General Yuzuru Chat

[rockstaryuzu]

4 hours ago, Murieleirum said:

 

Nathan dances while he's on skates. 

 

Yuzuru skates. 

 

I would say this is the first difference. Nathan does things with his upper body that have nothing to do with the act of skating per se, which, contrary to this, Yuzuru uses to express himself, his emotions. The performance result is completely different, even if it's hard to put it into words. One would say that the dancer is the better interpreter, but I disagree. Nathan disregards his feet and legs while he's performing his choreography, which I wouldn't go as far as to say that it corresponds to his emotions. It's not that it's an upbeat program so it cannot be emotional, I just... don't understand how he's feeling and what he's trying to say. But, for example, I understand what Yuzuru wants to convey in LGC, pretty clearly: I am the rockstar of skating, and the things I do on the ice are crazy, and y'all love it. (which is true hehehe). But Nathan's programs always leave me like: what was that skating for?? What's the meaning of it? The answer is: there is none. Because the idea of performance, the idea of interpretation, is completely different. 

Nathan is a good entertainer, I would say. Yuzuru is not an entertainer. Yuzuru becomes expression, emotion itself when he skates, like listening to a musical concert or watching a painting, because he's put so much effort, so much study, so much thought to each and every movement until it became natural for him to skate like moving art, every time with his heart on his sleeve.

These are two types of skating that just... cannot be compared. And the fact that most judges still don't aknowledge this, and don't think that it's important to highlight this difference... well... I always knew the world was full of morons, so it doesn't come as a surprise. It just makes me angry because little kids with 0 knowledge of skating would probably be able to see more than these judges. 

 

I would love to send Jackie Wong that tweet by the way. 
 

The way I'd put it is this:

 

Caravan is what you get when a super-competitive and talented athlete reads a bunch of feedback about himself online saying he lacks artistry, so he goes out and hires a great choreographer to give him a great program that he can perform to prove to everyone he has artistry. 

 

Etude is what you get when an artist decides he wants to take the audience on a journey with him, using his superlative figure skating skills  and the beautiful music to draw them in and tell the story, so that he and the audience can experience the moment together and achieve victory as a by-product. 

 

Personally, I think you can't compare them and shouldn't try; they are two entirely different things. 

 

And the scores are from two different eras. Etude was scored when the max GOE was +3, so unless you're going to try and do some kind of conversion to the current system, you're not comparing apples to apples at all. 

 

 

[Veveco]

I agree that the technical & total scores should not be directly compared because of the different systems. PCS, though, should be similar enough for comparison in principle. And, from what I've seen of the sbs videos, people are mostly using them to compare transitions. 

[kaeryth]

1 hour ago, rockstaryuzu said:

Caravan is what you get when a super-competitive and talented athletes reads a bunch of feedback about himself online saying he lacks artistry, so he goes out and hires a great choreographer to give him a great program that he can perform to prove to everyone he has artistry. 

 

Funny thing about Caravan... in my opinion, besides him shaking about during the starting pose and doing upper body transitions (clapping), there is no choreographic move or steps that stands out. I know everyone prefers his SP to his FS and rightfully so because the FS is even emptier but I don't actually see any justification for the praise of Caravan besides the fact that it's 'fun'. I think Nathan himself knows how empty Caravan is because for all his encores he has been doing Nemesis.

 

Contrast to Otonal where everything is memorable. From the opening pose to the SE-4S-counter to the counter-3A. There's the mini Stsq going to the 4T3T and of course the highlight of the whole thing is the spins on the piano note and the step sequence. People actually roar in applause for that step sequence.

[SuperMin]

This is in testament to his flexibility. 

 

 

[kaeryth]

English translation of Yuzu's congratulatory words on the Heisei Era to the Emperor

 

 

 

 

[caterpillar]

2 hours ago, Murieleirum said:

 

Nathan dances while he's on skates. 

 

Yuzuru skates. 

