Discussion on the vid wars of skaters by fans. | Page 2 | Golden Skate

Discussion on the vid wars of skaters by fans.

Tonichelle

Idita-Rock-n-Roll
Record Breaker
Joined
Jun 27, 2003
actually, it was about Kim being overscored.. the OP changed the title

no the mods did as it was suggested by other members that this was really more about the way the skaters are portrayed on youtube.
 

hurrah

Medalist
Joined
Aug 8, 2009
Under CoP, a fantastic skater who botches a couple of jumps can come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps, but s/he won't be able to own the win because there will be fans who protest it. So in order for a skater to take pride in the victory, s/he has to land at least most of the jumps. This would be the case even if the competition was adequately judged. Looking at how Patrick is behaving lately, it's clear his multiple fall wins last year did influence him mentally in a bad kind of way.
Now, if the competition is poorly judged, and YouTube can point this out backed by footage, well, that's even worse. CoP suffers, credility of figure skating as a sports suffers, the skater (of course) is mentally scarred, etc. It's just bad all around.
 
Joined
Aug 16, 2009
So it is impossible to be a fan of both Yuna AND Mao? It certainly seems that way.



Sorry, I like them both and if they are in the same competition I want the best to win.

I'm with you, MaiKatze. They're both so extraordinary that I don't see how I could choose between them. You and I can sit in the middle section and cheer for both. As you see, we'll have plenty of company.
 

gkelly

Record Breaker
Joined
Jul 26, 2003
Under CoP, a fantastic skater who botches a couple of jumps can come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps, but s/he won't be able to own the win because there will be fans who protest it.

Under 6.0, a fantastic skater who botched a couple of jumps could come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps. That's the nature of the sport. Fans got outraged back then as well. Sometimes skaters were embarrassed to win with multiple falls.

At least now the protocols let us see where skater with the falls made up the difference, instead of just ascribing the discrepancy to politics or blind judges.
 

jaylee

Medalist
Joined
Feb 21, 2010
Welcome, ohwylime. Thanks for joining the Golden Skate Forum.

The videos that you are looking at are several years old now. Things have calmed down quite a bit in the fan wars between the "Maosketeers" and the "Yuna dholes" ;) When Yu-na Kim and Mao Asada were fighting it out for World and Olympic championships the figure skating boards were full of shouting matches by youthful partisans who wanted to re-fight World War II.

This is a bit of a "whitewash" of what really happened on Youtube (not the FS forums) over the years. And World War II is not the correct war to use in your metaphor.

Assuming the OP is sincere in wanting to know what was going on, here are some highlights from what happened over the last Olympic quad, all based on my own experience, all things I saw for myself, a figure skating fan online who searches for videos on Youtube.

Essentially, there was/is a group of crazies out there who are not fans of Yu-Na (to put it lightly). I would say starting in 2007 (which is when Yu-Na emerged as a true contender), they have done their best to flood Youtube with videos to create doubt about Yu-Na's ability as a skater. They slow-mo her jumps. They freeze them at whatever point they choose in order to present her as a cheater. They tag their videos with the names of as many popular skaters as possible, so they show up in lots of results.

Not surprisingly, it got worse after Yu-Na won 2009 Worlds. Through that summer and that fall, I couldn't even search for Yu-Na without getting sick. Look, I went through Michelle vs. Sasha battles--that was NOTHING compared to this. These people made Sasha (or Michelle fans) look like toddlers fighting over toys. These people were out to destroy Yu-Na's reputation on Youtube. They created the videos in the hopes that new fans to the sport would find it and think, "Hey, maybe Yu-Na's not so great."

They took innocuous, awkward moments (like when Yu-Na appeared on Battle of the Blades to skate James Bond, and got awkwardly stuck outside of a group hug by the cast) and labeled it as an example of Kim Yuna being "HATED BY THE SKATERS OF THE WORLD."

It didn't end with the Olympics, either. This group of crazies actually went around spamming a bunch of sites saying that since Yu-Na wore a name brand of earrings that she had broken some ISU rule that her OGM should be taken away. It died soon after, but YES, this actually happened.

What else? Probably the worst thing that I saw happen was that they periodically went after huge numbers of Yu-Na's most popular videos. I could see it happen as videos I had favorited disappeared off of Youtube because of "copyright infringement" even as videos of other skaters remained online. The copyright infringement would be done in the name of "SBS" or other companies even when those companies had done no such thing. These crazies were trying to basically delete Yu-Na off of Youtube.

One of the sad cases was when one specific youtube user, who had been inactive since like 2006, gogi, had their channel deleted...I think in 2010. All they had was popular videos of Yu-Na when she was a junior. it was quite pathetic that those haters out there were so despicable that they had to go after the videos that showed her wonderful junior performances.

That's why, btw, when you search for Yu-Na videos now of a specific performance, you'll likely find TONS of duplicates of the same performance. Yu-na fans took action and started backing up videos, uploading tons and tons of videos in order to counteract the deleting. Maybe it seems silly, but again, if you saw the Yu-na videos disappearing, then you'd understand.

