Symposium

Fanception on ice!!!: Cycles of choreographic adaptation and fandom in figure skating

Emry Sottile

Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States

[0.1] Abstract—I examine the cyclical nature of love and fandom when Yuri!!! On Ice's figure skating routines are (re)performed in fictional and real competitions, which creates a sense of haunting palimpsest as embodied practice is translated from medium to medium. I highlight how adapting repertoire and donning cosplay can be a means for athletes and fans to produce profoundly generative and explicitly citational performances of embodied and passionate love for both form and fandom.

[0.2] Keywords—Anime; Choreography; Citational practices; Cosplay; Fan production; Intermediality; Sports fandom

Sottile, Emry. 2025. "Fanception on Ice!!!: Cycles of Choreographic Adaptation and Fandom in Figure Skating." In "Sports Fandoms," guest edited by Jason Kido Lopez and Lori Kido Lopez, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 45. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2025.2705.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In 2018, Japanese figure skating duo Miu Suzaki and Ryuichi Kihara performed their season's short program—choreographed to the song "Yuri on Ice"—at the Pyeongchang Olympics, which has since amassed almost five million views on YouTube. This song, however, is not a classical or popular piece to choreograph from; it is instead from the eponymous Japanese sports anime Yuri on Ice (ユーリ!!! on ICE), about International Skating Union (ISU) men's singles figure skating. The anime, heavily inspired by stars, cultures, and repertoires of the sport, is also heavily citational of the sport, and even employed figures in the community for cameos and to choreograph the show's repertoire. It does not end here, however, as the anime's choreography has found its way and is performed, in part or in full, by members of the figure skating community worldwide. The cyclical nature of love and fandom occurring within the (re)performances of these works, at fictional and real competitions, creates a sense of haunting palimpsest that pays homage to the sport as its embodied practice is translated across media spaces. As such, the layers of fanception and adaptation that are produced within the figure skating community tied to Yuri on Ice highlight how intermedia love dances, by and for athletes and fans of the medium, produce profoundly generative and explicitly citational choreographic performances of embodied and affective love for their form.

2. Context

[2.1] Yuri on Ice is a Japanese sports anime that aired from October 6, 2016, to December 22, 2016, and was derived from original screenplays and character designs of the manga artist Mitsurō Kubo. The twelve-episode anime was directed and written by Sayo Yamamoto and produced by the studio MAPPA. The story follows the career of Japan Skating Federation figure skater Yuuri Katsuki, who, after placing poorly in his first ISU Grand Prix Final, returns home to Hasetsu, a fictional city in Kyushu's Saga Prefecture. There, Yuuri's idol and Russian figure skating superstar Viktor Nikiforov becomes his coach in the Grand Prix series. The series' main plot centers around Yuuri competing in ISU Grand Prix competitions, such as the Cup of China and the Rostelecom Cup, alongside his friends and rivals, including the up-and-coming Russian skater Yuri Plisetsky. The critically and popularly acclaimed series is best remembered for its groundbreaking queer representation in anime as well as its acceptance by the global figure skating community of professionals and amateurs alike.

[2.2] Yuri on Ice's emotional arc centers around the queer relationship that develops between Yuuri and Viktor during the skating season, which was given narrative depth, complexity, and substance that is atypical of sports anime predecessors. In terms of representation, Yuri on Ice revolutionarily offered a homosexual relationship that differed from the boys' love genre that portrays male homosexual relationships in an objectifying way for female consumption and places heteronormative relationship roles onto queer men—for example, the masculine, dominant seme and the feminine, submissive uke (Laws 2007). Similarly, while other sports anime are not necessarily classified within the boys' love genre, the volleyball anime Haikyuu!! and the swimming anime Free, amongst others, are often critiqued for queerbaiting, which is a marketing technique that hints at LGBT relationships but does not make them explicit in media in order to attract a queer audience (Laws 2007). For example, in Free's sixth episode there's a scene where one swimsuit-clad character almost gives another male character CPR, leaving viewers to comment things like "I know Haru won't kiss Makoto no matter how many times I replay this scene. Yet I'm hoping that he would. I'm crushing my own's soul. This is self torture" (@AshlynnAspires, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c4tOhIJAk8). In the cases of these sports anime, in an attempt to make the subtext a text, fans take cosplay photos of the characters in their ships, create anime music videos including key subtextual moments, and write fan fiction or doujinshi (self-published magazines).

