Oh My

Has a more confrontational breed of VM fan evolved on social media since the previous Olympic cycle? "That's not a Spanish tan, Scott."

I mean, Scott - do you take them for fools? These aren't yesteryear's fans, you know. They can tell things.

I do think, though, that there's something just echt-Ilderton about the choice of Jackie Mascarin. It's the malice. He IS dating his partner, ha ha ha!!

The meek fans and the badass may differ in tone, but remain siblings under the skin. Identical convoluted fan fic plots running in their heads that they apply to real life, plots that as ever feature their take on a Scott Moir possessing an stagnant psychological state and a stereotypical adolescent expression of same. Narrative stays the same. Common sense never shows up.

Sale & Pelletier at the end
of their Olympic Short Program in 2002

Remember when Skate Canada joined up with the USFSA, the always composed Scott Hamilton and the execrable Sandra Bezic to bully the OOC out of a "second gold medal" to hand off to these deservedly runner-up Olympic pairs skaters? (Only a year later even the bronze medalists, Shen & Zhao, would up their game and leave anything these two ever did behind in the dust). The actual winners, Sikharulidze and Berezhnaya, experienced a wobble in his double axel during the long, and the U.S. media, egged on by the two Feds, and the two hysterics in the broadcast booth, attempted to incite a riot in the arena. 8 years later at the 2010 World Championship, Scott Moir experienced a wobble in his twizzle pass and Virtue and Moir still won. Scott explained this is why you train, so even a wobble in an element still merits L4. He's wrong, the element was downgraded, but of course whether or not the score differential sufficiently reflected it, Virtue and Moir's superior skating skills, higher level of real difficulty and complexity of choreography did make that Worlds win a deserving one. I don't remember Scott ever saying the thoroughly second rate Davis White deserved the gold instead.*

12 years after Salt Lake City, in Sochi, Skate Canada ruthlessly threw the best ice dancers of all time under a bus so that the fucking Gadbois Center could get credit for training champion ice dancers in the next Olympic cycle. That's Skate Canada down to the ground. Blood on the ice for the sake of Sale & Pelletier, into the woodchipper with Virtue and Moir.

I miss the days when people in figure skating could bitch about the judging and about other figure skaters' overscoring or getting screwed, and I don't know if any of us are going to live to see those days return. That was some deal that was struck. There's got to be a Faustian component because it's a fucking eternity this has lasted. The only ice dancers it's permissible to bitch about are/were Virtue and Moir. Virtue and Moir can't bitch about anybody.

******

They still haven't retired.

I wonder who Scott will be dating in 2049.

Fan 1: She still looks pretty glamorous.
Fan 2: Remember when people wanted them
together?
Fan 1: Some people thought they were.
Fan 2: How come?
Fan 1: Baited, trolled, gaslighted. With
a side of female empowerment.
Fan 2: I sure bought a lot of Noxema.

*Pelletier had an improper hold on Sale in a lift plus they skated at arms' length. Soon enough, someone conveniently produced a smoking gun of judging malfeasance that I'm pretty sure was actually bribed / coerced into existence. Nobody needed to strike a deal to score superior skaters over lesser ones.

P.S.

Tessa's been doing some promotional things with this bright and shining feminist. It's disturbing how some of Tessa's instagram production mimics this aesthetic. When you start thinking this looks good (and this is heavily app'ed) you need to come up for air.

Imposter Syndrome

Wonder if they ever have it?
They'll have six World Championships
and an Olympic gold medal when they're
done, and that's assuming they won't follow-up
the Olympics with Worlds in 2022.

I suspect Charlie White knows he and Meryl weren't the best skaters and never defeated Virtue Moir on the ice, but bought into the idea that perceived off-ice merit was a valid element in competitive outcomes. Hard work, sacrifice, good sportsmanship, waiting their turn.

Papadakis & Cizeron at the moment look like figure skating didn't think long term. The most any competitor can hope for is a Grand Prix title when P&C routinely come down with an injury during the series. Otherwise, the top spot is locked in and the sport has left itself no exit strategy.

Missed this until now:

Ilyushechkina Bilodeau:



We'll see. They look good together. Glad she's still an enthusiastic Canadian.

I did some surfing to see what fresh sham was out there, almost forgetting speculation as to why the whole sham process may have been revived (pregnancy). Tessa's social media output is so stylized

it could be pregnancy or just aesthetic.

In Pyeongchang, Scott's personal aesthetic was almost on par with an instagram model's - his crow's feet, which once extended across his cheekbones, were then just faint lines at the corners of his eyeballs. I guessed they felt they had to leave nothing to chance after the way "fat" had been weaponized in the 2014 narrative against VM. Only in figure skating would a supernaturally beautiful pair like VM be made to feel on the defensive in the beauty stakes. I'm not a fan of the hyper polished, erase everything standard and especially not a fan of a body and self-positivity message coupled with extreme filtering.

Ok.

Well, SHE's presenting as excited.

But the medium is still the message and I'm not a fan of this medium.

