No Glory in being a Faerie

Haven't written a lot about Stardom I feel like lately. Lots of stuff has been good -- past the 4 star threshold I usually need to write about something, but nothing has made me FEEL a way. Not even that Stardom hasn't made me feel, just... less in the ring. It's 5Star season and if anyone can make me feel something it's Natsupoi.

Natsupoi vs Syuri

For the IWGP Women's Title

Poi is the god damned best. Syuri is too, but Poi gets slept on constantly. Few are looking at her as being one the the current Greats. Yet put Poi in a top spot, and she always rises to the occasion. She's your favorite wrestler's best opponent. If not, then her second best.

Great speed, great physicality, great suffering. No one dies like Natsupoi. Yet her ability to die is why she can never win. It is why her opponents are always more highly spoken about than she is. Her job is to suffer and die service of her opponents.

Syuri is incredible, but to see the best Syuri, you need an opponent that makes you feel her incredible strikes. Natsupoi is the medium that allows us to feel the greatness of her opponents. She allows us to feel Syuri's strikes. We can feel how hard the ring apron is. We can feel how devestating it is to lose.

There is no glory in being a Faerie. You must always stand smaller than those around you. You are always the supporting actress. The glory isn't for you, but your opponent. What you get to keep is the pain, and the indignity of defeat.

Because of this, I will give the Faerie her flowers whenever I get the chance. Most fans won't miss what they had until she was gone.

Triangle of Madness vs Gods Eye

For the Artists of Stardom Title

I was kinda having low expectation and it absolutely wasn't amazing, but Julia and Skye stepped up. It's hard for them. AEW does not produce great home grown women wrestlers. Hell, they honestly don't product any particularly remarkable wrestlers. They find diamonds in the rough and give them a chance to shine. If you're a relatively new talent, where do you improve? Every spot gets taken by these diamonds, and the few matches you do have still don't amount to much. But both these women have worked the indies as much as they could. Skye only seemed to stop once she got injured. These two need a quality of opponent over a long enough period to have a real chance of substantially improving.

So I'm glad they're here. I'm glad Julia is in the 5Star. I'm glad they took this seriously. Their were botches and fumbles, but honestly Japanese wrestling is a lot more kind to that sort of thing. You can embrace the messiness, you can embrace the chaos, and aim higher than the limitations perfect paradoxically impose on you. Because the classic style of western wrestling is perfectly executed Mediocrity.

The Big Fuck You Steel Cage Match

This is not the type of match I usually give 5 stars too. I'm boring. A 5 star match is a sober singles match and preferrably someone bleeds or cries. A one-on-one affair with fluids. This? This was just fun.

I'm not big on comedy, and it's generally not what I want on a PPV. Yet this match managed to perfectly balance sicko shit, shticks, and serious emotional wrestling all in one package. This was a nutritionally complete object. This felt like some shit WWE would do where it would devolve into a clownshow, but the difference here is guys like Leo Rush can WORK.

The match didn't sacrifice an part of itself for the humor, it just had comedy in ADDITION to everything else. I could riff on the fact 'people already treat the OG NES controller like it's covered in barbed wire' forever (also it's a fine, it's just simple!!). The Okada/Takeshita middle finger spot was perfect.

A delicious sampler platter where half the wrestlers are wearing what are basically Cho-Aniki shirts. A perfect "fun" match.

Mike Awesome vs Masato Tanaka

ECW Heat Wave 1998

Random "Dinner with friends" match. God, Mike's theme kicks so much ass. Whoever did that knockoff AC/DC track with those lyrics really nailed it.

I've seen this match probably a half a dozen times at this point. It's not terribly long, but is just incredibly brutal. Whatever Awesome lacked in psychology he made up in literally everything else. The only thing you'd think needed was a man willing to die for him, but really what he needed was a man unable to. Masato Tanaka is still wrestling today, because he's some kind of freak with bones made of of cement. A match between two men who were just built different.