[2.3] While these fan practices are part of the Yuri on Ice fandom experience, the sense of respect for the source material arguably differs due to the fulfillment of queer potentiality onscreen that other anime have robbed fans of. When Yuri on Ice aired from week to week, the early episodes of the show set up an expectation of queerbaiting that fans, albeit annoyed, had come to terms with and accepted, due to historical precedent. On a popular Tumblr post in February 2023, user acepalindrome wrote:

[2.4] If you weren't there when Yuri on Ice was airing you don't get it!! We were just having fun...we all kn[e]w we [we]re being queerbaited but hey, it [was] nothing new. We [we]re used to it. My expectations [were] extremely tempered...I kn[e]w how this works. I [was] just having fun in the meantime. BUT THEN. BUT FUCKING THEN.

[2.5] This THEN indicates a turning point midway through the anime when Yuuri and Viktor's queer relationship is confirmed through a kiss, which is "depicted in such a way that the kiss itself is both never shown onscreen and completely undeniable" (Casiello 2016). While the framing of the shots obscures lip-to-lip contact, this kiss, among other intimate moments, makes the show's "queerness [paradoxically]...both always centered and always off screen," which was a luxury in and of itself to anime fandom (Casiello 2016). This shifted fandom interest (for the most part) away from queerbaiting fears and debates toward an excitement and relief that the anime was the exception to the rule, further enabling the proliferation of queer fan content. As a point of difference from earlier sports anime that accusations of queerbaiting have been leveraged against, Viktor and Yuuri are an impliedly engaged—via matching multivalent rings—queer couple who "have an extremely intimate relationship without it being defined as sexual or having an end goal of sex," and that relationship is given dramatic, romantic, and narrative substance (Laws 2007). While some audiences have critiqued Yuri on Ice for the vagueness of the relationship's nature, it is nevertheless significant in Japanese media, as same-sex marriage is still banned in the nation and the distribution of non–legally binding same-sex partnership certificates only began in the nation's capital on November 1, 2022 (Gunia 2022). Yuri on Ice's global reach is also notable, according to scholar Tien-Yi Chao, who points to how the anime crosses "three borders of facts vs fiction, nationality, and sexuality" in a piece that helps further Japanese soft power via transnational pop-culture diplomacy (2021).

[2.6] In his article "Fanception and Musical Fan Activity on YouTube" (2020), scholar Christoper Cayari applies the dream within a dream concept of the film Inception to fan spaces where fanception is instead what happens when a "fan participates in a fandom and thus gathers fans, creating their own fandom, which exists within another fandom" (Cayari 2020). This fanception arguably occurs with Yuri on Ice where figure skating fans created and adapted real skating in a fictional work that generated a fandom in and of itself, where fans cosplay as the anime's characters and perform their routines in competition and for fun. However, instead of an endlessly derivative process, Yuri on Ice uniquely formed a feedback loop: Those upon which the fan creation was based have engaged with or become fans of that which they influenced, creating a vaguely incestuous palimpsest via adaptation of their aesthetics and repertoire. Scholar Linda Hutcheon details that adaptation's pleasure is derived "from repetition with variation [that combines]...the comfort of ritual with the piquancy of surprise" and that this process creates palimpsest where haunting traces of the former always remain in the new unique work that is a "derivation without being derivative...[and] second without being secondary" (Hutcheon 2006).

