#i do have screencaps of the shitshow at the wiki but i don't feel them necessary cos it's water under the bridge at this point

[lia-nikiforov]

Rather than replying to every single reblog I’m just gonna tag y’all here because there’s a huge misunderstanding going on and maybe some folks weren’t here to witness some of the most inane highlights of fandom history

@rollychan @dragonkrz @three-cheers-for-supernatural

The reason a whole lot of us are so intolerant on this whole topic is because, back when fandom was teeny tiny thing, the Yuri on Ice wikia admins decided that they wanted to spell Victor’s name with K on the wiki.

Now, idk about y’all but I’ve always thought of fandom wikis as somewhat reliable sources of information, specially for minor details that you won’t find in the wikipedia. They’re meant to be sources of objective, official, canon information. They’re associated to wikipedia by name after all.

The reasons the wiki cited to spell it wrong in spite of all official sources and media using Victor were

a) It might be a mistake, other characters’ names have been changed (JJ, Guang-hong, Sara)

b) It’s more correct Russian

c) It’s culturally appropriate and more respectful

d) The writers are Japanese so they don’t know how to romanize/don’t care

But here’s the thing

a) Victor’s name was never changed. It was obviously intended like that from the start.  Never has any official merchandise or outlet displayed Victor’s name spelled in any other way than VICTOR.  As @fencer-x​ has said, it’s meant to allude visually to the word VICTORY.

b) (gonna steal this reply to save typing)

A lot of Russian and otherwise slavic folks obviously have no problem spelling it correctly. There are in fact, real life Russian men called Victor with C. So this argument has no grounds whatsoever.

c) For all their claims of moral highground and cultural accuracy, none of the people who do this seem to acknowledge that 

 C.1) “Axel Lutz and Loop” are not proper Japanese romanizations of such names (their names are even written in Kanji for fuck’s sake). The correct romanization for these names as per regular Japanese phonetics should be “Akuseeru Ruutzu and Ruuppu” See anyone spelling it like that? Yeah, didn’t think so.

 C.2) Otabek Altin isn’t a proper Kazakh name. The name Otabek is Uzbek. The “culturally appropriate” spelling would be “Atabek Altyn”. For some reason the people claiming to be more respectful of real life spelling never seem to argue for Otabek’s cultural identity

C.3) As per the Russian government’s current romanization rules (they change somewhat frequently) Yuri Plisetsky’s name should actually be selled Yuri Plisetski. Again, no one’s defending that appropriate Russian spelling

d) Do I even need to explain this. It’s so disrespectful, rude, condescending and borderline racist to say that because they’re Japanese they don’t know how to romanize. A lot of people will use this argument and it reeks of disgusting Western conceit I don’t even know where to get started. But as @fencer-x has also explained before, if this were a case of “lololol Japanese can’t romanize”, then his name would be written with a K. Because in Japanese the ク in ヴィクトル is 99.9% of the time romanized to K. The fact that they went with a C couldn’t be more obviously deliberate.

As the show started to grow in popularity, people who didn’t know how to spell it turned to the wikia... and got tricked into believing the K spelling was the official one. This continued for months. When GSC on facebook wrote Victor with K and got called out for it, people cited the wikia as “proof” that the K spelling was the correct one. People started claiming the K spelling was the correct, canon spelling.  A good handful of us had repeated bouts with the admins and wiki community asking them to change it but they refused for a very long time. I was called a nazi and ableist slurs, my blog was stalked and some of the admins even made a “secret” blog post to mock me for the crime of wanting a source of official information to give correct information. 

Eventually, by some miracle that I still don’t fully understand, the admins of the wiki changed their minds and finally changed Victor’s name to the correct spelling across the site and everyone lived happily ever after.

The damage was of course already done and the K spelling was already widespread over the fandom but what’re we gonna do about it at this point, except hope it fades away eventually like Raito and Rivaille did. None of us is like actively hunting down people who spell it with K or going to people’s blogs and attacking them for their incorrect spelling or w/e. But I hope you can understand why it’s a touchy and borderline intolerable subject for a lot of us. The fact that some people choose to  knowingly spell it wrong to “take a stance” (there’s a fucking tag on AO3 for “Victor with K” is2g) is just the cherry on top of a mindnumbingly nonsensical debate that should’ve never existed to begin with.