London Knights

Since there's a beehive of reactionary fan behavior re Virtue and Moir, I did some belated googling and found this recentish article.

https://thewalrus.ca/the-olympics-are-over-but-tessa-virtue-is-just-getting-started/

I believe there's something in there about yet another recent mood crisis Tessa had that impacted their relationship (we were due, it's been over 10 years since her shins severed all communication between them although it did nothing of the kind).

The piece also relates how the Humboldt Broncos junior ice hockey team tragedy impacted Tessa, causing her to harken back to her "first boyfriend", a one-time star of the London Knights.*

Aha!

http://dubemoir.blogspot.com/2013/03/propaganda.html

This is a blog entry from 2013, observing that the London Free Press's Ryan Pyette was obsessively and seemingly randomly working in mentions of the "London Knights" in his recent coverage of Tessa Virtue, with a particular emphasis that it was Tessa who was friends with the team.

Back then, this blog said this:

Of course anything Scott says is overshadowed by Ryan Pyette continually mentioning the freaking 2005 London Knights in all his recent articles, specifying how Tessa befriended them back then (har de har Ryan - she befriended the entire freaking team at age 16?) while Scott merely rooted for them (what did Scott do - judge the contest among them for the guy who got to nail Tessa?). That's a joke set up right there, but we all know it's a sham boyfriend dealie here so please already. Just make your real point. The way he's shoveling that into his articles apropos of nothing looks incoherent.

This is like when Scott and Tessa tried to set up a Paris bait and switch with Jessica Dube but were called out and it never happened. It was one of their most petty gambits and one of their most mean-spirited. They skyped and gave quotes about this lovely Paris walkabout they were planning, visiting all the Funny Face spots, taking pictures, priming the pump. Then - bubkus.. Because sting was foiled in advance, of course they couldn't share pics of themselves. They put the Jessica pictures in the bank and dropped them over a year later. Waste not, want not.

This time it took six fucking years but you know - winning is everything.

Comments section

I removed one multiple comments from the comments section of one of the previous three posts.More would have been put into spam if I'd participated in those comments sections, but I didn't, and it's water under the bridge.

Very sorry Virtue and Moir decided to stir the shit to this extent (Andrew Poje, at this late date, really?, and is Scott's ex-partner married? Well done.) with the most attention-grubbing gambits they could conceive, as if they don't already get more than enough attention with the same act they've been pushing since 2009.  Clearly they missed the negative attention and set out to prompt predictable hysterics in the limited community of reactionary online fans.

They enjoy bringing out the worst in people*, instead of the best, and they enjoy punching down.

People who double down in my experience are arrogant, afraid, or control freaks. Maybe Scott and Tessa are triple threats. Tessa and Scott are extraordinarily courageous athletes and competitors, but they have the talent to match. In an area where they can't control the outcome and may feel less sure footed (and by outcome, here I'll use "Skating performance" and not results), they recoil, become juvenile, and act out. Not a good look, but hey, everybody else is doing it. They have a lot of bad company.

P.S. I'm kind of WTF that anything they do this many years on can produce this kind of freak out, but all fans are alike and the new ones are the same as the old. This is how shipper fans of TV characters act, of anime characters act, of historical figures act.

*Wait. Are fans people?

I totally missed this

Hot stuff

Even though I mentioned the Mr. D episode in an earlier post, I only halfheartedly tried to look up to see if she was actually Scott's first partner (whose name I had forgotten) or a pretty ok sitcom actress - certainly better than either Virtue or Moir. I decided she must be an actress playing a sad sack/whipping post character on Mr. D, and moved on (is she that as well? I know nothing about Mr. D).

ETA am informed below that the childhood partner on Mr. D was played by an actress (and the character name is not Jackie Mascarin), so it's just extra fun for all.

I don't review the comments as much as I should (which I should change) as I'm trying to place hold this blog until ice dance wakes up to something other than Papadakis & Cizeron's march to 5 World titles and their already-awarded 2022 Olympic gold. Clearly, stuff slips through the cracks as the blog lens gets wider and more general instead of gathering up the details - to mix metaphors.

So I missed the fun in the blog comments (which are very funny, and my apologies for having not seen them when they first landed) and remained in the dark. I had no idea Mascarin was the actual ex partner and this was a new thing they were doing until I recently plugged Virtue and Moir into a search engine and landed in tumblr:

This account has Lots and LOTS OF FEELINGS ABOUT FANS!!
HAVING FEELINGS!!! STOP!!

I've edited out the account name for obvious reasons.

That sort of post makes me cringe, but obviously VM find this stuff entertaining.

Takeaways. They missed trolling? They're going for it in 2022? The latter terrifies me. But they're just not going away. Is their fame so ephemeral that if they dial this shit back their Q rating and earning power takes a dive? WTF are the elements in the algorithm that spat this thing out? Can't they hawk grocery delivery services, fawn over each other, smirk about partnerships, can't Tessa pull diner imagry she got from some movie* where the people are old, the lighting is misty, they share hot chocolate and get wistful about that time they were young and never got together and now never will but what a time it was - if they retired? Aren't those things retired Olympic champions can do? So why aren't they retiring? I could do mental backflips and think they're not retiring just so they can have an excuse to be cowards and not widen their own lens, but that's what I thought last time, and then they announced.