[2.7] While Cayari applies fanception to the YouTube space to examine music learning and participatory fandom, how it operates in the Yuri on Ice and figure skating fandom exemplifies how fanception can bridge media forms and can interpolate both fans and professional cultural producers in its engine. Cayari sees fanception as a means for aspiring cultural producers to "catapult [themselves]...into the view-count stratosphere" by using fan-related cultural production to help launch them to stardom (2020). In the professional figure skating community, engaging with Yuri on Ice was less about establishing a fanbase—which many skaters already had in the skating world—than it was about integrating anime fans into their fandom in a different cultural field. While "the largest portion of diehard skating fandom" is composed of "adult, middle-class, [and] mostly heterosexual women," professional skaters' adoption of a popular anime exposed them to new fan demographics (inter)nationally, especially among younger people (Kestnbaum 2003). For example, Russian world champion figure skater and one-time Olympian Evgenia Medvedeva's love of Yuri on Ice became part of her skating brand at the height of her competitive years as someone who was "just like the rest [of people] on the internet" when the anime originally aired (Krishna and Yamazaki 2016). Because she posted her reactions to episodes on social media, appeared at competitions wearing Yuri's Russian National Team jacket to the kiss and cry, and posted photos of herself in Yuuri cosplay online, she went viral and gained fans of her skating due to shared proximity to Yuri on Ice and anime fandom (Krishna and Yamazaki 2016). The fact that there was an official 2018 Olympics ad that animated Medvedeva in the style of Yuri on Ice and that people tossed her plush toys from the anime at the 2016 Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final highlighted the fact that a professional cultural producer's adoption of fanception can not only expand their fandom but also bring fans of other interests into the fold (Pineda 2018).

[2.8] When applied to studies of dance and embodiment, the fanception and palimpsest that happens can be envisioned as love dances. These are sites, according to dance scholar SanSan Kwan, where "love [serves] as motivation, as process, as endeavor, and as pedagogy" in the production and performance of these choreographic works (2021). However, while Kwan's love dances mainly conceive "intercultural duets as practices of love and of loss" a different inter-prefix is more apt in examining the aforementioned phenomenon of intermedia. While intercultural exchange within the show's globalized cast of characters is present within Yuri on Ice—including a duet between East and West in the form of Japanese and Russian athletes skating as a pair—the adaptations here fall within East Asian, and oftentimes specifically Japanese contexts. The thing that changes, however, is the medium that the sport and artistic form takes place in; it is then the love of figure skating, its stars, its repertoire, and its culture that propels its affect and effect across media forms and into these cycles of citational choreography and practice.

3. Fanception and adaptation

[3.1] Yuri on Ice can be conceived within frameworks of adaptation and translation that occur not via text but via representations of embodied repertoire. This is achieved through the highly citational nature of the work, which visually, aesthetically, and materially pays homage to many figure skating stars. The two creators Mitsurō Kubo and Sayo Yamamoto are figure skating fans who, like larger society, were preoccupied with the sport in the face of the 2014 Sochi Olympics when the project was greenlit. Kubo has discussed in interviews how she "[doesn't] think that anyone who would put more love than [they] did into making [Yuri on Ice] will ever appear" due, in part, to the efforts at authenticity taken in the production process (Dunham 2016a, 2016b). For example, Kubo location-scouted and did production research by staying in skaters' hotels at overseas skating competitions to properly depict these environments onscreen (Karice 2017b). Similarly, Yuri on Ice's skating costumes are inspired by real moments and outfits in skating anime. Young Viktor Nikiforov's design, for example, is based on United States figure skater and two-time Olympian Johnny Weir's 2006 Olympics costume and 2010 rose crown (Exorcising Emily 2016). Due to the fact Viktor would have been competing around the same time as Weir within the real-world timeline, Viktor's career intentionally evokes one of Weir's contemporaries: the Russian figure skating legend Evgeni Plushenko. The anime blurs the lines between real and fictional skating so much that Stéphane Lambiel, a former competitive Swiss skater and current figure skating coach and choreographer, even has a cameo appearance in animated form at the Grand Prix Final to further combine these worlds intertextually.

