Where I live my country depression is almost like a sin so I will have to put my best act tomorrow not easy . <| sep |> Yesssssss . Good storytelling and characters matter the most in any story . I think all the reasons you ' ve laid out are why so many people are watching and identify with it I could write out pages and pages of meta , but none of it would matter if this wasn ' t a damn good show , or they didn ' t pull out all the stops to show Yuri ' s character development and make him the realest character I ' ve seen in years . Let ' s be fair , like everybody else coming into this , I started watching this show without knowing any of this would happen . I saw the trailer in September and immediately went male figure skating anime ? ??? tiny angry Russians ? ?? finally a sports anime tailored to my dumb interests , sign me right up So I wasn ' t expecting the first episode to be anywhere as good as it was . I remember waiting to feel letdown in subsequent episodes and YoI just . kept making the right decisions where it matters . But because it ' s so good , I can watch it on so many levels . I can watch it in skating otaku mode , or as longtime anime fangirl , or as a queer person cheering for every glass ceiling they shatter , and I can also knock out pages of theories about everything from the music to the dog to hey , with all this instagramming and the 201617 skating season right now this show is probably happening in real time , are they going to alternate universe magically nonhomophobic Russia or what ? There ' s so much to unpack about this show because it really is a labour of love , and they might be working with a limited animation budget but there ' s no effort spared on attention to detail . It ' s not perfect because what is , but I just want to march every major anime studio in front of YoI and tell them , See , guys ? This , this right here is the kind of content we want more of . This show has set the goddamn bar .