GOD the skating animation was rough. And remained rough.

Budget, time, I know.

Not a fan of the Italian Incest Siblings

Or the fucking Swiss guy who nuts when he skates??

why u gotta be like that....

Generally, I wanted to like it more than I did

yeah I have no idea what the deal with the incest sibling was

I was very ?????

seemed like they had more characters than they had time to really flesh out in a way that made sense

Yeaah...

A massive chunk of character development was just an internal monologue while performing the same skating routine with the same shots we've seen like... 3 times now

Russian Yuri was the only skater who actually moved with any stylistic difference from all the others

And I wouldn't be so nitpicky about the skating if they hadn't insisted on showing so goddamn much of it

I don't want to watch some one-off character's routine more than once, never mind more than twice

"Guys we need to fill as much time as possible with these roughs that we already did bc we don't actually have a plot for this episode"

haha yeah I started zoning out during the skating bits a lot

There are like... brief moments of something really, really nice that I liked. Like how Victor and Yuri traded off the traditionally male/female positions through their exhibition routine

Victor was likeable, even if his personality eventually started to feel really one-note.

Yuri, I have some trouble with because there's only so long I can suspend disbelief that he's actually an adult.

it did some interesting gender stuff, like having a big thing about a lot of the guys being objects of sexual attraction

I was never sure of how I "should" be interpreting those moments, because they always seemed to be buried under wacky sports anime tropes