[3.2] The main character Yuuri's figure skating career, repertoire, and competition jump combinations are styled after two Japanese figure skating legends, Yuzuru Hanyu and Shoma Uno. For example, in 2015 Shoma Uno was the first skater to land a quad flip in an international competition, which Yuuri also landed in the ISU Grand Prix Final of the anime (Hoang 2016). Similarly, Yuuri's competition scores parallel the world records that Hanyu achieved at the Barcelona ISU Grand Prix Final in 2015, where the anime's finals are also taking place (Zaccardi 2015). All the anime's skate choreography is also done by Kenji Miyamoto, a retired former competitive ice dancer and current coach and choreographer. As a choreographer, Miyamoto has choreographed for both Yuzuru Hanyu and Shoma Uno throughout their skating careers, including Hanyu's ice show performance of BTS's "Dynamite" in 2023 for the Yuzuru Hanyu Notte Stellata ice show and Uno's 2022–2023 season free-skate program to Johann Adolph Hasse's "Mea tormenta, properate." Creating explicit parallels in choreographers, competition scores, and world records generates a layered blurring when fans and medium practitioners are translating figure skating from rink to screen.

[3.3] In generating the performances for the show, Miyamoto created and skated almost all the choreography for test footage, which was used as a reference for the final animation (Karice 2017a). To do so, Miyamoto, "endeavored to skate as if [he was] each of the characters themselves" to ensure that their personality came through in how the choreography and movement were embodied (Karice 2017a). Due to the large amount of repertoire in the anime, Miyamoto ensured that alongside the distinct music, each skater also had a unique style. For example, he had a female skater embody the ballet-inspired choreography for Yuri Plisetsky—a fifteen-year-old Russian skater who is Yuuri's main rival—who skates to works evocative of opera and classical music, which contrasts that of other in-anime skaters, such as the Czech skater Emil Nekola, whose free program is to a cyberpunk-inspired sci-fi film score. Miyamoto wanted the performance footage to reflect the intended androgynous, graceful beauty for the "choreography [that] has a male character moving as if he were female," so it could be subsequently translated onscreen (Karice 2017a). Thus, he coached the skater to "not to flick her fingers out forcefully" when she skated and act as "if she had dipped her hands into honey, or as if she was drawing threads out from the tips of her fin[g]ers" when she moved (Karice 2017a). When real skating coaches' and performers' choreography mixed with real-world allegory connections, the piece became a labor of love, which has been attested to by both members of the staff and members of the international figure skating community who have vocally supported the show. For example, Johnny Weir has said "the producers definitely took their time to be sure that every detail was right" and it felt like the production team followed them "backstage, in hotel rooms, [and] at the banquets" to create a "very knowledgeable and loving representation of the skating world" (Exorcising Emily 2016).

4. Cosplay as a love dance

[4.1] Fanception and citation also emerge out of Yuri on Ice in the repertoire of the figure skating community at large through the performances of skaters like Miu Suzaki, Ryuichi Kihara, and Joel Minas. These citational performances also can be figuratively or literally conceived as a form of cosplay, which scholar Matthew Hale describes as a "performative action in which one dons a costume and/or accessories and manipulate posture, gesture, and language in order to generate meaningful correspondences and contrasts between a given body and a set of texts from which it is modeled and made to relate" as a form of "embodied citational acts" (2014). Hale also points to the two major intertextual processes that connect a cosplayer with their text: direct imitation—which emphasizes fidelity to the source—and textual transformation. The latter introduces "aberrations and embellishments" that create distance between the source and adaptation, enabling the works to "illuminate...the other by virtue of their many points of correspondence and contrast" through transformative acts (Hale 2014). While there are no explicit benefits to one or another, both forms of cosplay inscribe fictional somatic citations on a real corporeality. This also occurs when the figure skating community takes up Yuri on Ice's palimpsestous skate choreography, practices the repertoire, and (re)performs it for the public in their own version of a love dance.

