Character · Yuri on Ice
Yuuri Katsuki
A skater cries in a toilet cubicle after the worst season of his life, then comes home to find his idol in the family hot spring.
In Otakana the clue reads: Figure skater coached by his idol
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Yuri on Ice
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Yuuri Katsuki finishes last at the Grand Prix Final, goes home to Kyushu, and eats his way through the off-season while deciding whether to quit. Then a video of him copying one of Victor Nikiforov's routines gets onto the internet, and Victor, a five-time world champion, turns up at his family's hot spring inn with a poodle and an offer to coach him.
The show takes the sport seriously, which is why it travelled. The programs were choreographed by Kenji Miyamoto, a real ice dancer, the jumps are named correctly and land badly when they should, and the scoring is treated as something an audience can follow. Yuuri's anxiety gets the same care: it never resolves, it gets managed, badly, between competitions.
Yuri on Ice ran twelve episodes in 2016 at MAPPA under director Sayo Yamamoto, and became the season nobody had forecast, winning awards and pulling in viewers who had come for the skating rather than the animation. Real competitors started using its music in their own programs. The relationship at the centre of it is treated by the show as a relationship, not a hint.
Spelling YUURI
YUURI is five letters with a doubled U, which is unusual, since English normally throws long vowels straight out. The extra U survives here because it separates him from Yuri Plisetsky, the Russian skater who shares the sound, and the kana genuinely holds a length mark. Katsuki is the family name and the game does not want it. Two U's, one R.