Featured / Yuzuru Hanyu is My Emergency Contact

Yuzu ran his fingers through his hair and caused a paradigm shift in the Fanyus.

Author’s Note: This entry was written in the Summer of 2019.

We kicked off a new season of Fantasy on Ice last weekend. It started in Makuhari and yes, I had a soft pretzel. Yuzu is in the shows again this season…obviously, or they wouldn’t be on my radar. Trust me. Without Yuzu, Fantasy on Ice couldn’t be less fantastic. The Fanyus spent their time leading up to the first show in all the usual ways: hacking into NASA’s mainframe to try to stream the shows from Japan for free; posting happy, hysterical crying cat emojis simply from being momentarily overwhelmed that Yuzu exists; and, of course, speculating on which direction he would comb his hair.  

That reminds me. There was a magazine released in Japan which explained in great detail (including color coded directional arrows) how Yuzu styles his hair. Multiple diagrams for each hair style variation. Several pages long. This wasn’t created by a Fanyu. This was an ACTUAL, LEGIT publication…which I’m sure sold out instantly. I hate to break it to you fellas, but you won’t be Yuzu, even if you follow the green arrow 26 degrees to the right and the orange arrow 131 degrees to the left.

But the Zamboni’s almost done, so back to Fantasy on Ice. The show started with the usual group number which, were it not for Yuzu, you might see at your local ice rink on a Saturday night. I know, I know, there are other Olympic winning figure skaters in Fantasy on Ice. It’s not. The same. It was status quo until Yuzu dipped one of the female skaters at the end of the group number. The way the Fanyus reacted, you would’ve thought he had sex with her right there in the middle of the ice. It was similar to the reaction to the Haru Yo Koi hydroblade in Fantasy on Ice last year; however, we all know in that case no girl was needed. Yuzu and the ice “made out” just fine.  

There was ample time to recover from Dip on Ice 2019, but there would never be enough time to prepare for what came next. Lulled into a “is the stuff these other people are doing actually considered the same sport as Yuzu’s” stupor, it was time for his solo. We had seen pictures from it, and before that we had seen sketches of the costume posted by Fanyus at the arena trying to describe and upload the drawings to Twitter as if they were courtroom sketch artists. “I think the material is this…and it is this color right here…and it appears to have three layers” (because of course any less would have closed the banks in Sendai for the day). But pictures and descriptions were no substitute for the real thing. The two minutes and 34 seconds of Real Thing. Before you could say, “two-time Olympic gold medalist” Yuzu had grabbed the Fanyus by their ForJoy subscriptions and wasn’t about to let go.  

Ridiculously tailored costume? Check. 

Hair combed at 26 and 131 degrees? Check. 

Mismatched gloves? Check. Check. 

Unapologetic, masculine smolder? Uhhhh…that’s a new box, Yuzu.  But…

CHECK!!!!!! 

It was as if he said, “SCREW IT.  I’m just going to give them exactly what I know they want.”  Because it didn’t stop with the costume, the hair or the 新しい [new] smolder.  

That’s right, Yuzu. Mess up that perfectly 26/131ed hair to bring out your angry cowlick.

Slowly lower your hand to your throat while you’re spinning because it just DOES something for us.

Cover your eye like Kaneki does when he’s with Hide in the coffee–I can’t. It’s too beautiful.

And at the end, after you’ve hurled your glove to the ice, simply STAND THERE (longer than usual) and let us just look at you while you appear to curse in Japanese over how 悔しい [disappointed] you feel about this spectacular performance you just gifted to the universe. 

It’s obvious why you threw your glove at the end. You were throwing down the gauntlet as if to say, “I dare you to ask me for more than that.” And just in case anyone did, you solidified it with one last running of your fingers through your hair just as the screams started to die down. A stab into your prey that was already dead on the ground. It required ZERO skating skills but you still scored a +5 GOE for that (UNBELIEVABLY PREMEDITATED)  hair sweep. 

Let’s keep it real. 

We know you and Pooh-san came up with all this one night while sharing a Zunda McFlurry and watching Tokyo Ghoul. The quad Axel wasn’t enough to keep you busy during the off season, so you had to develop the “perfect package” to give us everything we possibly ever could’ve wanted.  

And now, we don’t know what to do. So…we’ve done nothing. Well, at least publicly. Given the avalanche of Facebook postings the ANTICIPATION of this performance created, there was shockingly little posted after it. This wasn’t radio silence. This wasn’t crutches Yuzu silence. This was…well, there’s no word for it. Yuzuoverload? もしかしたら. [Maybe.] It’s as if each Fanyu took a sabbatical to handle it in their own, individual way, saying,

“I’m just gonna take that two minutes and 34 seconds and go sit over here in this dark corner for awhile.”

We may have needed to start another Shakespearean prayer circle, but this time for a whollllllle other reason. A few Fanyus have resurfaced, but the comments are all the same. “I can’t handle this.”  

Things got eerily…quiet.

The next day, while the Fanyus were still not handling this, Yuzu returned to his innocent, quirky self photo-bombing Plushenko and posing like the sweet 男の子 [boy] next door to sell Fantasy on Ice T-shirts like absolutely nothing had happened the night before.

But we hadn’t forgotten. 

And he knows it. 

You could tell from the look he gave the camera after the parting shot hair sweep. The one proclaiming he has upped his game. I mean, we know he’s a competitor…

But, Yuzu, you will always be in the lead, and it’s possible this time you broke the Fanyus to the point that we’ll never be the same…

…until you do it again.