[4.2] During the 2017–2018 figure skating season, two Japanese pair skaters, Miu Suzaki and Ryuichi Kihara, utilized Yuuri's free skate song "Yuri on ICE" for their short program, which earned them first place in the All-Japan Figure Skating Championships that year and twenty-first place at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. Choreographed by former Japanese competitive figure skater Yuka Sato, the short program envisions the solo free skate as a pair skate, which in some cases gestures to the original choreography while in other cases explicitly cites it, making it a form of textual transformation cosplay, as opposed to direct imitation. For example, the piano score to "Yuri on Ice" begins with an ostinato—or repeated musical motif and phrasing—for the first portion of the song that persists gently and gracefully. However, about twenty-four seconds into the program, a bright, hopeful chord interrupts the ostinato. Then, the fermata lingers in the air before the newly altered ostinato begins again, which marks the first jump combination of Yuuri's free skate program: a quad toe loop into a double toe loop. This moment of music similarly marks the first jump in Suzaki and Kihara's program: a synchronized side-by-side triple lutz. While the finer points of the jumps differ—the loop is a jump that launches off the edge of the skate while the lutz is a counter-rotated jump launched off the pick—Suzaki and Kihara choose to choreograph this jump with precise timing and placement in the vein of the original choreography. Thus, while hearkening back to the anime's choreography and emotionality, the pair-skate program still makes the necessary adaptations to convert a men's singles free skate performance into an effective short program for pair skaters. This repetition also occurs via more direct citation where the step-sequence from the anime is copied in synchroneity in the real competition performance. Halfway through the anime and Olympic performances, the skaters balance on their right legs and rotate their lifted leg backward and forward and pair this with sharp hip rotations as they glide on the ice. The step-sequences end with raised arms and the usage of pronounced, sweeping gestures upward, which are similarly present in both performances.

[4.3] In the anime, the instrumental piece "Yuri on Ice" centers around Yuuri's figure skating career and the love that has driven him through it. However, whereas throughout the song Yuuri duets with the building instrumentation that highlights his discovery of hope and love as the song progresses, the Olympians duet with one another via side-by-side jumps, shadow skated step-sequences, somatically connected lifts, sit-spins, and death spirals. In the final pose of the anime sequence, Yuuri gestures to his coach Viktor off the rink as a sign of love and dedication. Suzaki and Kihara replicate the gesture but instead hold hands and gesture to each other in an affective and intimate moment, which inscribes both a unity and a heterosexuality to the originally queer dance. The love and sense of yearning love that is expressed in the solo anime performance thus finds completion and resolution in the textual translation of it onto the international stage where the pair's sense of loving trust, teamwork, and intimacy appears effortless on real ice, to call upon old memories for watchers and reinscribe the song with new meaning.

[4.4] In translation, alteration and loss of meaning are common phenomena, which is also illuminated when the heterosexuality of Suzaki and Kihara's performance is viewed alongside the queerness of Yuri on Ice. When competitive pair skating originated in the early twentieth century "there [was] no technical reason why most...moves would need to be performed by opposite sexes" (Kestnbaum 2003). However, women "demonstrat[ing] their parity with men by performing moves alongside them" in pair skating was a means to enter the competitive skating world (Kestnbaum 2003). While opposite-sex pairings were revolutionary for women then, the gendered dynamics have remained unchanged more than a century later and delimit a different sort of representation on the rink. This has been especially true as intense acrobatic moves such as overhead lifts and death spirals have been more popular in pair skating, so "sexual differences in terms of body type" have become all but compulsory for pairs to remain competitive (Kestnbaum 2003). These signifying moves are found in the pair's "Yuri on Ice" performance and combined with moments of direct imitation of the performance text; thus, while the staging of queer source material in the professional skating world is a show of love and respect, its full impact is unintentionally stymied by competitive pair skating's repertoires and gender dynamics. While the credits of the Yuri on Ice finale depict an almost queer utopian vision of pair skating, where Yuuri and Viktor skate together—sans the sort of moves marked by sexual difference in competition today—Suzuki and Kihara's performance on the Olympic and ISU circuits highlight the heteronormative presentist realities that might dilute these possibilities in translation on (inter)national stages.

[4.5] While the blue color palette and rhinestone accents of Suzaki and Kihara's skating costumes and their choreographically inspired program textually transform the multilayered source material, other skaters, such as Joel Minas, strive for direct imitation in both costume and performed choreography. Joel Minas is a gay Filipino former competitive figure skater and current part-time skating coach from the Metro Manila area who has gone viral on YouTube multiple times for his performances of repertoire from Yuri on Ice at fan events. As opposed to Suzaki and Kihara, Minas's performance reads as a copy of the anime's choreography and performances. In addition to performing the skating repertoire, Minas makes several gestural and citational choices that inscribe the embodied performance with authenticity. Minas performs these programs to the best of his ability, with ardency and attention to replicating the most memorable members of the program, including the flying sit spin, seductive step sequence, and sweeping arm gestures.

