuri wove around his programme has changed. His presentation has evolved, but he’s still in the process of discovering his own concept of Eros. He still impersonates a woman and a tasty katsudon using the atashi pronoun, but now it’s the woman who discards the playboy and goes off pursuing the next man.
During his skate, Yuuri is preoccupied with trying to include Viktor’s advice when he was flirting with Yuuri in the rink coaching him (“dance more like you’re trying to seduce me”). Only close to the end, he remembers that his programme has a story (“On the conclusion for the love-crazed couple… how did it go?”), implying that Viktor’s flirting does more for Yuuri by now than the story Yuuri came up with for the Onsen On Ice. Given that Yuuri never fully identified with the role as playboy / seductress so far, this isn’t a surprise.
To Viktor, who unlike Yuuri is sexually experienced, it’s evident that Yuuri is still wrestling with the concept of Eros. However, between episodes 5 and 6, the nature of their relationship changes as following Yuuri’s confession they can start dating (see my discussion of Japanese dating culture in YOI here). Now that they are a couple, Viktor instructs Yuuri to seduce him as himself. And Yuuri’s reaction says it all.
Once, Yuuri starts to seduce Viktor as himself, he switches back to his own pronoun “boku”, which is the Japanese standard male pronoun for “I”. The programme is no longer a story with a protagonist Yuuri has to impersonate, but about him actively seducing Viktor with his own charms. Whether he keeps the “feminine” style remains unclear since this exceeds the limits of the animation (skating scenes are extremely difficult to animate due to the complexity of the movements). For my novelisation and its first sequel I assume that Yuuri’s feminine expression of Eros evolves into a style that is 100% true to Yuuri as he fully blooms into his unique notion of Eros as a part of his queer journey and his deepening relationship with Viktor.
However, it’s beyond doubt that the evolution of Yuuri’s Eros is closely tied to his relationship. As a result, Yuuri scores even higher when he skates Eros at the Rostelecom Cup three weeks later. Competing at a place where Viktor’s enormous fanbase might resent him for stealing Viktor from the sport, fuels his possessiveness which is one aspect of his Eros. His short programme has reached a stage at which he can hardly improve it any further with its current composition.
That’s where elements and base values come into play.
With all the jumps being in the second half and every entry more difficult than the one before, Eros is a tough programme designed for a skater with strong stamina. From a spread-eagle entry into the 3A after a demanding-looking step sequence that matches the fast-paced music, to a lunge-entry into the final 4T+3T combination when exhaustion is at its peak, the programme has a ruthless composition, matching its theme. Viktor’s initial composition included a 3S as the second jumping pass, which Yuuri single-handedly turned into a quad in an attempt to beat Yuri at the Onsen on Ice. Ironically, by this chance, Yuuri made his daring short programme even more daring. (fun fact: many real-life skaters struggle with the 4S too)
Yuuri skating at his best when skating true to his feelings is especially true for jumps, which he regularly flubs when something is on his mind or the programme isn’t working for him. To land a jump, and even more so a quad jump, everything going into the execution like technique, timing, speed, take-off, the moment of opening again etc. must be orchestrated perfectly. As a result, Yuuri only nails the 4S once he fully settles into the routine in episode 6.
For the Grand Prix Final, Yuuri changes the composition one last time to maximise his base score. It’s a risk he’s willing to take to win like he has been doing all season long by replacing jumps, most prominently when he included the 4F in his free programme to surprise Viktor, which he now includes into Eros as the final jump and jumps the 4S in combination with the 3T.
For reference: these are the base values of the jumps in question as they appear in Yuri!!! On Ice*:
The 4F symbolises everything Viktor is to Yuuri. It expresses Yuuri’s desire to become Viktor’s equal or even surpass him, as well as his romantic feelings when he jumps the 4F on a whim at the Cup of China. Including it in Eros, adds a possessive layer to the many things the 4F represents like showing the world that Viktor is his now as well as Yuuri’s ambition and growth as a person.
Yuuri’s final performance of Eros in the anime is another example of him not skating true to his feelings. By focusing on winning, he lost his hold on the programme and its key aspect that has brought him personal bests before: seducing Viktor. However, I imagine Yuuri to keep refining his short programme during the second half of the season like any real-life figure skater would do.
Closing remarks on queer presentation
What sometimes is referred to as “feminine” expression in dance sports is a soft and sensual movement style as opposed to the cishet male stereotype (strong, showing little emotion etc). It also describes a gay stereotype. However, how a queer person presents can apply to a variety of queer labels. Being queer myself, I don’t feel comfortable deriving queer label from isolated information for an individual be they real or fictional. I don’t want to promote stereotypes, and because of this, you won’t find me jumping to conclusions about the YOI cast’s unique queerness.
For further reading about Japanese pronouns especially when used by queer people, I recommend this comprehensive article. Having read this, Yuuri’s switch to “atashi” during the first two times he skates Eros, makes even more sense to me.
*these base values were the same in the seasons I checked starting from the 2014/15 season to the 2016/17 season, which encompasses the time Yuri!!! was produced.
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