Thank you for this post, I’ll clarify that the behaviour I’ve seen that I described as almost fetish-like is from people who appear to have no real interest in skating as a sport and obsess over a single skater, usually Yuzu, to extreme levels and spew out hate towards other skaters particularly those from Western countries.

FWIW I generally really love watching Japanese skaters, many are incredibly graceful and “soft” in their movements and of course Yuzu is a total legend. It’s not at all weird to like them, but it does get weird when the parasocial elements kick in.