lantern bearer.

As someone who struggles with this myself, I honestly have no idea lol. There’s no one overall approved way (like ‘they’). I wouldn’t really recommend using the neuter оно (it reads like ‘it’ to me), though I’ve seen some instances where nb people try to use it. The more frequent option seems to be as you said, switching between ‘he’ and ‘she’. That’s off of my scattered personal observations, but there are some really good in-depth articles that might answer your questions better:

- “Can You Be Nonbinary in Russian” -written by a NB person!- “Approximating gender neutrality in Russian” -more academic

But like, we do know him. we’re with him constantly for a full series, we know who he is. I call Viktor Vitya all the time when I write my outlines for my fic and such. he’s Vitya, our favorite Russian ice skating legend and absolute fool. and he’s a fictional character, Russian refers to fictional characters by their diminutives all the time (ie. Misha, Cheburashka, Uncle Vanya - i think those are pretty well known on tumblr at least ?).  anyway, I pulled one of the popular text posts from VK to find a YOI specific example (link ; disclaimer that i didn’t really read thru it, it’s just popular) and if you ctrl+f Юра (Yura) it’s all over the place. I mean it’s really not a big deal, a diminutive isn’t so special that we can’t call our beloved characters by it just bc they’re fictional. there’s no harm done here  :)

yknow I’m gonna be real here. I really don’t know a lot about sports. I have no idea if skaters attract the same public fan base as, say, an actual celebrity. like, Idk how I’d refer to Johnny Weir or anyone else if I ever met them, how professional athletes interact with the public is so beyond me. I can tell you that ppl do refer to Russian celebrities by their diminutives. think Vladimir Pozner, who gets called Volodya bc he’s just that well-known to ppl. or like, my favorite and beloved Vitas, whose stage name is literally just his diminutive. i’m not gonna go up to Vitas and be like omg Vitaliy Vladasovich. i’ve like, never called him anything other than Vitas. so i mean, if real life ! viktor was a public figure then yeah, i could see Vitya being used

i’m trying to compare it to real life examples tho. and google says Evgeni Plushenko is where I should be looking so I went thru a VK group and if it’s not the FN + LN combination, then I just see Evgeni. i’m not finding his diminutive. but like, this is one example and i have no clue if Plushenko is personally popular ???  would real Viktor be such a household name that i know to call him Vitya?  it’s a bit beyond me tbh.  i’ll go through more vk groups if you want, if you can find some more direct representative of Viktor. celebrity culture is just kinda beyond me tho, Vitas is one of these few exceptions where I don’t call a celebrity by FN + LN