amuseoffyre:

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.