The more I look back at YoI, the clearer it becomes how unreliable a narrator Yuuri is, especially in the first episode. We should have realised it right from the off that something wasn’t quite matching up between what he was saying and what we were seeing.
Lemme have a quick look:
“I’m one of the dime a dozen figure skaters certified by the JSF”
Dime a dozen. Right, kiddo. When you have groupies who are the rising stars like Minami-kun, who recognise good skating because they’re trained to, I suspect you may be understating how good you are. When your home town plasters your imagery all over the place because you are their famous skater, you’re more than a dime a dozen.
Also, let us take a moment to remember that he made it as far as the Grand Prix final. We learn in later episodes how many competitions you have to win to get through to the Grand Prix Final. He won. He won lots. He did *well* right up until the Grand Prix. The commentater even comments that he wasn’t himself at this one significant event.
This anxiety-ridden little moppet even explains why: the death of a beloved family pet and grief threw him off, and I suspect his natural anxiety was the nail in the confidence coffin. But he still blames himself, despite a run of horrible circumstances, grief, isolation and the insane amount of pressure he was putting on himself to get his ‘big day’ right.
“I was an idiot to think I could finally meet my idol on the same playing field…”
Maybe Sochi wasn’t a level playing field, but it certainly wasn’t because of the skating. It was because of everything else crashing in on him at the same time, which meant his skating suffered. Then it became a domino effect of depression and anxiety and he lost again and again.
We know this because when he was trying to get his groove back, he took Viktor’s gold-medal winning routine and performs it to perfection. Lemme repeat that: a gold-medal winning routine and performs it to perfection. Which he is doing while not in peak condition and while significantly heavier than he had been during the competitions.
Yuuri is a badass-skater, but because of his spiral of depression and anxiety before the start of the series, his narration about himself and his career naturally skews to the negative. And we believed him. We fell for it, because he believed it himself.
How wrong we all were.
I would argue that he’s not actually significantly heavier, though - that Yuuri’s self-perception at the start of the show is yet another instance of him being an unreliable narrator. Bearing in mind, only three months pass between his defeat at Sochi and his decision to skate Victor’s routine, and IIRC he’s already being teased about his weight when he first arrives in Hasetsu. The teasing he receives for his love of katsudon, both from Victor and his family, is something which Yuuri’s anxiety inflates out of all proportion to reality. The artwork shows him as being materially heavier because he thinks of himself as heavier, not because he actually is; in fact, we see him visibly inflate whenever anyone mentions his weight, even if he looked normal two frames earlier. But when he skates Victor’s routine - when he’s in his confident, on-the-ice headspace - he doesn’t look at all bigger than he did at Sochi, suggesting that he’s been exaggerating his own downspiral. Which is, I think, a really clever use of the common anime practice of altering drawing styles (say, between chibi and regular) to indicate a character’s emotions. Yuuri feels fat, so he’s drawn as fat, but that doesn’t mean he actually is.
And I mean, three months: even if he was overeating every day during that period while doing zero exercise - and there’s no evidence of this being true: a failure to stick to a competition diet while not competing isn’t the same as going overboard - I wouldn’t think he could gain more than a kilo a week for 12kg total. Which, given his starting point of a hyper-athletic, peak-conditioned body, and the fact that he’s still got muscle strength and fitness enough to bash out Victor’s routine at the end of it? Yeah. He’s not overweight. (Not that it would be bad if he was - fat acceptance forever! - just that, in this instance, I don’t think that’s what’s happening.)
In this as in so many other areas, Yuuri interprets teasing as legitimate criticism. To the people around him - none of whom, crucially, really recognise or understand his anxiety - there’s no harm teasing a professional athlete about putting on weight, because even if he does gain it easily, that’s actually a good thing to help him keep up his strength and muscle mass during the periods when he’s training. At best, they think they’re teasing him about something so obviously untrue that Yuuri himself can’t possibly fail to see the humour in it; at worst, they’re poking fun at a slight change to his physique without really understanding how badly he feels about it.
Which also, if you think about it, explains at least part of why Yuuri reacts so badly to Victor’s initial overtures: he’s spent months feeling like a failure, being teased for being overweight, antisocial and unattractive, and suddenly his idol is not only here, but hitting on him. Yuuri doesn’t feel attractive, and he doesn’t remember the banquet, so it’s not just that he’s being oblivious around Victor - it’s that he likely thinks he’s being mocked or trolled, because even in the unlikely event that Victor Nikiforov would ever find Yuuri attractive enough to flirt with, why the fuck would it happen when Yuuri, in his own mind, is at his least desirable?
And - okay. I’d initially thought the thing about Yuuri finding his eros through katsudon was purely done as a joke, and yes, there are some clearly comedic elements to it, especially in light of episode 10. (YUURI, YOU IDIOT.) But also consider that katsudon - as he tells Victor during their first dinner together - is the food he lets himself eat when he wins; to which Victor responds by saying, effectively, but you haven’t won anything lately, so you shouldn’t be eating it now. In his own flippant, oblivious-to-anxiety way, he’s trying to use katsudon to motivate Yuuri to train - so when Yuuri later calls the dish his eros as a way to motivate himself, I’d argue that he’s referring, at least in part, to how he feels when he actually gets to eat it, i.e.: confident from winning. Which completely fits with Yuuri’s expression of eros as being tied to his confidence: having forgotten the banquet completely, he doesn’t know that he’s ever been sexy or confident after losing. In his own way, he’s trying to make a callback to that first conversation about what katsudon means to him (security, confidence, success) but Victor, who is famously forgetful, misses the significance of it, and instead takes it as a sign - accurately, but also unhelpfully - that Yuuri doesn’t find him attractive.
(via jackironsides)
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