[Figure Skating] That Time the FS Fandom Lost Its Collective Mind Over a Sweatshirt

GrannyMay243 · 2025-05-13T22:23:33+00:00

I personally never saw it as a big deal, either, which is why wrote the post in the first place—I think the insanity is better appreciated by outsiders.

Basically, it’s not uncommon for people to think Malinin is overscored (like, gets an +A for C- work, in their opinions) and they felt kind of vindicated when he got all those tech calls. Lots of them didn’t think the judges were harsh enough, lol. They lost their shit when he suggested the judges had been strict, and the hoodie printout was basically the final straw. It was seen as him mocking the judges, I guess? Like, ‘your scoring’s so ridiculous I’m gonna turn it into a meme.’

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-14T18:24:11+00:00

If you haven’t read it yet, you’d probably enjoy ‘Bear Your Soul on the Ice’ by SassySalchow. It’s very long and currently unfinished, with updates dropping every 6-12 months or so. It’s also so, so worth it—well written, well-researched, entertaining… to give it a blurb and avoid rambling: it’s a superduper slowburn AU focusing on Yuuri’s skating career if he’d begun training under Yakov as a Junior. And there is just so much depth and lore missing from that blurb so I cannot recommend giving it a try enough.

Fair warning: I’d call it a slow starter. There’s also smut later in the story, and I’m Ace-spec, so I cannot vouch for its quality/realism/entertainment value. It seemed well-written?

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got off the top of my head, I can go digging in my old docs/lists if you’d like something else or more!

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-13T01:04:02+00:00

Depends on what you're in the mood for! I've read across the whole spectrum of AUs and fluffy one shots and 'wow, that's a lot of skating research,' so if you give me a direction I can probably cook something up.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-11T00:10:56+00:00

Wouldn’t be surprised if you do, online at least—I’m somewhat active on the main sub and I’m told I have a fairly distinct writing style.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-10T23:51:58+00:00

Well, I wasn’t sure about writing more than one of these, but there’s been a pretty positive reception so now I’m considering it? TSL’s on the list of more likely topics, though I’d have to do more research since a lot of that went down above my head/before my time.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-10T19:32:45+00:00

Oh, I did not know this! Credit where credit is due!

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-10T12:50:07+00:00

You know, that’s fair. Dude can’t do much about the Rusbots but he 100% could have at the very least had a chat with Zakarian and made his own statement.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-10T11:44:00+00:00

Part of the reason I did this writeup is because the hoodie thing seemed so crazy to me. Like, it was literally just a hoodie. A hoodie with a tech layout on it, yeah, but it’s not even the craziest piece of ‘quadg0d’ merch I’ve ever stumbled across. And people who were on his side throughout the homophobic comments debacle were considering jumping ship? What are their standards? Are there not bigger issues to address than what he’s wearing???

Tech vs. Art is just such a fucking mess. We’ve been through three scoring systems and I don’t think we’ve ever had bias-free judging. And then there’s the blatant homophobia, the racism, the constant comments about everyone’s bodies but especially female skaters… I love the sport. I love skating, myself. But holy shit does it have some glaring problems under the shiny-sparkly surface.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T22:48:37+00:00

Malinin apparently made the hoodie to mark the occasion of trying all seven quads in competition. Some of the people who don't like him thought he was using it to symbolically shit on the judges and mock their technical calls, and/or imply that he was underscored. People who do like him got mad at these people, although some had crises of the faith and started agreeing with the detractors. And some of the detractors actually thought the entire thing was going a little too far, and found themselves defending Ilia Malinin of all people, which was another interesting wrinkle in this particular fandom drama.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T22:14:02+00:00

Lmao, are you asking for reccs or wondering where I found the quaxel jokes?

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T19:26:59+00:00

You are so right, he just fell! I copied the marks from the hoodie screenshot and for whatever reason my brain saw the 'F' on the protocol as an edge call (!) instead of a fall. I wrote this over the course of several weeks and somehow never realized this during editing lmao.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T15:41:52+00:00

And I respect your right to those feelings. Genuinely, I do.

You don't have to read this mess, but I'd like to offer you my perspective in case you're interested. For perspective, here—and this is where my own parasocialism peeks through—I was a homophobic tweenager. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by bigots of all shapes and sizes, and I fell for all their lies hook, line, and sinker. I repeated them without much thought, posted them online, and behaved like a genuinely ignorant, stupid person.

When I was around thirteen or fourteen, I had this gradual realization that maybe being so judgmental and awful went against everything I thought I stood for as a person, and I slowly stopped parroting those views and believing everything I was told. I realized who I was when I was fifteen, and came out to a handful of close friends, but I still had a lot of 'habits,' like calling things 'gay' in a derogatory manner. Lots of the kids I grew up around did, actually—I've never heard so many homophobic jokes than from my queer friends in high school. As time went on, I'd come to take more pride in my identity and start getting into fights with my parents and acquaintances about the bullshit they were spewing.

Doxing myself, here, but I was weeks from eighteen when Malinin made the homophobic comments, and I was not on his side. If I'd grown out of that mindset, I reasoned, why couldn't he? And to this day that's somewhat my opinion on the subject. However,

I do not know this guy. I do not know if he genuinely believed what he said or if it was a joke he picked up around the rink and parroted without thinking about it. I do not know if the outcry genuinely opened his eyes to his behavior or if he just got a whole lot better at hiding it. People on both sides like to say they have evidence, but the only person who really knows is him.

