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Poetic. Uplifting. Heartbreaking. This is not only one of my favorite animes, but one of the best shows of any genre I have ever seen, full stop.

The attention to detail in this anime is incredible. The squeaking of the wooden stage or tapping of a paper fan, the architectural details of the theaters or the movement of fabrics, are all rendered with extreme skill. The people who worked on SGRS clearly loved traditional Japanese culture and the art of Rakugo, and it shows.

The characters are wonderfully human, flawed, and complex. I found myself completely understanding why someone acted in a certain way while hating them ... for doing so at the same time. And just when I thought I’d figured out someone’s motivation, a new piece of information was revealed that made me reevaluate everything.

I wept, I gasped, I laughed. This is what drama should be.

I absolutely understand why the reviews for Yuri on Ice are so mixed. However, I find myself more than a little obsessed with it, and I think that for all its flaws it's still worth a watch. Well, 2 watches--but I'll explain below.

As so many other reviewers have mentioned, this show has layers upon layers. You can definitely watch it as a romcom, albeit one that is constrained by a culture that hasn't been overly LGBT friendly in the past. Without too much digging, Victor's over-the-top behavior can be explained by the genre. You can watch this as a high-tension sports drama, where neither viewers ... nor the athletes themselves are entirely sure how well their routines will go. Really it's a mix of both, with a lot of psychological drama thrown in.

It's the psychological aspects that had me coming back. YOI has one of the best, most accurate portrayals of anxiety and depression that I have seen in any show. Realizing how anxiety makes your brain lie to you is key to understanding this show. Yuri sees himself as a loser--and when we meet him, we agree. He just bombed a major competition, is overweight from stress eating, and has recently moved back into his childhood bedroom. But that doesn't square with what is actually happening. He's the top-ranked male figure skater in Japan, his hometown is crazy supportive of him, and one of the most talented and attractive leaders in his sport has chosen to give up everything to come work with him. Even the other skaters, his erstwhile rivals, are nice to him. Yuri's drive to win, and the crushing pressure he puts on himself to succeed, are what is skewing his perception, and he's a textbook example of an unreliable narrator. A bombshell reveal at the end of episode 10 adds even more depth to this, and I strongly suggest you rewatch the series at least once to take advantage of this knowledge. Many of the problems I had with the show went away afterwards. (Try to watch it from Victor's perspective, if you can. This isn't a goofball romcom, but rather a tightly structured comedy of errors. Things that I took at face-value became funny, and lines I'd found amusing were now hilarious.)

As much as I truly enjoyed YOI, it does suffer from several major flaws. The animation quality plummets in the later episodes--there's an entire Twitter account dedicated to awkward YOI screengrabs--and it's especially disappointing given how lovely the action sequences are in the first few episodes. New characters are thrown in all the time, ostensibly to illuminate some part of Yuri or Victor's psyche, and are discarded just as quickly. The pacing is extremely uneven, and I would have gladly given up watching other skaters' performances for more time spent on Yuri and Victor themselves. I also wish their romance had been more overt, but the creators mentioned that they faced censorship so I can't blame them too much.

Despite this, I think the series is still worth watching (and re-watching!). I'm looking forward to the movie and, hopefully, a second season with a distant-enough deadline for the show to work out some of its kinks.