The thing about Yuri on Ice
Or rather the audience response to it, which is of people starved for sustenance shocked and tearful at being fed a decent meal: it’s not just that it’s a heartwarming queer love story, it’s a heartwarming queer love story set in a more humane (but not unbelievable) world, one populated by characters who are both colorfully drawn and basically good-hearted. There are no antagonists; no one is really malicious or cruel. This is not to say none of the characters ever screw up, because of course they do, but no one in the world of this story is trying to harm anyone else.
Maybe this is in part what @coloredink means by calling it a gift from the brightest timeline. What I’m seeing in the often semi-hysterical audience response–my own included–is that there’s a massive unmet need for this sort of gift. I don’t like to use the word “fluff” because I have a complex about it, which boils down to resentment toward its connotations of insubstantiality, and what Le Guin once said about the bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Happiness is not stupid, and stories devoted to furnishing comfort and joy, and hope of love and a more humane world, need not be stupid or insubstantial. Comfort and joy are essential to life. Not just in the hellhole of a year that is 2016, but always.
There’s no reason we should be starved for stories like this.
t00thpasteface