 

I would say this is the first difference. Nathan does things with his upper body that have nothing to do with the act of skating per se, which, contrary to this, Yuzuru uses to express himself, his emotions. The performance result is completely different, even if it's hard to put it into words. One would say that the dancer is the better interpreter, but I disagree. Nathan disregards his feet and legs while he's performing his choreography, which I wouldn't go as far as to say that it corresponds to his emotions. It's not that it's an upbeat program so it cannot be emotional, I just... don't understand how he's feeling and what he's trying to say. But, for example, I understand what Yuzuru wants to convey in LGC, pretty clearly: I am the rockstar of skating, and the things I do on the ice are crazy, and y'all love it. (which is true hehehe). But Nathan's programs always leave me like: what was that skating for?? What's the meaning of it? The answer is: there is none. Because the idea of performance, the idea of interpretation, is completely different. 

Nathan is a good entertainer, I would say. Yuzuru is not an entertainer. Yuzuru becomes expression, emotion itself when he skates, like listening to a musical concert or watching a painting, because he's put so much effort, so much study, so much thought to each and every movement until it became natural for him to skate like moving art, every time with his heart on his sleeve.

These are two types of skating that just... cannot be compared. And the fact that most judges still don't aknowledge this, and don't think that it's important to highlight this difference... well... I always knew the world was full of morons, so it doesn't come as a surprise. It just makes me angry because little kids with 0 knowledge of skating would probably be able to see more than these judges. 

 

I would love to send Jackie Wong that tweet by the way. 
 

 

This is a really interesting take. I maybe wouldn't call Nathan a dancer, because I have several friends that are professional dancers and Nathan doesn't really compare (which makes a lot of sense and is not a criticism of Nathan, since he isn't a professional dancer). But I do agree that the choreography is like dancing in the sense that it doesn't utilize the ice as a medium all that much: you could do the Caravan choreo on the ground and it wouldn't really suffer. (For comparison, I'm thinking about something like the Otoñal spread eagle, which wouldn't work anywhere else, or for that matter the wonderful bit of choreography in Étude after the first spin).

 

But I really think this analysis is exactly why I tend to enjoy Nathan's short programs at first and then grow increasingly more weary of them. This was especially true for Nemesis but I feel the same about Caravan as well. When we first saw it it was new and fresh, and Nathan seemed to be having fun with it and was entertaining to watch. But while I'm sure Nathan genuinely likes Caravan (and liked Nemesis, which is clearly the superior program), it doesn't seem like he has much of a connection to it beyond that. He's skating this particular program because it was choreographed for him and because it gets the job done. So as time goes by and the novelty disappears, the interpretation starts to feel a bit shallow. Both this year and last, by the end of the season Nathan reminded me of an actor who has played the same part too many times, just going through the familiar motions and expressions. 

 

Meanwhile in LGC Yuzu is a rockstar, and it's about the relationship between the audience and the performer, and from the unusual jump entries to the detailed spins to the crazy step sequence, there's just a lot more to it. You can tell how invested Yuzu is in the program any time he performs it, and that goes for all the programs I've ever seen him skate. So instead of wearing out as he settles into it, it grows and transforms and becomes better and better and better. 

 

I feel like I'm just reiterating this in a lot more words, but I basically very much agree. Nathan is an entertaining performer and Yuzu is an artist, and it's impossible to compare the two. 

[rockstaryuzu]

2 hours ago, kaeryth said:

 

Funny thing about Caravan... in my opinion, besides him shaking about during the starting pose and doing upper body transitions (clapping), there is no choreographic move or steps that stands out. I know everyone prefers his SP to his FS and rightfully so because the FS is even emptier but I don't actually see any justification for the praise of Caravan besides the fact that it's 'fun'. I think Nathan himself knows how empty Caravan is because for all his encores he has been doing Nemesis.

 

Contrast to Otonal where everything is memorable. From the opening pose to the SE-4S-counter to the counter-3A. There's the mini Stsq going to the 4T3T and of course the highlight of the whole thing is the spins on the piano note and the step sequence. People actually roar in applause for that step sequence.

I can see what you're saying but compare it to his SP from last season. It's a vast improvement (I know people prefer Nemesis but I find it much more devoid of choreographic content than Caravan). You can see that SLB did her best to give him something good, and it's not awful (sorry, I thought it was their first time collaborating but she did Nemesis too, so wiki tells me). Take a look at Great Spirit for comparison - it was literally too much for Shoma; every time he performed it it nearly did him in, and I suspect that Shae-Lynn overestimated what he was capable of. Whereas with Caravan, I think she gave Nathan exactly what he was capable of and no more. 