As for the flip side, yes, there are some crazy rabid fans of Yu-Na, and they went overboard in reacting to events (the "impeding" incident) and made their own videos in retaliation, which just made things worse. They were totally wrong and should never have done it. They also contributed slow-mo videos of Mao's triple axels. Again, totally wrong. And once I saw a bizarro person upload Yu-Na's FS and label it as Mao's FS. Ridiculous.

I hate what the rabid "fans" did on Youtube. But i doubt anyone has gotten more crazy videos posted about them as Yu-Na has. As a skating fan since 1992, I've never seen anything like this. I was a Michelle fan and saw plenty of fan wars back in the day...but in comparison to this, they made Michelle/Sasha/Tara/Irina/Sarah fans look like babies. Oh, but then again, there is that one crazy Michelle troll who for YEARS posted nasty comments on all of her videos (getrealandsee/ithinkformyself/etc). Bleh, there are crazies in every fandom.

But whatever, it doesn't matter, because Yu-Na is still an Olympic champion, the whole world saw her win it gloriously, and no one can ever rewrite the past to take it away from her. So the haters can just drown in their own bitterness. :p

Under CoP, a fantastic skater who botches a couple of jumps can come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps, but s/he won't be able to own the win because there will be fans who protest it. So in order for a skater to take pride in the victory, s/he has to land at least most of the jumps. This would be the case even if the competition was adequately judged. Looking at how Patrick is behaving lately, it's clear his multiple fall wins last year did influence him mentally in a bad kind of way.
Now, if the competition is poorly judged, and YouTube can point this out backed by footage, well, that's even worse. CoP suffers, credility of figure skating as a sports suffers, the skater (of course) is mentally scarred, etc. It's just bad all around.

That has nothing to do with what the OP is asking about. The videos posted on Youtube in question don't back up anything regarding poor judging--they are propaganda videos made by fans of one skater who refuse to believe that the OTHER skater won fair and square, and therefore create specially edited slow-mo videos that are supposed to support their delusion. They are the equivalent of the birther movement in the skating world. The people who made them are pathetic.
 

hurrah

Medalist
Joined
Aug 8, 2009
Jeeze, you make it sound like Yuna's the only one who has gotten hate videos on YouTube. Actually, Patrick has gotten some, and so has Mao.

Things have been pretty quiet recently, though. I haven't seen any OTT clips lately.
 
Joined
Aug 16, 2009
And thank goodness for that! I remember the first time I encountered video commentary. It wasn't a separate video but written posts under a perfectly wonderful video. Of course it was one of Michelle's, because I looked her vids up the most. I was so agitated to see such foul language used against anyone, but especially against a young person who had done nothing but try to excel at a sport. I felt almost grimy after I read it. I can't understand why anyone would be that scurrilously intense about a total stranger.
 

babyalligator

On the Ice
Joined
May 18, 2009
*hums* let it be... let it be... let it be... oh, let it be...

:laugh:
...... imagine all the people....living life in peace.....

but then again, it's nice to see passion in a sport. to be honest, i think i like the idea of kumbaya more than i do actually standing in a peace circle holding hands. lol

and i must say, at least it doesn't get physical or bleed into events with ice skating, no matter how excited we get. i can't say the same for other sports....i say this as a native new yorker who spent five years in boston. you take a guess. :p
 
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Buttercup

Record Breaker
Joined
Mar 25, 2008
So it is impossible to be a fan of both Yuna AND Mao? It certainly seems that way.
I think it's possibly to like and admire them both. Fandom to me implies a level of emotional involvement that means that if they are in head to head competition, you will want your favorite to do better. I do like them both very much. However, I like Kostner even more, so if they are competing against her, I want Kostner to win - preferably with a great skate, but I'm not too picky.

Jaylee, I used to work with young kids, and they'd always stay, but he started it. To which I'd reply, but you continued it. Spare us this sort of tl;dr historical narrative, nobody cares nor wants to return to the days of the bot wars. Especially since morozombie has already summed it up so well.
 

Riemann

Rinkside
Joined
Dec 3, 2012
And thank goodness for that! I remember the first time I encountered video commentary. It wasn't a separate video but written posts under a perfectly wonderful video. Of course it was one of Michelle's, because I looked her vids up the most. I was so agitated to see such foul language used against anyone, but especially against a young person who had done nothing but try to excel at a sport. I felt almost grimy after I read it. I can't understand why anyone would be that scurrilously intense about a total stranger.

Is it wrong to assume that might have been the work of the obsessed anti-Kwan nut?

For those who avoid reading YouTube comments, the basic story is that Michelle Kwan videos have been attacked for years by the same person using multiple accounts. This person has literally posted hundreds, if not thousands, of negative comments over a span of quite a few years. Its accounts will even talk to each other in an attempt to make its numbers appear larger, but it is obvious that it is the same person.

