Stephane Lambiel Tweets About New YOI Film

[jillredhand]

Again, seen much much much more bad behaviour from fs fans in general who appear to have no connection to the show. It's a sad truth that the show is far kinder to skaters than many fs fans are, outside of their favorites. The fictional skaters are flawed to various degrees, some get much fleshing out than others, but they are also treated with compassion and humour.

People here complain and fuss all the time about how unpopular fs is becoming outside of Japan and Russia. And then complain again when many new fans (like me and many of my friends who are going to competitions for the first time since the show premiered and staying up all hours to watch ls like everyone else!) are brought to fs skating. Many YOI fans are young and will settle down and learn. My friends and I try to teach, but it's a popular show and so it will take time.

PREACH.

Yes, some young and giddy fangirls tended to conflate real life skaters with Yuri on Ice characters. That wasn't particularly cool, but neither do I think that it was unforgivably bad behavior. Most of the people doing cringey things like changing Yuzuru's name to Yuuri on the wikipedia page, or making Youtube comments about the YOI characters on real life skater clips, are probably 14 years old. Moreover, I saw *plenty* of crack-down on those disrespectful actions coming from within the fandom, and the worst misbehavior from the anime fans was never worse than the fever-pitch fanaticism of the Virtue/Moir shippers. Most serious figure skating fans, probably including everyone on this website, are invested in their favorite skaters to the point of some degree of imaginative self-delusion about who they really are as people, and that's not really very different from what the anime fangirls are doing.

Plus ... did we all just forget that not only did the show creators take direct inspiration from real life skaters, it was often the skaters themselves who were instigating some of this character conflation stuff? Denis Ten, Ashley Wagner, and Michael Christian Martinez tweeted direct comparisons between themselves and Otabek, Mila, and Phichit, and that's not even getting into Evgenia's cosplay ... Michael made more than one Instagram post with Yuzuru captioned "Phichit and Yuuri," Johnny Weir was the one pointing out how Victor was obviously based on Plushenko, and Stephane Lambiel posted a lot about watching the show together with Deniss Vasiliev, even before he actually did a voice spot on the show. Sure, the fangirls could go a bit too far with it, but it's unnecessarily harsh to condemn them for something that the actual real life skaters were doing too.

Plus, I just don't think it's a wise or forward-thinking attitude to look down on figure skating fans who only got interested in the sport because of Yuri on Ice. It smacks of gatekeeping, of "the only *true* fan is the fan who fans like *I* fan." If you want more people to be interested in figure skating in general, or even if you just want to share the joy you get out of the sport, then it's kind of counterproductive to look down on the most popular piece of figure skating media to have been made in 20 years.

I guess I'm just very defensive of the Yuri on Ice fans. Hell, I'm one of them; I was a four year fan at best until Yuri on Ice recaptured my interest. But I've been here, watching every competition since the anime aired live. Not every anime fan will transition to following the sport seriously, but they certainly aren't going to if long time figure skating fans do needless gatekeeping.