 

And taken by itself, Caravan's not a bad program - certainly on par with what most of the men's field come up with. The trouble with it, in my opinion, is that (jump layout aside) it seems like something anyone could or would do. I could totally envision Brezina or even Brendan Kerry doing it. And I don't know whether that's because there's nothing of Nathan's personality in there, or whether it's because Nathan's artistic personality is just not that unique. 

 

 

[rockstaryuzu]

1 hour ago, caterpillar said:

You can tell how invested Yuzu is in the program any time he performs it, and that goes for all the programs I've ever seen him skate.

Bingo! That is exactly the difference between Yuzu and everyone else 

[Vulnavia]

The way that I boil it down is that to me, Yuzu is someone who has a lot that he wants to say with his skating and a clear sense of who he is artistically and what he wants to convey with each performance, while Nathan doesn't particularly have anything that he wants to say or convey, he just views skating as a sport where you go out there and do only what you need to do to rack up the points that you need to win.

[rockstaryuzu]

4 hours ago, Veveco said:

I agree that the technical & total scores should not be directly compared because of the different systems. PCS, though, should be similar enough for comparison in principle. And, from what I've seen of the sbs videos, people are mostly using them to compare transitions. 

I wonder about that. From what I've seen, PCS tends to reflect technical scores to some degree, so if the overall tech score average across all skaters goes up, so will PCS. Simply put, I don't think either PCS score reflects reality all that much.

[Geo1]

19 hours ago, rockstaryuzu said:

@kaeryth beat me to it, but what they're talking about is the Golden Mean, not the 'golden portion'. Basically it's considered the ideal ratio of length and/or width to height to produce an image pleasing to the eye.

 

13 hours ago, SuperMin said:

Anime like proportions-makes him so interesting to watch.  I wonder what the other skaters proportions  are like?  

 

There was a video after the Sochi Olympics around March 12, 2014 in which they discussed Yuzu's popularity amongst his female fans and how he resembled a character out of the world of manga and anime.

 

To check out this point, they visited an anime school and one of the instructors showed two anime characters and explained how their height could be divided into a certain number of equal segments which was considered ideal (the "golden proportion" referred to above). They then put an image of Yuzu from his Sochi PW between the anime characters and he had the same number of equal segments as they did confirming that he had the same ideal proportions as the anime characters.

 

They also pointed out that all of the anime characters had unusually long necks and that this was considered attractive. It was pointed out that Yuzu also had the same unusually long neck as the anime characters confirming that he had all the attributes of a character from the manga and anime world!

 

Unfortunately, I was unable to find the link to that video. I believe it still exists. Some other satellite may be able to find it.

[kaeryth]

New magazine cover!

 

 

[kaeryth]

 

 

 

[kaeryth]

 

 

[IceWings]

3 hours ago, Geo1 said:

 

 

There was a video after the Sochi Olympics around March 12, 2014 in which they discussed Yuzu's popularity amongst his female fans and how he resembled a character out of the world of manga and anime.

 

To check out this point, they visited an anime school and one of the instructors showed two anime characters and explained how their height could be divided into a certain number of equal segments which was considered ideal (the "golden proportion" referred to above). They then put an image of Yuzu from his Sochi PW between the anime characters and he had the same number of equal segments as they did confirming that he had the same ideal proportions as the anime characters.

 

They also pointed out that all of the anime characters had unusually long necks and that this was considered attractive. It was pointed out that Yuzu also had the same unusually long neck as the anime characters confirming that he had all the attributes of a character from the manga and anime world!

 

Unfortunately, I was unable to find the link to that video. I believe it still exists. Some other satellite may be able to find it.

 

I had a link to that YT video. Unfortunately, that video and the user's account have been deleted. Probably part of that YouTube purge of figure skating videos and accounts. 

Hopefully it will get reuploaded on YT or elsewhere.

 

The instructor also said that Yuzu has an androgynous look, which is popular in shojo manga. I would add that his heart-shaped face gives him a "pointy chin", which is also typical of manga characters!