Tag: victor nikiforov

fencer-x:

ilarual:

So since the topic of Victor and his characterization came up today, I have a few thoughts on the subject I’d like to share.

Let me start by saying that I’ve read a lot of Victuuri fic. A lot of it. Mostly canonverse fic, because I’m pretty meh on AUs and it takes a pretty special AU to woo me away from canon and canon divergence. As such, I’m intimately familiar with how the YOI fandom tends to write Victor in a canon setting in particular. And I feel like a lot of the time… we miss the mark. Rather drastically, as a matter of fact.

What do I mean by that?

Simple: I think a lot of the way the fandom portrays Victor is still heavily influenced by first impressions.

This is true of many characters in many fandoms. I’ve been around the block a time or twenty and seen a lot of fanon characterizations, both good and bad, and I’ve seen this pattern repeat over and over. First impressions are a big deal, both with fictional characters and with real people, and it can be hard to let go of that. And that’s not always a bad thing, sometimes the impression a character makes on a fandom after two or three episodes is perfectly accurate. And sometimes it’s not, and writing based heavily on first impressions without taking subsequent characterization into account ends up being very flawed and out of character.

And then there’s Victor. And the thing about Victor is that, with the way the narrative of YOI is structured, in the first quarter of the show, we as the audience are deliberately led to believe false things about Victor. It’s all part of the setup for the big twist, it’s all part of the surprise. We’re intentionally being directed to make assumptions about him, without any real evidence that those assumptions are accurate to his character. Almost none of what we “know” about Victor based on the first quarter of the series is really accurate— especially because the vast majority of it is coming from other people talking about Victor, and not from Victor himself.

Here’s what is “revealed” about Victor based on the first three episodes:

• he’s selfish (according to Yakov)
• he’s impulsive (revealed by Victor’s seemingly sudden decision to coach Yuuri)
• he no longer feels he can surprise his audience, and this may be part of why he left skating (according to Yuri)
• he’s forgetful (according to Yuri and also himself)
• he’s a desirable bachelor “playboy type” (according to Minako and Nishigori)

And as we later learn, all of these things are untrue to some degree, except possibly the forgetfulness thing, which I’ll come back to in a moment. So let’s take a look at these “facts” about Victor, shall we?

Keep reading

I quite like this meta, especially this:

He’s been neglecting life and love for over two decades. Life and
love. Both of these things. This is a man who’s completely tickled pink
by the fact that he’s even allowed to eat what he wants now. Freaking katsudon, of all things, is a fresh and exciting experience for him, and Hasetsu’s little ninja house is a thrilling novelty.

Forget
this image of him as a man of the world who spends all this time having
one flings and one night stands and has done extensive leisure travel.
Victor’s twenty-eight years old and he’s only just starting to live his
life; that false first impression we’re given of him is deliberately
misleading.

Victor outright tells us he hasn’t really lived yet. If he were off having whirlwind sex romps on foreign beaches and sipping champagne in the hottest clubs around, I don’t think he’d feel that way. Living a luxurious life doesn’t necessarily mean he’s really been living it. Gucci luggage means nothing about the person carrying it–ask every Japanese workaholic salarywoman who takes -5 vacation days a year but owns brand-name luxury items like wallets and purses.