General Yuzuru Chat

[Neenah]

I do think that Yuzu is cute and good looking, but for me it is his skating all the way. His looks are not important to me as I have been following Japanese idols for years and became immune to cuteness and good looks (they all are very cute). Even now I watch interviews and other fluff videos only once but have watched each of his performances (competitions and practice) at least 10 times, because there is where true magic happens and where he shines the most. If it is about looks, he is just one of many cute and good looking Japanese celebrities but on the ice he is the undisputed king and a unique presence 

 

Also, I started following FS last year because of Yuzu, and since then I have been learning about elements, rules, scoring, competitions, and have streamed GPF, 4CC, Europeans, and Worlds live as well as three junior GPs, ACI, Lombardia, and parts of Nebelhorn this season. I am trying to get tickets to go to Worlds and will go even if Yuzu is not there because there are other skaters that i like and skaters I hope to discover. If all that does not make me a fan of the sport (just because I am a Hanyu fan) then what does?

 

[kelly]

5 hours ago, Joey said:

 

Of course not! ^^" It really wasn't ideal planning that some things that would have been worth seeing overlapped. It would have been sad for the ladies too if noone came to the victory ceremony, so really there was no winning once those things happened at the same time.

 

My comments refered to the spread statements that Yuzu fans just didn't show up for other skaters - not because something else happened at the same time, but just because they apparently don't care. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear

It's ok haha I was being sarcastic because those people saying yuzu's fans were disrespectful are insane

[Murieleirum]

30 minutes ago, Hydroblade said:

I don't wish for it, because it's immortalized in a series of frantic tweets 

 

I think I may have a 'first facebook post' related to Yuzuru, but maybe since it was public, I contained myself... the only thing I know is that it took me 1 day to go from 'oh look a cute Japanese skater' to 'I am going to dedicate the rest of my life to figure skating and to this figure skater in particular'

[Forcefield]

Ah this talk. Coincidentally, I was browsing randomly through youtube Yuzu vids yesterday and came across this fanmade one.

 

Will you still love me
When I'm no longer young and beautiful?
Will you still love me
When I've got nothing but my aching soul?
I know you will, I know you will
I know that you will
Will you still love me when I'm no longer beautiful?

 

Yes, Yuzu! Yes, I will. 

Looks can make people take notice, but its not everything.

 

 

[sweetwater]

What made me his fan was not his face or skating, but his spirit that came through his skating. White Legend in NHK 2010 was the first performance I saw of Yuzu, and I loved the way he tried to show the swan in his mind without any fear even though it was his first senior competition. I also loved the way he went into the 3A, with no hesitation, like nothing. So I don’t know if I loved him as an athlete or something else, at first.

However, when I started following FS more closely (he was one of the biggest reasons,) I soon realized that I needed to learn more about the sport, because otherwise, I could not appreciate what he and other skaters were doing. Like, they all dedicate their life to skating and they are given only a few minutes to show the result of their effort, several times in each year, and not every performance is recorded and seen by many people. If the audience doesn’t care about what they really do, how cruel is it for them?

Even if you start loving a skater not because of his/her skills, you cannot stay purely ignorant about them when you care for him/her too much, I think.

When someone who loves FS says that some fans love a skater simply because of his/her looks, I seriously wonder how he/she loves FS or a skater.

 

As for things happening regarding GPF, Nats, the magazine, I have nothing to say. Some of the things happened during 2012-2014 seasons were truly sad and ugly, but those skaters who loved what they were doing survived and bloomed in their own way. So I want to trust Yuzu who loves figure skating and support him.

[Hydroblade]

18 minutes ago, Neenah said:

His looks are not important to me as I have been following Japanese idols for years and became immune to cuteness and good looks (they all are very cute). Even now I watch interviews and other fluff videos only once but have watched each of his performances (competitions and practice) at least 10 times, because there is where true magic happens and where he shines the most. If it is about looks, he is just one of many cute and good looking Japanese celebrities but on the ice he is the undisputed king and a unique presence 

I agree with this but there is something about him that makes me feel like no other japanese idol ever made me feel. I suspect it is, like i said before, a series of unfortunate events that amplified the impact he had on my life but i don't think i've ever felt like this before. 

For example, i never bought idol merchandise but here i am sitting at my office desk with the Yuzu calendar on the side (and i'm ordering next year's calendar too). Coming to the office in the morning and seeing him there puts a giant smile on my face and it's very VERY motivating. 

I can't watch many of the fluff videos, although i ADORE this one (mainly because i liked the song before and i screamed when i saw that there was a yuzu video with it)

his interviews... I watch them because it's study material lol, and i LOVE listening to him. It motivates me to study japanese even more.

