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All Together promotional posters 🤭

The other day snow/boiiii streamed a DDT match which featured Kaisei Takechi, some idol debuting as a wrestler. Korakuen Hall was sold out and the crowd was about 95% women and 0% straight guys and I'm guessing a lot of those women also don't regularly attend wrestling matches since they came just for this guy. Anyway, the result was a crowd reaction the likes you haven't seen since 1970. Like you know when you see old matches and they work a pretty babyface over with the most minimal shit but the crowd is screaming and wailing as they witness this torment like they're watching him getting nailed to the cross. It was like that. The only thing missing was the old ladies trying to hit the heels with their umbrellas or poke them with hair pins, and drunk men climbing the guardrail and starting riots.

Also interesting to see how this, in my opinion, completely changed the way the wrestlers were working the match, milking the crowd's love for that man by hurting and humiliating him in new exciting ways. I bet it must have felt pretty good for all wrestlers involved to get the reactions that their craft was originally designed around. You know all of those match beats, the ~psychology~, the grand gestures, the dramatic comebacks, the comeback being cut down again, are made for this level of emotional engagement, and if you don't get them it's like pantomime. I can only imagine the rush you feel when you simply throw Christ out of the ring and the whole crowd wails in sympathy.

It also got me thinking about how miserable it must be to go through these motions but instead of crying children and angry grandmas you have an audience of detached smarks, whose strongest emotional reaction is chanting "this is awesome" when you did some cool chain wrestling.

Via コト

(Zack stands on his tippy toes)

DDT Pro, 2011, Falls Count Anywhere: Sanshiro Takagi uses some cigarette-based offense against El Generico (commentary earnestly explains that "cigarette smoke is very bad for your lungs!")

📷 source

Take is a athletic freak