La Zona Muerta

A rerun from the Observer Board dated 19 Jan 24:

Points where I genuinely had doubts about continuing in my wrestling fandom:

Sting losing / winning stupidly at Starrcade. I promised myself I would stop watching cold turkey if Sting didn’t win. He didn’t and I was mortified… but then Bret Hart wandered out and was like “NOT AGAIN” and restarted the match or whatever. My fandom was safe, if a bit bruised.

The Fingerpoke of Doom. I was rabid to see babyface Kevin Nash kill Hollywood Hogan to death. I didn’t get it; I got the opposite and WCW suffered a gut shot before my eyes. It never recovered.

The death of WCW. I actually did stop watching for awhile, but discovering tape trading saved me.SmackDown sort of lured me back (but not all the way), and eventually TNA led me to ROH and Dragon Gate.

The Benoit situation. Probably doesn’t need much explanation.

A nebulous point around 2010 or so. TNA sucked, WWE sucked and I was sick of my friends coming over every Monday night in a ritual we had done since roughly 1997 or so to watch wrestling. My wife had a similar crisis of faith shortly thereafter and eventually stopped watching RAW probably around this time, too.

Another nebulous point; whenever NXT started to flag. Probably 2018? Fortunately NJPW was there to pick up the slack.

The pandemic / Speaking Out / general strangeness to follow. Again, probably doesn’t need much explanation.

And finally, 01/18/24. The day Kazuchika Okada made it official that he was leaving New Japan Pro Wrestling.

Is that dramatic? Overly so? I dunno, probably. New Japan hasn’t blown up my skirt in a LONG time, and the writing was, frankly, all over the wall on this one, but here’s the thing. If he goes to AEW, it sucks, and if he goes to WWE, it sucks worse.

Gotch bless Bryan [Editor Convoy here; I’m referring to Bryan Alvarez]. I consider him a friend, and if I wasn’t such an anti social weirdo, I’d probably be a closer friend… but I saw his tweet last night that Okada would be “fine” if he went to WWE as it’s a different place now.

BULLSHIT.

I’m sick of people pretending everything is puppy dogs and rainbows now with WWE, as if Hunter is some sort of fucking champion for the rights of foreigners. Tozawa still runs around, depicted as a wacky foreigner who acts developmentally disabled. Kairi and Asuka are “The Kabuki Warriors,” because, oh hey, isn’t kabuki a Japanese thing (please don’t tell Hunter that kabuki was an expressive art and women were eventually banned from performing it, ’cause they were too sexy, leading to kabuki being mostly male performers playing male and female parts). Nakamura is booked as a threat when it’s convenient and a goofball when not.

This is not a place that is a haven for the foreign. They only treat non English speakers as well as they need to.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be thrilled with him in AEW, either… I don’t have a lot of faith in them depicting Okada as anything but “here comes big match guy.” I guess that’s not the worst thing, but it’s not ideal, either.

Tony Khan seems pretty pleased with himself, so hopefully that augers well, but I have no idea, no insight. I just know that seeing one of my favorite wrestlers either go to a situation I don’t like, or a situation I’d find appalling is no reason to celebrate.