[4.6] Despite the heteronormative nature of the figure skating world's staged performances, "stereotyped perceptions of men in skating as necessarily unmasculine and by implication homosexual persist apart from the actual sexuality of any individual skater" in the sport (Kestnbaum 2003). Thus, while the performance of heteronormativity by male skaters is expected on the ice—either physically in pair skating or in catering to female fans and judges in solo skating—homosexuality is expected off it, making for a complex issue. Despite Minas's positionality seeming somewhat stereotypical, its contribution to a genealogy of (re)performance of a queer subjectivity on and off the ice with other queer skaters like John Curry and Rudy Galindo should not be understated. While the queer sexuality of the skater "the subject is no longer [an] unmentionable secret" in skating culture, queer-identified skaters have "asserted that judges have marked them down because of their sexual preference or...too-effeminate style," signifying that there is still work to be done (Kestnbaum 2003). Through utilizing cosplay performance as a mode to express belonging to fan and queer spaces, Minas effectively serves as a role model that queer fans can see themselves in and reinscribes the queerness that Suzaki and Kihara's performance unintentionally dilutes to the anime's score and legacy.

[4.7] Throughout Yuri on Ice, Yuuri performs his short program "In Regards to Love: Eros" four times, and the program shifts slightly each time as Yuuri improves. In each new iteration, there are certain emotional and dramatic moments, such as Yuuri stepping out of his quad salchow in the third episode and kissing his engagement ring before his Grand Prix Final short program in the eleventh episode. Minas, aware of the effect of these, specifically includes these moments in the choreography, which dramaturgically uses moments of the character's imperfections at the same time temporarily to summon the fans' memories and intensity of watching the anime. In the comments for the performance "Yuri!!! On Ice - In Regards to Love: Eros Live,'" which was recorded at a 2017 fan gathering in the Philippines and has garnered 3.8 million views, commenters write things such as "I gasped when he made the same mistake as Yuri omg I'm dead" (@vvanteah, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WXwHJkjrNw) and "HE KISSED THE RING AND DID YURI'S MISTAKE MY HEART CANNOT HANDLE THIS" (@Pipzip, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WXwHJkjrNw) attesting to the semiotic clarity in the performance citations.

[4.8] While some more serious skaters have pointed out the technical differences between Yuuri and Minas's repertoire, the slightly scaled-down repertoire still reads as an imitation to many fans who are looking for specific citations. Fans seek out the skate choreography's crossed-arms ending pose, how the skater gets out of his fall; the interspersed flamenco-inspired arm positioning; and the fast-paced, seductive hip rotations that are identifiable to skating aficionados and casual Yuri on Ice viewers alike. The performance thus becomes a labor of love by a fan, who connects with and embodies a character whose athletic and sexual orientation he identifies with. It is subsequently translated for fans into an intermedia love dance that is inscribed on the body of Minas and memories of him and his viewers. When Minas, Suzaki, and Kihara skate, they also are not only performing the anime—they are performing Miyamoto, Hanyu, Uno, and other figure skating greats whose legacies haunt the repertoire that their performances as cosplay complicate and conjure.

5. Conclusion

[5.1] Yuuri's repertoire, its antecedents, and its descendants are just one of many sites where the intertextuality and the generated effects of fanception occur within the framework that Yuri on Ice provides as an understudied yet popularly over-discussed 2010s anime, and further analysis is possible via other characters repertoire, cosplay in convention spaces, and so forth. Still, examining how Yuri on Ice adapts professional figure skaters' choreography and culture and how those adaptations are (re)performed and altered in cycles of palimpsest activated via cosplay and fanception is significant because it allows for choreographic analysis to be reframed within fan and sports genealogies of embodied practice. As representations of choreography are translated across cultures, texts, and artistic mediums, love and loss mark these border crossings and can be profoundly generative if we allow them to. Through examining how a different sort of love—that of fans to an art form and the affect in its embodied expression—can generate its own intermedia love dances, we can better see how layers of adaptation and homage come into duet and concert on the corporealities who perform them in contemporary figure skating and beyond.