A gay ice skating anime made me believe in love again

When I started watching Yuri!!! on Ice, I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’ve been a fan of sports anime for years, and a fan of anime in general for longer. Sports anime makes up a broad and increasingly popular swath of anime offerings, and as with any genre, there are certain conventions I’ve come to expect: a loveable underdog making a surprising comeback, detailed explanations of a game’s rules and strategy that somehow get me to care about sports, teams learning to cooperate and developing their relationships both on and off the court.

This last feature of sports anime may be what makes it so profitable. Because sports anime tends to feature large casts of men and few (if any) female characters, and because the male characters’ interactions tend to be both physically and emotionally intense, the genre provides ample fodder for yaoi fans. These fans are often (but not always) straight women who find the idea of male/male relationships compelling or titillating. Most yaoi fans don’t expect or even want these relationships to become canonical. Instead, the characters serve as inspiration for their own fantasies and fan-created content. However, sports anime also pulls in LGBT fans hoping for legitimate representation.

I was one of these fans. Free! introduced me to sports anime, and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit how long I held on to the belief that the same-gender relationships in the show would eventually become romantic. While I still enjoy sports anime — Haikyuu!!’s excellent…