WinForPooh

@valkyrie My woolly brain is mixing up you and @SparkleSalad because sparkle used to be Wakababy. I can tell between all the different Yuzus just fine, but apparently there's only room in my head for one Wakaba.

Yes, it didn't take into account contemporary views, I remember that. For better or for worse, modern art forms (or forms of entertainment) are very different from historical ones. But it was still interesting, a different perspective of what androgyny in performance might mean in different contexts. It did make me think of how in Europe, too, women weren't encouraged to act and historically all the glorious female roles were played by men - and that hasn't drastically impacted how femininity in performance is viewed now. So it would be interesting to read more. (Was the op not Japanese? I don't think I checked!) That's the one.

I've felt like I'd get nosebleed from watching him on a big screen! I'm a wee bit jealous that you got to see him live. What an experience it must've been. I suppose watching Yuzu live is similar in impact in some ways.

There was this very cool Tumblr post about this. Well, not strictly, but about how Yuzu isn't actually taking down gender constructs with his androgyny in the Japanese context because historically in Japanese performance arts, a male artist portraying a role or character or feeling/emotion well enough to be gender-bending, or feminine, was an affirmation of how good they are at their art form, so that gender does not restrain (constrain, maybe? Limit?) their expression. It also comes from how in traditional art forms for a long time, women were not encouraged to perform so some of the best performers did some of the most compelling feminine roles.(I think the blog, which did some serious annotating, also referred to certain words that might mean feminine in one context not being used in the sense we generally associate it with in this particular context, but my brain is woolly right now and I wouldn't want to be quoted.) I'm simplifying dreadfully and not getting the nuances well at all, but I can't find the post now. But since he's not performing for a home audience and he's performing for the world, Yuzu's androgyny - which is a quality that some of the best rockstars share, from Freddie Mercury in his skirt and high heels to David Bowie to Prince - does serve to knock away a few barriers. I think the blog's point was that the effect is there, but it might not be intentional in the context of his culture's history in performance arts.

What is this Asian stereotyping going on over here, I disapprove. As a very Asian Asian - south Asia is Asia, surprise! - I totally disapprove. Being restrained in certain contexts is part of most cultures, and those contexts might be different in different Asian cultures than in different Western cultures. Neither of which is a monolith and has many different cultures, btw. For instance, come to a funeral here and I'll show you unrestrained emotions on a scale you'd probably never see in a Western culture in that context - screaming, wailing, sobbing, beating chest, completely uninhibited exhibition of grief and despair. Come to a young people's concert here and I'll show you unrestrained enjoyment, from the stage to the stage hands. Come to a traditional festival celebration and I'll show you absolutely unrestrained - to the point of demolishing boundaries - revelry. Could we please keep up the absolutely fabulous environment and feeling here that doesn't rely on labels or stereotypes? As for Yuzu being too Asian for LGC... Well, as an Asian who has friends and family who perform rock music on stage, some for money and some simply for the passion of it, I've to go whaaaaa! My subjective opinion is that he rocked it, even taking the rockstar bravado as far as to make that face after just barely somehow landing the 4Lo in the GPF! From that step sequence onwards, he was completely rockstar. As for H&L being too nuanced...I'm on record as not being able to watch it without crying, so I guess I got a lot of those nuances just fine.

Why would they do this to a skater with one of the best triple axels among active skaters today? I get that he probably has the skating skills to transition to ice dancing, and he has the musicality and connection to do it, too, but he's also a wonderful jumper! How's that shoulder going to deal with the lifts?! Justice for Han Yan and his 3A!!

Explain to me again the logic behind the BVs of 4Lo and 4Lz.

That is true, and there's a reason why Brian and Ghislain are balding. I wonder how Tracy keeps her hair.

Their lack of regard for rules, when Yuzu follows every rule ISU has even when ISU doesn't remember them? Their blatant disdain for authority? I think of the Weasleys as Gryffindor prototype and Yuzu is so... not a Weasley. But you know, Nobu would be Gryffindor. You just know Gryffindors would Zayak all over the place.

Really? The root of the word means snake, though. There's probably lots of mythology attached to it, snakes are considered mystic and powerful, figure in legends and folktales a lot.

