#thinky post

I just want to say that I am delighted and surprised by the new YOI movie direction. I wasn’t expecting a movie focusing on early times, but once I thought about it, it makes perfect sense.

Season 1 is entirely in Yuuri’s point of view, but it’s also about a very specific slice in Yuuri’s life, and it’s about his reaching for a very specific goal: skating on the same ice with Victor, and being Victor’s equal (in many ways). One of the challenges the show has set for itself is that anything less than five-time-world-champion Yuuri is going to feel like a let down now, but also if he just keeps on winning then it’s going to lose much of the tension and surprise that made it delightful. So which is it--does Yuuri win as much as we have been promised or do we get bored? I’ve been trying to figure this out myself.

And so here is why I’m delighted--because we know that Victor’s five-time-world-champion wins came at the cost of life and love, and by the end he felt like his desire to keep surprising people was a chain around his neck.

Are there going to be delightful moments in the movie? YES. Are they going to surprise us? YES.

But this tells me, most importantly, that Sayo found a way through the “Yuuri wins all the time and we get bored” versus “Yuuri doesn’t win all the time and we get mad” maze that must follow.

We have our tension, and it doesn’t have to be “Yuuri will lose.” It becomes “Victor wants to become the coach that he needed--someone who can coach a five-time world champion without making him give up life and love to do it.”

And *that* is a delightful story.

I do think there will be sad parts of the movie--what little we saw of Victor’s backstory was sad--but I also think that it’s going to surprise and delight us. At every turn, Yuri on Ice was delightful, and I don’t think it’s going to stop.

I would personally love to see the movie end with the banquet, followed by a fast forward to a final scene--one in which Victor tells Yuuri what he wants for him as a skater, just before Yuuri skates out on the ice for what will be the first competition in Season 2.

A Series of Unfortunate Events has been important to me for years; their return, in the form of the Netflix series, has set me thinking about them again, and pondering why they’re so important and now surprisingly timely.