Hello! I hope I am not bothering but I just wanted to get someone off my chest. I was wondering what the Kubo meant when she said that rinks were similar to what members of the same club wears. It just kinda confused me when she says that considering how romantically the ring exchange scene is (seriously who gives each other rings in front of a church platonically!?)
No need to worry, I like discussing things too deeply😂 so you are not bothering at all! But another fujo rant comes in 3... 2... 1...
So yeah, the those rings are for clubmates interview... Imo, to understand why she said that, or why it was written (because she didn't say that publicly, so we can never know for sure), we need to talk about the difference between how western fandom approaches "representation" and how Jp fandom does.
Japanese fandom and representation
Things are progressing in Jp, too, but even to this day, a lot of people (that doesn't mean all) who call themselves "fujoshi" don't want "representation" and don't want to be allies. They simply consume BL and, let's face it, p0rn, for their own enjoyment. It's in Jp only, but some time ago, somebody posted on twitter their graduation project on this topic - an article and video - if anyone can understand some Jp and is interested in this topic, it's worth giving a watch. The title is "同性愛嫌悪的にBL・GLを愛でる私たち", "We, who homophobically love BL and GL" .
I've mentioned it before, but in case of YoI, there was, eg., a random article from a gay journalist, a figure skating fan, who wrote about how good that dinner scene in ep. 10 was. And it was really, really good - Jp is a country, where a lot of people still think that being gay is bad for society, that gay people are unproductive, so it's okay that they face discrimination. So that scene, where Phichit just congratulates Y&V on their marriage like it's the most natural thing in the world, is incredibly powerful. Yet in fujo spaces, that article was bashed, obviously - "Why did he write something like that? It doesn't have anything to do with those LGPTs. We just like playing with the characters, but they are not gay...".
BL is not LGBT?
Why you ask? Well, if you like fantasies about semes raping ukes etc. then you probably don't want to be told "hey, that's actually discrimination and homophobia, you really should stop that... Semes and ukes don't exist, most people switch...". That's why a lot of fujos insist that BL is something completely separate from LGBT issues. And that leads us to...
Another thing that I also ranted about in the past - that fujos hijack almost all depictions of same-sex attraction between men in mainstream media deeming them "fujoshi fanservice". So YoI is most often discussed as "fujo-pandering anime", and not as "anime with gay representation" the way it is in the western fandom... And it also had a lot of antis, because quite a lot of people dislike fujos. Some of the most popular lines you see in YoI reviews are: "it would be so much better without the weird fujo pandering...", "it was good, but that weird fujo pandering was unnecessary".
Went so far, so why no confirmation?
So finally giving the answer to the question... I believe, that there was very little incentive from the marketing point of view - society is homophobic, industry is homophobic, fandom is homophobic - to actually announce that Y&V are really gay and in love. Most fujos are only interested in Yuuri being uke and Victor being seme (so many fujos wished for IceAdo to fail and I hope that karma will come back to them...). So after the show ended, in my opinion, what is in Jp called koushiki (so people who run the IP and seriously it's not "Mappa"...) really wanted to get rid of the "fujo pandering" reputation (and fujos to a certain extent too, probably, because they've got so rabid that a bunch was even sued for online harassment) and started to backtrack on some things - avoiding rings, avoiding Y&V only arts, even avoiding Y&V only merch, which would sell like crazy. And yeah, Mitsurou and VAs sometimes pushing the narrative that "it's not that serious". They also started promoting Yurio instead. I think, from their perspective, it was the safe choice for the IP... Make it for "everyone", not only for fujos.
Where we are now...
Only it wasn't, in the end... The great koushiki vs. fujos war started (fujos started acting as "rings police", attacking staff members on twitter, doxxing Avex's employees, so on) and long story short, two years later YoI+IceAdo trailer did very bad at cinemas (in the first week out of ~170000 seats, only ~17000 were sold, that's ~90% empty seats - well, a little less maybe, because I'm not sure if special tickets are included in these statistics)... That's my opinion, but I think that was the most likely reason why IceAdo wasn't released in 2019. With such a big Jp distributor, they probably started to fear it will flop. Or the other way - the distributor decided that it would probably flop after seeing these numbers - allegedly, the first rumor that something is wrong was from that distributor's employee.
The very sad reality is that we are in 2023 now, and koushiki pretends YoI doesn't exist... If you think about it, it's really extraordinary... Even without the movie, they could release "VicYuu merch" and it would sell like crazy, but their stance has always been "Well yeah, but we prefer to not earn money, actually 😘 Want to play a game where Victor and Yurio bully Yuuri together, maybe?".
That was long again... I'm sorry, but it's just not possible to give an honest answer in a few sentences.