He has an evil streak that would make Hufflepuff reject him. That smirk when he sees his rivals? He says all the right things and he does respect them and admire them, but he is also supremely confident in his own abilities, to the point that when he's waiting for warmup, he has this smirk that says 'Do you not see that I'm back? You will see soon enough.' The 3A because the crowd was chanting Javi's name when he was on the ice? The boy respects his competition, all right, but from his perch of knowing he is the best. Slytherin, I tell you. Slytherin. (I want to be Slytherin but I keep getting stuck n Ravenclaw and I'd never get into the common room, that password system, I'guess that makes me Forbidden Forest.) ETA: A true Gryffindor wouldn't have settled for a relatively sane layout of sal and toe. Calculated risk intended to result in victory - if it weren't for the CiONTU, I'd say Ravenclaw for sure. Excellent at his chosen field with a deep understanding of it, eloquent and articulate, and also a bit hopeless at regular stuff because his head is always in his chosen field.

Dumbledore hoodwinked the sorting hat somehow because by the end of the series, could anybody possibly doubt that he was meant to be Slytherin? He outdid Snape in being devious and cunning! Yes, raise a baby in terrible conditions without keeping a proper eye on him and intimidating the stupid family into treating him with basic decency, then train him carefully (by letting him do dreadfully dangerous things at 11 years old!!!) to be either the saviour or the sacrifice, either will work just fine, for the good of the world - Gryffindor?! Ha! Yuzu would be Slytherin, partly because I don't think he has the bravado-style bravery of Gryffindor. He's fearless when it comes to skating, but let's not forget that walking on land and going through doors can defeat him. No Ravenclaw would do CiONTU. The plagiarising Slytherin boy.

Ahhh I was completely fooled. Should've known better. Very nicely done.

CBC were very mean to Boyang, weren't they? So kind to Nathan, but so mean to Boyang. Comparing Boyang to Yuzu, seriously, that's just mean after that performance.

*rubs eyes* They really did?! And picked a white one, they should have learnt the lesson from LGC white, too.

Excellent idea, and thank you! I've been watching H&L on and off all day and, well, my eyes, they've sprung a leak. That is the perfect skate for me. I keep muttering 'we're not worthy' when he bows, every time I watch it.

I usually consider myself fairly smart-ish but this is doing my head in and I don't understand. I don't understand what the aim of these changes really is. To make scoring stricter? That's just... It's like if you can't do the 3A properly, try the 4A?! Can't get the edge on a 3Lz, do the 4Lz? Can't handle following rules accurately for a 7-grade GOE system? Here, play with a 11-grade one! So how on earth will a well-executed triple be the same as a bad quad, in that case? Triples get stricter GOE anyway, quads get candies, that's one of the problems. No repeating quads? That's fine by me tbh. Maybe we'll see fully rotated combos now, because if there's no repeating quads, combos will probably be triples. Do the clear and recognisable steps and then do a solo quad and rotate it properly. But this one probably won't be passed. What's the point of any of this?

He's just so cute! And I wonder if he cringes looking back.

It's actually true that this is a very sheltered place. Or at least, it's a place with clear rules and when those are broken, there are enough people who will point that out and not engage in certain kinds of conversation. I'd hope that that makes the planet an unattractive place for anybody who extends Yuzu-stanning to hating other skaters. Yes, I can see how there must be pockets that really do hate on Nathan right now. Here, most conversations about him focus on legitimate criticism and federation boosting power, with caveats that Nathan is very talented, a very good jumper, and only 18 and therefore capable of improving to get those scores and deserving them. The differentiation between the skater and the media hype around the skater is usually made. But I can also see that there's a bunch of people who call ^that^ hating, too, and that's just silly. I'll stick by my view that Nathan does indeed deserve to be called the World Champion because he is, he deserved to win that, unquestionably. But that score was ludicrous, I will be very salty that such a ludicrously scored and flawed programme nearly beat such a strictly scored and near-perfect one. And he's scored almost solely on fed power for TR, which is also ridiculous. Maybe he does have as much skating talent in him as Yuzu did at his age, but he hasn't shown the commitment to improving every single aspect of his skating to achieve perfection, and without that, we will never know just how much talent he has except at jumping. Now, is that hating? I don't think so, but I'm sure there are people who will disagree. (I will admit that my disgruntlement is also driven by what Nemesis could've been and wasn't, and I resent that because I really liked that programme in the beginning.) I also have to say that without Yuzu in the picture, Nathan's shortcomings wouldn't be so obviously visible, without that direct comparison. I understand why they hate Yuzu. They're wrong but I get it.

I shouldn't post before my morning coffee honestly, but I couldn't resist.