How come they mix it up with every new program (except their show programs) but don't mix this up? Wait, the parenthetical just answered the question.

In hindsight, the spot is a lot cuter without the 
multiple overlays of "See everything we just did there?!!!
In real life things are the opposite but then it flips back again
and then again!"

I'm kind of creeped out by this configuration. I know why - I think it's because most people had only known he had a previous partner when he and she were both eight and then it was radio silence (she wasn't even dragged in to weigh in in all the years Virtue and Moir competed and their "bio" was served up relentlessly. Nothing that got around, anyway.). Her showing up this late in the game in this capacity is kind of cooties-inducing no matter what retroactive narrative gets stitched together. Ew. But then again:

The W Network, 2014. Tessa & Scott.
Want some "Ew"? Check it out. Still available
on video-sharing and streaming
service websites. And reviewed on this blog.

Yes, with Tessa's 30th birthday just around the corner I was anticipating that the icky days were behind us, but that was just a dream. And then again, a sort of knee-jerk bad taste has often been their metier. Their first sham flaunted plenty of partner-swapping and a kind of smarmy unsavoriness (and also voyeurism), the second started off benignly enough but got ambitious and then offensive (review the reality show if the ways it did so are lost in the mists of time), the third was pretty benign with Tessa showing up routinely as the bookend on (our) left, and this one is like Huh? and Yucky had a baby.

***

So now of course I'm checking out the comments I've missed and right off I see a transcript of commentators trashing P/C's inflated points. Thank you for that. But, it's also scary, because if people are allowed to question the judging instead of talking about PC's ephemeral magic, the door might be creaking open (again) and I just don't want VM to skate through it. I was positive they had the green light last time, and look what nearly happened.

*or Tessa pulled it from somebody's online fan fiction. She's wicked clever, right? Would not surprise as that's where the W Network's "Tessa and Scott" stole its entire script. I'm sure there's a Dr. Zhivago-esque scenario somewhere, only in London and it's a diner, and Old Scott sees Golden Ager Tessa across the street going into a shop, does a double take, rushes out, and gets hit by a car. Life is poignant. The diner schtick, for me, evokes Tessa's tweet of some time past sharing a wisdom-fueled flight she experienced with her seatmate, a man named John who was just the right amount of old (77). If his name had been Larry we'd have never heard about it.

Virtue and Moir STILL haven't retired. I'm wondering if they are waiting and seeing if Cizeron's back issues cut short the Papadakis & Cizeron juggernaut. Let's put "back problems" in quotes. Don't wish ill on his back, but if a pretext could be found for pre-Olympic retirement, that would do the sport good. Seriously, THESE are going to be seven time consecutive world champions when all is said and done? That's just absolutely stupid. Nobody's buying it, and it has been driving teams out of the sport. Lie in wait, Scott and Tessa!

They could also be doing their favorite thing - keeping the guesswork up for publicity and content.

I love this on Tessa.

OT: I recently went down the rabbit hole of a body/style classification system called "Kibbe types". It sorts women's optimum clothing style according to the balance (or imbalance) of yin/yang in their body lines, including their facial features and bone structure. Yin being feminine, yang being masculine, but remembering some traits defined as yang are traits many women want (long legs, for example).

If a woman is wearing the 'wrong" lines for her body type, she is still a beautiful woman, but she will look most herself in stuff that matches her lines. I have Tessa pegged as a "soft classic," which means I don't think she looks her best in all the edgy, detailed, geometric, on trend stuff she has often liked to wear, as that stuff is better suited to gamine (for example, her sister Jordan). Ditto for the Audrey Hepburn-esque black leggings/flats thing she used to favor. That's a gamine. It looks juvenile / contrived on the wrong type.

So she looks great here. Stay there, Tessa. It's the difference between "Tessa is styling" (I just can't make myself drop the "g".) and "Tessa is gorgeous."

I can't believe she's not even thirty yet.

I'm focused on the dress because the more-platonic-than-thou remarks seeded throughout the accompanying Walk of Fame articles is instant sleep-spiration, to hijack one of social media's most obnoxious portmanteau trends.

Every once in awhile, something comes along:



I love quotes like this one:

My failures from the past seasons really motivated me to do well," Kihira said through a translator. "I promised myself that I would remember them and never repeat those mistakes again.

Not that the positivity and bright-side-ing of North American sports culture doesn't have its place, but I like when athletes, particularly very young athletes, dispense with subtext.

Nicely done for the elements, feels a little content-lite:



Which is the direction the ISU has been pushing ice dance for years. Just creep on back to the late 1990s. I haven't deconstructed Hubbell and Donohue's elements and in betweens, but my immediate impression is it's pretty cursory. Lots of swinging around for transitions.

They have a lovely, powerful glide, although in the first half Madison's upper body movements call to mind John Mueller's critique of Cyd Charisse's dancing - that she "slams into position." She really slings those shoulders around, and although they won, and stipulating it might not matter, maybe nothing should compete in the power and flow of the glide.