On the Love Songs of Yuri on Ice
An interesting thing about the music selection in Yuri on Ice is that, so far, all the skating scenes for our main characters use love songs. It’s got me thinking about how the skating plays into the themes of the story, specifically, the use of ‘love’ as the primary narrative, and how the songs build onto the stories of the successive episodes, which in turn inform the songs—it’s neat.
In the first episode, we saw a stunning skating sequence to a song called 離れずにそばにいて/Stammi Vicino, Non Te Ne Andare by Victor and Yuuri. The official subs translated this as 'Stay Close to Me’, but the name would’ve been more accurately translated as either 'Stay By My Side and Never Leave’ or 'Stay Beside Me, Don’t Go’, which carries a much stronger feel of longing and desperation. It’s an arresting sequence and song, more or less setting the stage for our expectations of the characters, story, and atmopshere, and the lyrics have been translated by the talented @yohao88 here. Lyrics-wise, it’s a bitter, hopeful, painful, desperate and ultimately uplifting song in turns. This is clearly a love song, but it isn’t a treatise on the nature of love like the ones we’ll see later, rather, it shows the effects of love, and intensely so : what love does to you, how it breaks your heart and gives you strength. It’s filled with a sense of longing and yearning. This is love as a loneliness, a form of despair, love as a light in the darkness, a plea. This is love as a dependency, something which is not whole in and of itself, something only fulfilled when you finally find someone to take your hand and never let it go.
It’s interesting that in the skating sequence itself, Yuuri gets the majority of the bitter parts (With a sword I wish I could cut/Those throats singing about love) and the longing, desperate parts (Stay beside me/Don’t go/I’m afraid of losing you) while Victor gets the majority of the lonely parts (I hear a voice crying far away/Have you been abandoned as well?//This story that makes no sense/Will vanish tonight along with the stars) and the hopeful parts (If I could see you/From hope/Eternity will be born), with them seguing into each other’s sequences by a jump at the end of the verses. This is the same technique used in the first part of History Makers where Yuuri’s lyrics segues into Victor’s lyrics, if you’ll recall.
While anybody’s guess is as good as mine as to whether Victor was lonely and found hope in meeting Yuuri or not, Yuuri turns out to be a good fit for his parts. He doesn’t understand love and lashes out or flees at its approach, perceiving that love intrudes into his comfort zone, throws him off balance and exposes his weaknesses for all to see. He rejects the love of his fans or indeed the possibility that he can be loved, seeing it as a burden or downright dismissing it with his lack of confidence. ('Run of the mill top skater you could find anywhere’?—–dude, you’re the only certified male top figure skater in all of Japan! You’re on all the site banners! You’re the ace!) This of course creates a feedback loop where his support group stays at arm’s length in order to not cause him discomfort, which in turn drags his confidence and the ability to connect with others down, which in turn does not help with his understanding of love.
The other part of the lyrics, ’Stay by my side/Don’t go/I’m afraid of losing you’ is of course nearly verbatim what he feels about Victor, which forms a large part of his motivation. It’s noteworthy that although 'he hates losing’ is a facet of Yuuri’s personality that all his friends mentioned (in episode 5 this is translated as 'he hates compromises’ when it’s actually 'he hates losing’—-in this case, to both himself and the younger skaters), Yuuri himself does not mention that he wants to win so much as he wants Victor to stay with him, and if winning is what it takes to do that, then that is what he’ll do. One might also argue that Victor is closely related to his love of skating, as it is through Victor’s routines that he both discovered and rediscovered his love of it, and thus in a way it’s also a metaphor and directly connected to losing skating through age, time and losses.
So in the first episode, we have a stage-setting love song that relates to our main character’s psyche and motivation, both prior to the series and perhaps for the foreseeable future. There’s also a leitmotif for this song that could be briefly heard on occasion when Victor skates or when Yuuri thinks about Victor skating—interestingly, in the latter case, the leitmotif is the 'Stay beside me/Don’t go’ verse, which Victor did not skate onscreen in the actual sequence. (One may speculate that it’s a leitmotif for either Victor or how Yuuri feels about Victor in general.)
But, if you’ll recall—–love, as set up by this song, is a dependency. It cannot be fulfilled by itself. And so it makes sense that in the second and third episodes, 'love’ would waltz into Yuuri’s life and camp there and pretty much makes him look it in the eye.
I’m still talking about skating!
(The rest put under Read More Cut for length.)
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