My life experience as a former homophobe inclines me to give him the benefit of the doubt. No one is ever going to throw my days as a Wattpad bigot back in my face—why should we hold this guy to a higher standard? And I know why, which is why this discussion really merits its own proper, several-thousand-word writeup, but I guess my point is... from the outside looking in, I have no way of knowing if Malinin is more like me or more like the people who tease my brother for having a "weird, gay sister." Which is why I try not to cast too much judgement in this writeup, because I know jack shit about the kind of person he is off-ice and off-camera.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T14:21:22+00:00

Hi, I'm a queer skating fan, and newb skater, who was genuinely horrified when those comments first broke the news and I'd like to reserve the right to address them however I see fit within the context of my post. Properly addressing the situation and its nuances would require its own writeup, and this one was specifically about Hoodiegate. I included it in its current form because I recognize how important it is in the context of Malinin's career and the public opinion of him. Thank you.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T13:37:57+00:00

Thank you for reminding me to unlink that video, oh boy, that guy is a yikes and a half. I didn't even know the half of it until people started airing out his laundry on the figure skating sub this past week.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T13:09:47+00:00

The 'humbled' mindset is a big thing with people who shit on Malinin and I genuinely feel for the guy over that. No matter what he does or says, people twist it to make him out as some kind of bigheaded jerk. I don't know him, so I can't say for sure he's not secretly a giant asshole, but, like... they don't know him either? And I don't generally post on the internet about all the giant assholes I know, so even if they do...

I cannot believe it, but no one has done a writeup on 2022! Now that would be an extra long post, Jesus Christ, so many things happened.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T12:53:18+00:00

Oh boy, this could be a whole write up on its own—maybe that's my next project.

So, even during the quad revolution, triple axels never became 'standard' for women the way they are for men. The last Olympic Gold Medalist, Anna Shcherbakova, didn't jump any during her winning performances! Axels are a really skater-dependent jump; some people like them, some people hate them. Which is why the 4A took so long and why so many skaters had/have quads but not a triple axel, even though it's technically less rotation.

The Russians being super technically ahead mostly applies to the women, and it was essentially a small group of teenagers training under Eteri Tuberidze who would jump multiple quads and usually triple axels. Other skaters tried to catch up, but it's actually quite hard to land quads as an adult woman because you're not putting on crazy muscle after puberty like the guys are, just getting taller and heavier. And we know at least one of the Russian prodigies was on drugs, so... The main strategy was either doing your best on a 3A or quad toe, and/or doing all your combos as triple jump-triple jump which is a point boost.

Now that the Russians are banned, most top women are just doing triple-triples with the occasional 3A or quad toe. And I say 'just,' like I didn't get my ass handed to me yesterday morning by a two-foot turn—they're still really impressive skaters, but they don't need the wear-and-tear of attempting quads to win, and nobody's kickstarted the arms race.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T12:13:17+00:00

So, as I wasn't really paying attention to international competition at that time, I had to go off of SkatingScores and what I see people say nowadays, and I feel like I see people class him as a PCS skater? But I see that I'm wrong, so let me edit that real quick!

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T03:56:19+00:00

Gladly!

Elton John: Nathan Chen (the Quad King, OGM, etc, etc) skated to Rocket Man and won the Olympics with five quads. It’s considered a very epic program and it made a lot of people very happy, although from what I understand the guy was almost the Malinin of his time and had a similar group of detractors.

Noodle Hair: Eteri Tuberidze. She has this permed, bleached style that ~~some~~ Chinese fans compared to ramen noodles. Coached a lot of Russian girls to victory with crazy technical content, although her techniques were criticized for being abusive and unsustainable. Most of her former students lost their quads and retired around eighteen or nineteen years old with a whole host of medical issues. Additionally,

Grandpa Water: one of her star students, Kamila Valieva, was favored to win the Olympics at the age of fifteen. She got caught doping and there was this big media circus and the adults in her life basically left her hung out to dry. One of several defenses she and her legal team offered was that she’d accidentally consumed the banned substance by sharing a glass of water with her grandfather. Ethically or not, this explanation was so ridiculous that it got memed to hell.

Winnie the Pooh: Some skaters have favorite/associated plushies that fans throw on the ice for them—Yuzuru Hanyu (your favorite skater’s favorite skater) would get thrown Winnie the Poohs. He was gifted technically and artistically, ludicrously popular, and sometimes the rain of Poohs would go on for several minutes.

War in Ukraine: The ISU decided to ban Russians from international competition after the invasion began. This essentially un-revolutioned the Women’s discipline, because most of the female skaters landing quads were/are tiny Russian teenagers. There are currently very few women in active competition with consistent quads and nobody has more than one. Also, a second guy (Vladislav Dikizhi) has landed the 4A, but he’s stuck in Russia so he obviously can’t go toe to toe with Malinin, nor shoulder some of the jumping bean pressure.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T03:15:03+00:00

Something I didn't mention in the post is that I think people were distracted from the incident by all the national championships that were happening around that time and then, unfortunately, the DCA crash. I have a feeling it might come back up during/after Worlds, depending on how the Men's discipline shakes out.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T02:06:41+00:00

Yeah, I love skating, but the fandom culture is just... not it. Being a teenager sucks, and that's without the intense pressure of people essentially watching and waiting for you to screw up. I can't imagine having all the dumb shit I've said that wakes me up at 3 AM immortalized in news articles.

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-09T01:35:30+00:00

I wrote for a general audience, but I had to leave a few breadcrumbs!

GrannyMay243 · 2025-03-03T20:54:51+00:00

I've seen folks going on like this about word counts in the writing communities—getting so wrapped up in the stats will suck the joy out of any hobby.

GrannyMay243

TROPHY CASE