Yuzu the cat - I mean, space kitty - burglar, sneaking to the Olympics on a dark and stormy night to unscrupulously and evilly steal shiny sparkly gold medals meant for the Chosen One! Those medals hold the secret to saving the world from an alien invasion. Fanyus defend their overlord, but little do they know that he is in fact the Troll sent by the mothership to steal humanity's only hope before the true invasion begins! We are all lost, because of brainwashed Fanyus who cannot see that the gold medals that were our only hope have been stolen, wickedly stolen, by the Evil Space Kitty Burglar!

Welcome! Everybody will not only give you a different answer about his must-watch performances, but the answer will never end. It'll be 'and this...' 'oh yeah, and that one...' and so on and so on. There was a thread recently about must-see Yuzu videos/programmes and that kind of turned into an 'and this one and this one' list that ended in basically everything.

Oooh, conspiracy theories! I love them, let me get my tinfoil hat. Completely hypothetically, if I were a judge sent from, let's say, the skating federation of Latvia (random because I love the name of the country, but it might fit because Deniss), and my fed finally has a skater who can get some attention and maybe become popular, raise the profile of the sport in the country, get decent placements and sponsorship and so on, would I realistically put a, let's say, US or Russian skater's PCS under seven even if I thought that's all they deserved? I wouldn't, because those feds' judges' scoring influence the perceived corridor for my skater, too. And I'd consider those feds' influence with the ISU governing council. I'd want to give my skater the best shot they can have, and accept that that's not going to put them above the top favourites, but at least will improve their placement. I wouldn't want to make enemies by declaring there were no transitions there so here, take a four. Mind you, that would also get me investigated because the accepted corridor would be much higher and falling outside that would make me the perceived bent judge! Smaller feds would choose to keep the bigger ones happy. But there are more of the smaller feds so that helps establish that corridor of scoring - five out of nine judges getting with the programme is enough to do that. But honestly? My tinfoil conspiracy doesn't really hold up because judges sometimes just don't make sense. In 2016, there were (rare) times Nathan got lowballed by the US judge. Yuzu has been lowballed by Japanese judges. Hell, even PChiddy has been not inflated too highly by the Canadian judge. Judges from smaller feds can score like they're on acid, and there's that Mexican judge that makes me just want to eat my tinfoil hat. Either my tinfoil hat isn't tinfoilly enough and the conspiracies are deeper and more intricate than I can imagine, or it's all just bloody bonkers.

It should be like that, right? For a while ISU said judges' scores would be anonymous - like, the panel is there for us to see, but who gave what scores would be anonymous, to be free from federation pressure, after The Big Scandal (which ended in a couple of suspensions and now everything is back to business as usual). But that ended in judges propping up their feds' skaters with no accountability at all. So now we can find out which countries the judges are from and who scored whom how much, and what GOEs were given, and that should make them accountable, but in what actually happens... Well, the most obvious one is to look at the mandatory GOE deduction for solo jump in SP without clear and recognisable steps/choreo element preceding jump, and how many judges follow that rule. We make a lot of noise about such things, and they ignore it, so that seems to be their strategy.

lol Your scenario is not that off, tbh. Judges are not independently hired by the ISU, as neutral contractors who will judge without bias. ISU's idea of countering bias seems, to me, to be - let's give everybody equal opportunity to be biased, and that will even it out! If you look at skatingscores website, you'll see that each judge is labelled according to their country. There won't be more than one from one country in any competition. These individual figure skating judges are chosen and sent by skating federations of those countries. These judges are therefore under their feds' influence. If a judge wants to be picked by their fed to be sent as the judge to a competition, it's understood that they have to judge according to their fed's expectations. Yeah, the system is that weird. Now, do smaller federations have qualified judges? No, not all of them. So they're at a disadvantage right from the beginning. Then there's the fact that there's a limited number of judges in a competition, so some countries will of course not be represented. So you have unofficial alliances. If a smaller fed has a skater in the competition and they need their skater to go through to the free skate, but the smaller fed and the skater don't have the reputation to break that 7.5 barrier in PCS, what can they do? But then If Fed A is not in a competition's judging panel, but Fed B is, and later Fed B's judge is not in one and Fed A's judge is, what kind of understanding could possibly be reached? At the Olympics, the Chinese and US judges for men's event both scored pretty damn ludicrously, but the Chinese one is getting investigated (is it over, I don't know what happened) but the US one didn't. That is also a display of federation's power. Japanese judges don't play the game well, which is to their credit but not to their skaters' benefit. If you spend some time clicking through the whole season's breakdown by judges' nationalities, you'll have a few interesting reactions! TL;DR - individual judges are chosen by their countries' feds, and if you're really neutral, you might not be sent for a competition again because a fed's aim is to get their skater to place as high as possible.