I once tried to figure out who this person's real identity actually was, but I was never able to come up with anything definitive. I would love to know if it is someone with a personal grudge against her or just a typical loon.

Now, more recently, there have been tons of racist comments left on videos of her performances. These are very different from the way the crazy, obsessed hater typically operates, so they're probably not related.
 
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aftertherain

Record Breaker
Joined
Jan 15, 2010
I'm very confused with all this controversy surrounding Mao and Yuna. I know it's a country rivalry thing, but I was shocked to see even the country news media (Japanese especially.. or at least they were the ones I found on Youtube) projecting negative reports on the skaters.

Oh, modern technology, so beautiful ... yet so ugly.

I hate what the rabid "fans" did on Youtube. But i doubt anyone has gotten more crazy videos posted about them as Yu-Na has

...

But whatever, it doesn't matter, because Yu-Na is still an Olympic champion, the whole world saw her win it gloriously, and no one can ever rewrite the past to take it away from her. So the haters can just drown in their own bitterness. :p

And on the other hand, Mao Asada is still a two-time World Champion and has landed a record three triple axels in a single event by a lady and no one can ever take those away from her.

Allegations of "paying off the judges" and the like have appeared on both sides. If one side accuses the other of cheating more than the other does, does that make it okay? NO, because they're both still doing it. :mad:

(And I don't like the side-by-side comparison videos either. It's not like they're doing the same program ...)

My point is, no matter who started it, the "other side" continued it. Quite frankly, both sides are to blame. :sarcasm:

Yuna and Mao are both beautiful skaters in their own rights.
 
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Tonichelle

Idita-Rock-n-Roll
Record Breaker
Joined
Jun 27, 2003
I know that we've allowed this thread on here - so it openned up the can of worms - but let's not start calling out youtube posters as they cannot defend themselves to the allegations on another board. We don't allow board dragging, but that also applies to youtube. Keep it general, folks, or better yet - let's promise each other that we're not going to go down that nasty tunnel of hate again. Thanks.
 

jaylee

Medalist
Joined
Feb 21, 2010
Jaylee, I used to work with young kids, and they'd always stay, but he started it. To which I'd reply, but you continued it. Spare us this sort of tl;dr historical narrative, nobody cares nor wants to return to the days of the bot wars. Especially since morozombie has already summed it up so well.

Buttercup, the OP had a question. Did anyone actually answer it before I did? No. Morozombie's video (I LOVE IT!) is a parody (not a summary)--but you can only get all of the humor if you know something of what originally happened. Which no one in this thread really explained.

I had every right to answer the question with as many details (actually, details to provide support for my statements) as I wanted. You don't have to read it if you don't care. You don't have to respond if you don't care. A summary of what happened is not a return to the bot wars. My post isn't about assigning blame and it's silly that you took it that way. It's about summing up what happened, as I experienced it, a figure skating fan on Youtube. It is exactly a historical narrative, but if you don't want to discuss it, you don't have to. Clearly there are other more worthy threads you need to read and participate in.

And on the other hand, Mao Asada is still a two-time World Champion and has landed a record three triple axels in a single event by a lady and no one can ever take those away from her.

100% agree but I should point out that I ended with the line about Yu-Na because I felt it was needed after I had to list ALL of the videos that DID try to take away from her reputation. I made it very clear that the videos I mentioned about Mao were bogus and obviously didn't take anything away from her.

Allegations of "paying off the judges" and the like have appeared on both sides. If one side accuses the other of cheating more than the other does, does that make it okay? NO, because they're both still doing it. :mad:

And I specifically listed examples of the horrible videos made about Mao. (Forgot about the paying off the judges one, thank you.) My whole post wasn't about "what's okay"--none of it is okay and I said that. That should've been obvious.

My point is, no matter who started it, the "other side" continued it. Quite frankly, both sides are to blame. :sarcasm:

Point taken. Sure, both sides are to blame. But since you're so pointed about this, I want to say that's not what my post was about.

The fact of the matter is, that videos directed against one skater went on longer, had a larger variety of attacks, and were in a greater volume, and yeah, got even more views of those videos. That's just a fact. If you want to assign blame equally to both "sides" regardless of that and regardless of who started it, that's up to you. No problem. Actually, my line about Yu-Na shows I don't care about the blame. It wasn't about assigning blame or trying to make a case for punishment--there will never be any punishment for those involved, unfortunately.

The OP had a question and I answered it in detail. Things like blame, who started it, who should've ended it, who is worse...I actually don't care about any of that. It is what it is.

Yuna and Mao are both beautiful skaters in their own rights.

agreed.
 
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Riemann

Rinkside
Joined
Dec 3, 2012
I know that we've allowed this thread on here - so it openned up the can of worms - but let's not start calling out youtube posters as they cannot defend themselves to the allegations on another board. We don't allow board dragging, but that also applies to youtube.

OK, acknowledged and respected. Won't happen again.
 
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