I think i do prefer to watch him skating or in a skating related environment. But he's cute af and i want to bite/pinch his cheeks 

1 minute ago, Murieleirum said:

 

I think I may have a 'first facebook post' related to Yuzuru, but maybe since it was public, I contained myself... the only thing I know is that it took me 1 day to go from 'oh look a cute Japanese skater' to 'I am going to dedicate the rest of my life to figure skating and to this figure skater in particular'

I just casually recalled him, found the image of him in hakama and accepted my fate. I think it took me a day too to submit to the Pooh Overlord completely

3 minutes ago, Forcefield said:

Ah this talk. Coincidentally, I was browsing randomly through youtube Yuzu vids yesterday and came across this fanmade one.

 

Will you still love me
When I'm no longer young and beautiful?
Will you still love me
When I've got nothing but my aching soul?
I know you will, I know you will
I know that you will
Will you still love me when I'm no longer beautiful?

 

Yes, Yuzu! Yes, I will. 

Looks can make people take notice, but its not everything.

 

 

He has a beautiful soul, he is pure light. Or course i will love him even when he is an old wrinkly raisin man

[Neenah]

Just now, Hydroblade said:

I agree with this but there is something about him that makes me feel like no other japanese idol ever made me feel. I suspect it is, like i said before, a series of unfortunate events that amplified the impact he had on my life but i don't think i've ever felt like this before. 

For example, i never bought idol merchandise but here i am sitting at my office desk with the Yuzu calendar on the side (and i'm ordering next year's calendar too). Coming to the office in the morning and seeing him there puts a giant smile on my face and it's very VERY motivating. 

 

I may or may not have a shelf full of CD's,calendars, pin lights, stickers and photos of my favorite idols  

Yuzu is starting his own collection  

[sweetwater]

8 minutes ago, Hydroblade said:

I agree with this but there is something about him that makes me feel like no other japanese idol ever made me feel. I suspect it is, like i said before, a series of unfortunate events that amplified the impact he had on my life but i don't think i've ever felt like this before. 

For example, i never bought idol merchandise but here i am sitting at my office desk with the Yuzu calendar on the side (and i'm ordering next year's calendar too). Coming to the office in the morning and seeing him there puts a giant smile on my face and it's very VERY motivating. 

I can't watch many of the fluff videos, although i ADORE this one (mainly because i liked the song before and i screamed when i saw that there was a yuzu video with it)

his interviews... I watch them because it's study material lol, and i LOVE listening to him. It motivates me to study japanese even more.

I think i do prefer to watch him skating or in a skating related environment. But he's cute af and i want to bite/pinch his cheeks 

I just casually recalled him, found the image of him in hakama and accepted my fate. I think it took me a day too to submit to the Pooh Overlord completely

He has a beautiful soul, he is pure light. Or course i will love him even when he is an old wrinkly raisin man

Hey, even in this video, he carries a bag of letters and presents!

[yuzuangel]

1 hour ago, Smultron said:

I wish I could recall the exact moment, the turning point, when I went fully crazy hehe

Haha I remember the moment when I first went full crazy. 

 

I guess I'll be the first person on this whole site to admit that when I first saw him I thought he looked very handsome but I wasn't completely drawn in by his skating. That was Sochi and while I liked PW very much I wasn't like "Oh my god I cannot take my eyes off of him, I must dedicate the rest of my life to watching Yuzuru skate." But...I did remember thinking, that he was very handsome. Maybe because I have a big weakness for guys with soft hair and a 1000 kilowatt smile and a kind of bashful confidence. I knew immediately that he was the only skater who I wanted victories and happiness for unconditionally. For everyone else I liked watching, say, Yulia L. and Gracie G., I liked watching them for the drama of whether or not they'd skate well (and both ladies were famous for that sort of "drama" after Sochi). But with Yuzuru I just somehow instantly knew that no matter what, rain or shine, I only wanted all the gold medals and happiness for him. I remember all of the "debate" amongst non-figure skating fans after Sochi of how no one deserved to win the gold medal and feeling unnecessarily defensive for a skater who I never really followed. 

 

HOWEVER, I STILL didn't really watch men's skating until years after Sochi...I still had the impression that men's skating was mainly about jumps. For the couple of times when I caught men's skating on stream (never Yuzu though), it seemed like a jump fest where the skater goes to one end of the rink...jumps...then skates to the other end...and jumps. And all of the spins and choreography felt phoned in, like "Well I'm doing this because I have to but what I'm really doing is conserving energy for the jumps." I made the excuse that I couldn't really watch an entire flight of men's skating just for one skater. But one day I tuned in live to NHK and the rest is history. Yuzu had improved soooo much, was a 100x better skater and also looked 100x more handsome now that he was no longer a baby and was just simply breathtaking. I became basically bedridden for the next week or so watching and catching up on videos, like "Oh my god I cannot take my eyes off of him, every moment I can't be watching Yuzu skate is a waste of life, I must dedicate my entire life to this skater." Lol. And now here I am 

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

@Joey: So all that ugliness happened, huh. Things get pretty...heated in Japan, don't they? And so complicated...I've heard snatches of it in passing but your account of it is the most at-length one I've ever come across (for me). I have been wondering why a number of his fans seem so eager to paint him as the eternal victim but with a history like this, I guess I could see where it all stemmed from...

