Many are now asking the same question: "Where did all this Shoma-hate come from?"
As someone who took the nickname "Istaroth," I simply must share my own testimony of how the animosity toward Shoma Uno began.
First and foremost, here is the key takeaway: people will try to justify the hate by citing things like past misogynistic comments or being rude to teammates. However, the hate train started well before any of that, which should already tell you something about how "credible" those claims are.
I personally felt the first wave of hate around 2017, as Shoma began appearing on podiums more frequently. Like many athletes, he had technical issues—specifically, pre-rotations. But it is crucial to understand that at the time, this wasn't penalized by ISU rules (a loophole later exploited by the popular "quad girls"). In fact, a huge percentage of the quads performed by the "incredible Russian skaters" are built entirely on pre-rotation technique.
Funny fact: Pre-rotation wasn't listed in the ISU rulebook as a "negative feature" and was simply ignored. I’m pointing this out to show that Shoma wasn't breaking the rules of the time; he wasn't the first or only one to use these loopholes. The fact that the rules were written that way wasn't his problem.
The animosity toward Shoma, as far as I could tell, mainly stemmed from two linked factors: he started beating Javier Fernandez and breaking up the "Yuzuvier" dynamic, all while Yuzuru was giving Shoma a lot of attention. In other words, it was a classic "fan war."
Then, about a year or so later, the "misogyny legend" emerged.
How did it happen?
Some hater stumbled upon an obscure YouTube channel with maybe a dozen subscribers belonging to a gamer nicknamed "Omaru." This person dedicated at least 10 to 12 hours of their life to sifting through several marathon-length streams of this Omaru—where he occasionally chatted with friends or followers—just to "prove" a few things:
Omaru’s voice and manner of speech sounded like Shoma’s.
In one stream, Omaru mentioned he was a student at Chukyo University and had a younger brother in school.
There were a few other matching biographical details.
Based on this, this anonymous individual decided that Omaru was Shoma. And "because they hate him so much" (sarcasm intended), they spent even more hours scrubbing through every single remaining stream. Out of ALL that footage, they managed to find ONE single remark, which the hater then twisted in translation and rebranded as misogynistic.
What was it actually about?
Someone was asking Omaru about his romantic life. He replied that he didn’t have a girlfriend and that, in general, things with the opposite sex weren’t working out. I recently discussed this with a few others who were around back then, and we all clearly remember him using the word nigate (苦手). Sure, in some contexts it can be translated as "dislike" or "hate." But generally, nigate means "I’m bad at this" or "I’m not comfortable with this."
Omaru also explained (to paraphrase) that he avoided his female classmates because he felt their flirting was motivated by a desire to "collect" him as a trophy. In other words, even if the phrasing was clumsy—and Shoma isn't exactly a wordsmith—the point wasn't a hatred of women, but a rejection of being objectified by his peers. However, because he used words like nigate or kirai, it was "translated" as "I hate women."
In other words, even if the statement itself was clumsy (Shoma—if we assume Omaru = Shoma—is not particularly refined in linguistics, and back then he basically had recurring speech issues), its essence didn't boil down to a hatred of women in general, but to a rejection of a specific type of behavior. And the fact that Omaru saw exactly this kind of behavior from his female peers at university became the reason why he "avoided university girls his age."
Of course, one could speculate that Omaru might have misinterpreted the behavior of those around him, but that doesn't change the essence: he saw objectification directed at himself, and this prompted him to avoid the people it was coming from.
But because Omaru was talking about female behavior and words like nigate and kirai slipped into his speech, his words were "translated" into English as "I hate women."
Essentially, no one ever gives you a direct quote because the actual quote is just a 19-year-old, socially isolated kid criticizing objectification at the tail end of a marathon gaming stream. Neither Omaru nor Shoma are professional orators; after several hours of talking, anyone's sentence structure begins to fall apart.
As for the claims of "rudeness and betraying Yuzuru"... it boils down entirely to the fact that Shoma honestly admitted he was rooting for Nathan Chen in Beijing. I could write a lot about why interpreting this as "betrayal" is such a "weak aura" move, but my goal today was simply to recount my memories of how the lies about his supposed misogyny actually started.
Also, Omaru, who felt that girls only approached him because of his fame and struggled to find any sincerity around him, might have said 'I hate women.' But there is a massive difference between a raw emotional reaction and a fixed ideology. If you want to see an actual ideology, look at someone like Arsen Markaryan. Trust me, you don’t want to dive into his 'lore'—it’s truly disgusting.
