Manime Club Talks Yuri On Ice

Manime Club (MC) is a weekly activity at The Community Hub.  It's a Manga and Anime club for teens who enjoy watching and talking anime. The only thing missing is the Mangas (we are working on that).

We recently finished watching the first season of One Punch Man and with the second season still ongoing we decided to watch something in between before starting with One Punch Man S2. We figured we'd try a non-action anime. Team Manime considered shows like Watamote and Kiss Him Not Me. We ended up choosing Yuri On Ice because it's a popular anime but also because it would be fun to see what the reactions would be and what the discussions would be like. 

We ended up watching three episodes. We could see the kohais (junior participants) visibly reacting to the anime with surprise, amusement, physically cringing. 

After the screening, the lights went back on and we formed a circle (to summon the dark lord, just kidding we don't do that on Tuesdays) and opened a discussion about the anime.

Even before the official discussion started we heard a lot of reactions like "what was that", "that's jeffed up", and "oh my gods". 

When everybody settled a bit senpai M asked everybody what they thought of the anime:

"It's not a bad thing but it's too overly sexual. I'd say it was a pretty good anime, above average."

 "A couple of scenes I did not expect, but the way the story goes is really beautiful: that's what ice skating is about telling a story by skating. Like ballet on blades"

" I'm not really used to that in anime"

Senpai R: "anime is almost always overly sexual, you're always going to have a scene where something is too gratuitous" Why is it you guys think this is overly sexual compared to other anime?

Because we usually only see it between male and female characters

I don't think it's over sexual, it depends on the genre like harem and gender-bender stuff"

Senpai M:  how do u feel about the gay subtext?

I think it's fine because there's a community of people who will see themselves

There's nothing wrong with that, it's just new.

(some reactions were inaudible mumblings and more cringing that could not be transcribed)

As always we did the last round to see how much each person would rate the episodes they had just watched. The lowest was 5 while the majority rated this anime positively from 10/10 to 7/10 to 9/10.

I have to admit I was a bit nervous and cautious of what the reactions were going to be. The discussion was fairly openminded and everybody was able to say what they thought freely. 

We are going to continue to watch Yuri On Ice this June and I look forward the all the fun discussions.