 

Also, for the record, I wasn't thinking as deeply as I should have and as such wasn't as careful with my words. This has happened a few times here already, people taking something I said wrongly because I worded it poorly. The words chosen this time were especially poor but I didn't actually mean what those words implied. I had meant something else altogether. ^^;

 

As for everything else, yeah, I mentioned them because you mentioned JSF's actions being unjustified and we were basically still on the same thread of conversation. 

 

And I know this wasn't what we're talking about but I'm just going to slip this in here simply due to the fact that it's convenient. I'm still not too sure about the magazine thing but I figure 50% of a magazine content being about him when it technically isn't exactly supposed to feature him exclusively is still a good deal. I'm pretty much on the same boat as @katonice about this. I mean, they've got to start featuring other skaters somehow so the void left by Hanyu wouldn't be as bad as it would get if these publications were to suddenly no longer be able to have Hanyu grace their pages. If JSF wants to avoid the situation Russia's men's field is facing after Plushenko's retirement, or at least curb it a bit so the degree of slump wouldn't be quite as bad as that (Uno still being around is irrelevant because he alone won't be able to sustain the kind of interest in the sport the way Hanyu is doing) and these are one of the early steps that they are taking towards it, I find it hard to begrudge them the action they're taking. They've got to keep the sport and the field going somehow...

 

[kelly]

At ACI, even after yuzu's terrible SEIMEI, his fans were still cheering on javi and Nam who were after him, so you can't really say they were being disrespectful.

 

I must admit I first fell for Yuzu's cuteness and adorableness, but I fell deeper because of his skating

[Smultron]

1 hour ago, Hydroblade said:

I don't wish for it, because it's immortalized in a series of frantic tweets 

 

Well.. I didn't use twitter at that time... Then I got an account just to follow fs news (I had always been very anti-twitter before, lol - the things you do for fs ) 

 

I get so emotional every time I think about the chain of random circumstances that made me watch Worlds this year and rediscover skating... I had been out of the loop ever since the first generation that I was familiar with retired and I felt that I wanted to get into it again but it was a combination of life keeping me busy and struggling with finding new faves... So watching Worlds for me was a truly magical and almost spiritual experience 

Becoming a fan of Yuzu motivated me to learn more about the tech stuff and rules and finally learn the jumps and I feel that thanks to him my love for figure skating grows every day  

Like...If someone  had told me last year that I would watch JGP, I would have laughed   

[cirelle]

12 minutes ago, yuzuangel said:

I guess I'll be the first person on this whole site to admit that when I first saw him I thought he looked very handsome but I wasn't completely drawn in by his skating. 

 

I think I was even worse than that... I have very vague memories of watching Sochi, it must have been the FS, and being annoyed with the commentators gushing about this Japanese kid, when the other Japanese skater was so much sexier and cooler.   I never followed figure skating and then came LGC and H&L and hit me like bricks and changed my whole fandom profile. It's really so cool how some stuff takes its time to find you.

[robin]

It's kind of sad that Yuzu fans are put in a position where they have to prove that they like the sport and not just Yuzu's good looks. (And I am not going to judge anyone that does lol)

 

I have fuzzy memory of how I got to love Yuzu. I just remember I started with trying not to be drawn by him bc I thought exactly that- that I would only like him for his looks. I specifically remember watching all the top mens' skating trying not to focus on Yuzu but everyone else. Back then I was just watching trying to tell the jumps apart and I had little knowledge of FS. I hadn't even been a casual FS fan before nor did I have any hard preconceptions of the sport. FS was a blank white canvas to me. I had just seen a video of Lambiel's skating before and was left fascinated by his flow on the ice, I wanted to see more of it! (I was also really drawn by the competitive element so I was trying to find a competitive skater.)

 

And well, after a few days of wandering aimlessly, the moment I admitted to myself that I indeed like Yuzu's skating the most (by far) and that my liking him was beyond his looks (which are a 10 to me btw) my.. uhh... obsession manifested pretty fast. Within a few days I was already crying over his skating iirc and here I am now 

[robin]

Oh and I can definitely confirm that the more I learned about FS and the trchnical aspects of the sport the more I learned to appreciate Yuzu's skating in particular.