#yoispoilers

OK, look, I just want to get this off my chest because we’ve seen the whole series now, but nobody seems to be talking about this or questioning the idea that Victor is a forgetful guy.

For a guy who claims to “forget stuff sometimes”, we never see Victor act forgetful. 

So I am convinced that this is just more unreliable narrator stuff.

Remember when Yuri lost the bag of nuts in episode 10 and is freaking out over it? Victor’s all like, “Try to remember. It’s a bag of nuts, brown paper with green print. Where did you last see it?”

He remembered what the pointless, inconsequential details of the bag of stupid nuts that he didn’t even buy and doesn’t care about looked like. Does that sound like a guy with a bad memory?

Meanwhile, there are only a handful of instances when he claims he’s forgotten something. The first one, which is when he says “haha, you know I forget stuff sometimes” is in the second episode, with Yurio, when Victor says it just slipped his mind that he promised Yurio to help “give him the best senior debut ever”. 

But then there’s another time in episode 8, which is very clearly a big fat lie. 

It’s at the Rostelecom Cup, and JJ randomly tries to talk to Yuri and Victor in a hallway about how Emil’s just landed his quad loop, just like he himself did. It’s unclear whether he’s just trying to ineptly make chitchat, or he’s boasting, or he’s taunting Yuri, but either way, Yuri has earplugs in. He pulls them out and apologises for not having heard what JJ was saying, but JJ just sort of ignores this and takes the opportunity to get right in Victor’s face (again with the bad social skills) and says “Victor did that in last year’s exhibition! I’d love to see that again!” 

And what does Victor say in response?

You get the idea that Victor is annoyed that this brash upstart is in his personal space and was rude to Yuri and is also daring to say he’d like Victor to get back to skating as though a) Victor should care and b) his future plans aren’t a personal topic that he has refused to comment on.

But Victor just says “I don’t recall.” Which JJ takes as the low-confrontation brush-off it is.

Why am I going on about this? Because I wondered why this weird scene with JJ was included in such a tightly cut show where no second is wasted and the more I think about it, the more I think that it was to show that Victor pretends he doesn’t remember stuff when it suits him.

Furthering my theory (which yes I have talked about before) that he only pretended he’d forgotten to help Yurio with his senior debut. 

Why would he pretend to forget? 

Because as if he could say to Yurio, “The best thing I can do for your senior debut is to just get out of your way. I’m not competing this year.”

This would just make Yurio angry and insulted and like Victor didn’t take him seriously, and he wouldn’t understand the place of love it came from.

I think it definitely helped that in the meantime, he had somewhere else that he genuinely wanted to be (i.e. trying to bang/help Yuri with the bonus of actually enjoying himself for once). The fact that Victor’s career was leaving him emotionally hollow and he was miserable and lonely certainly also will have factored in his decision. 

1) Lohengrin rang a bell because IT IS WHERE WE GET THE MODERN DAY WEDDING MARCH how’s that for foreshadowing

and

2) It’s thematically based on the story of Zeus and Semele. Zeus, king of the gods, falls in love with a mortal so goes down to her in human form and they have a glorious affair until eventually Semele demands he return to his true form, which destroys her.

You know, kind of the way that Victor, king of skating, falls in love with Yuri and goes to find him and they have a glorious affair until Yuri asks him to go back to being a god. 

Except that this is a comedy, not a tragedy, so Victor says “no way, not without you!” and that’s a much more satisfying ending. 

It’s only just occurred to me, but IN YOUR FACE Yakov and everyone else who called Victor a second-rate or fake coach. His athlete broke a world record and missed the gold medal at the GFP by 0.12 of a point. The winner of the gold medal won (and also broke a world record) using A ROUTINE VICTOR GAVE HIM. 

So, I’m re-watching episode 12 AGAIN and I’ve just realised why JJ had to take the bronze, rather than Otabek. 

Like the entirety of tumblr, I’ve been feeling outraged that Otabek was robbed… until right this second. Because I’ve worked out that, narratively speaking, the three medal winners are the characters who have exhibited the most emotional growth. 

JJ made it onto the podium because during the first part of the grand prix final, he finally cracked under the pressure. His arrogance and support network only got him so far, and that “so far” was into the competition but no further.

What happened then? Instead of just freaking out like Yuri did the previous year, he got angry. We are specifically told he was angrier than he’d ever been. He cried, which was also not usual for him. He yelled at his mum – again, not usual. Instead of feeling like everyone’s support and cheers was just his due, he internalised feelings that he needed to earn it.

Basically, he developed as a person. He matured a lot in just a few days, emotionally. 

YOI has a real thing with feelings, and how feeling new things improves creativity and therefore the skaters’ performance. Look at Michele Crispino’s performance in Russia, for instance, after Sara tells him that they need to stop the weird co-dependent thing they have going on. He becomes a whole new skater. Let’s not forget Mickey tied with Yuri in points and only didn’t make it into the grand final because Yuri had won a medal at the Cup of China.

Meanwhile, untouchable Victor was finding being untouchable was inhibiting his growth. He was on top of the world but felt strangled, rather than inspired by it. He flies halfway across the world to chase something that moved him and no one who loves this show thinks he made the wrong call.

So, yeah, JJ earned his spot, narratively speaking, on that podium.

When we compare his episode 11/12 journey with the three skaters who didn’t place – Chris, who wasn’t feeling anything new this season, other than bored; and Otabek and Phichit, who both just loved to skate, loved their besties and felt nationalistic pride – then his emotional journey is obviously more like Yuri’s and Yurio’s. It in no way rivals theirs – both of them exhibited tremendous emotional growth over the entire series – but it was enough to earn him that bronze.