Emoting doesn't mean "unnecessary facial expression".
If you don't want to listen to anything, then I'm not sure why you go to a forum in the first place. I'm not an anonymous poster either and I never said you have to agree with me, that is just you negatively projecting onto me. I'm trying to discuss specifics and provide reasoning; I would expect people to engage in this reasoning. I await any reasoning you might have to share as well. For example, you finally brought up something we can discuss:
Can you please point out where in the program this is displayed -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA_aWlBj8Ws
Nothing in the program shows great extension or balletic positions from what I see, nor great musicality. The program opens with a deep, fluttering violin and her movement is a limp looking hand position and a slow turn on the ice. As the music builds she does nothing relevant with her body or expression to represent it, instead just doing some very slight arm movements and a single random turn. After the first jump combo the music again echoes this and there's no sense of shape in her movement to the music or purpose in her carriage, she again just does a random turn on the ice and then goes into a spin. After the spin ends it's the exact same thing again - the music is intense and her movement does virtually nothing. Then she does another spin, where the last position is held out longer then it should be for what the music is doing (because she's doing that to get a spin level of course). After that second spin the music is rapidly progressing onward until a pause, and the movement we get from her is toe-stop in the middle of it and some generic skating in a semi circle.
As the music builds again and has a mournful tone, she has no expression at all while she skates around the corner, and eventually doing a quite happy looking ina bauer with her arms opening over her head before going into a jump. After the jump we get the quick violin coming back into the melody but look at what she is doing - just one small forward swing of the free leg and a slight dip of the upper body. Then comes another jump, without much impact at all. So now after that we are into the footwork sequence, where there's a real lack of ability to reflect the gravitas of the music in her movement. At one point she does a forward lunge and it looks far more like than exaltation than any kind of representation of remorse. There's a very short forward spiral stretch in here and sideways leg lift into an attempting crouching kind of position and it truly looks clunky and far removed from what should be happening. Finally we end with a wholly unsurprising layback spin, where she does a weak illusion turn into sideways position, then haircutter, than beillmann. No usage of the arms or hands anywhere here to add extra texture or meaning, and immediately going into a vanilla final ending pose.
So, where is it? These great balletic positions and skating moves you spoke of? Where is the burning need in the performance from Mirai to express the starkly sorrowful aspect of the music? It's not there and she has never shown the desire or ability to express such a thing in a performance. "Ingmar Bergman on Ice" is never where she's been at. When you look at the clarity of Medvedeva's movements in comparison and her ability to have a serious and solemn expression, this program from Mirai is logically going to look worse and make it easier for the judges to score her down on PCS. Particularly if Russia feels threatened by the 3Axel potential from Mirai. "All she has is the 3Axel, her other movements don't compare to Medvedeva". That will be the politicking and it will stick.
I am trying to have a conversation, while you are only trying to shut down conversation, and at the same time trying to downgrade someone's well informed and considered opinion as "armchair". You have yet to give any real counterpoints or analysis, acting like it's an atrocity to question a skater and to think about what would provide the best competition results.
When did Ryan Bradley get good or even decent PCS internationally? Never.
Those other two skaters left Tom Z, precisely because of his misjudgements. They were
naturally talented artistically, nothing to do with him.
.
