#genuinely the way he went about with kenny and kota in the GL storyline made it so unquestionably queer | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

breadclubrising · 6 years

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As the preiminent Golden Lovers Scholar I was wondering if you had heard of the Truepenny Conspiracy theory and your thoughts in it? I'm horrifically butchering it but I believe the essence is that one of the reasons Kota went on his NA/European excursion was to allow Kenny the time and space to become huge enough in NJPW to be able to have greater control over how the GL story was told and presented.

(I would not use the word “preeminent” but go off I guess.)

Interesting. You know, I haven’t heard of this theory and five minutes of Googling didn’t net me much. The closest thing I found was a wrestling podcast called Truepenny that has talked about the Golden Lovers, and I wasn’t going to like… listen… to things. I have ADD. Feel free to send me links! Or get me on the horn with whoever has that theory, because tl;dr: I disagree.

Edit: Uhhhh the person with the theory read this post… so that’s a thing. And apparently the original theory has Gedo being involved in this whole thing, which, yeah, if the guy calling the shots is calling the shots… then those shots are all part of a plan. Like if you’re like “this is all part of God’s Plan” and you genuinely believe that God made said Plan, then, yeah, literally everything ever makes sense. So this is an excellent conspiracy theory in the sense that I cannot refute it, as literally any argument could be countered with “but that’s because Gedo planned it that way.” I’m still not sure that Gedo would be like “Kota, get out there and be fuckin’ weird as hell at all times because it’ll make people care about the Golden Lovers, which they will have to do a lot of research to figure out and also it happened mostly in DDT so they’ll have to learn that too and probably watch some DDT to understand the significance of it all,” BUT I ALSO CANNOT SAY THAT HE WOULDN’T DO THAT! GEDO IS A FUCKIN SLICK MOTHERFUCKER! So the theory lives!

It won’t surprise you that this made me write a thing, so I put it under a cut. But there’s also some gifs of Kota’s butt being given the recognition it deserves.

Going off of what you said, I don’t think this sounds very likely. Just logistically speaking, that means they would have had to be banking on Kenny rising to greater stardom in NJPW, which he was only just starting to do when Kota left due to injury in November 2015. Kenny’s takeover of the Bullet Club and monster push started in early 2016, which is still before Ibushi was even cleared to wrestle again.

So the timing kindasorta matches up, but Kenny certainly wasn’t at the point where he’d have that kind of control over his own booking. He’d only just moved up to heavyweight. To me, Kenny didn’t really start having that kind of clout until his WK 11 match with Okada helped bring NJPW to a much bigger audience in the west. And that’s definitely not the sort of thing you can plan for.

Not only that, but once Ibushi was cleared to wrestle again, he resigned from NJPW and DDT. If this theory is true, I can’t think of a reason for him to resign from NJPW, let alone DDT. In fact I’d think, if the goal was to have control over the GL storyline, it would make sense for him to also try to gain prominence in NJPW, so they could both exert pressure on their booking directions.

I actually think Ibushi genuinely was burnt out, like he says. And going by interviews he gave around that time, it really seems like the burnout and injury had taken a huge emotional toll on him, and he wasn’t even sure what he wanted to do with himself anymore. So doing random shit like going to the UK and flirting with WWE makes sense to me as something he’d do because all he desperately needed to try something different.

And Ibushi still wrestled for a bunch of other Japanese promotions here and there, DDT included, between February 2016 when he came back from injury and July 2017 when he entered the G1. Even after the G1, when he was in NJPW pretty regularly, he still made appearances in DDT and other Japanese promotions. And of course there’s the tinhat theory (*wink*) that Ibushi was the man behind Tiger Mask W, who debuted in NJPW in October (??) 2016.

Basically, I’m saying that it makes no sense for Ibushi to utterly and completely derail his career for over a year in hopes that Kenny might become a superstar and help them revive the Golden Lovers. And if he had wanted to do that, he didn’t do a very good job of staying out of Japanese wrestling (which would make him less “loyal” to NJPW). Ibushi seriously damaged his standing in NJPW and risked wandering in the wilderness for a very long time. I know the Golden Lovers story is central to both his and Kenny’s career arcs, but he actually risked ever being able to revisit it by doing what he did.

Right after WK 11, Kenny mentioned in an interview that he and “an old friend” were going to try to do something special in 2017. Ibushi, too, said “I do have plans in Japan” when he talked about declining the WWE contract. So clearly they were trying to do something with the Golden Lovers storyline even back then, but it didn’t come to fruition in 2017 as they’d hoped, even with the clout they both had (my kinda crackpot guess is this is because Jericho threw a wrench in everything).

In kayfabe, I think Ibushi was being erratic and lost because he was unsuccessfully trying to put the Golden Lovers part of himself in the past. His character also got increasingly serious and “professional” during this time, to the point where when he was called upon by Taguchi Japan to do a hip attack on Chase Owens, he looked conflicted and concerned, as if he hadn’t spent 6 years in DDT doing butt stuff of so many varieties.

the cinnamon tography of this moment

I don’t know guys, that seems kind of unprofessional, don’t you think?

God-I-wish-that-were-me.jpg

(This was just an excuse to use these gifs again. I need to re-upload the whole set post-Deletening :/ )

I’m always very curious how much contact Ibushi and Omega actually had post-Golden-Lovers, but I think that when Ibushi was shooting fireworks of his chest and high fiving Vince McMahon, he was genuinely trying to find his own way in the world. Whether that was with the loving support of his friend (?) Kenny Omega, or to the chagrin and concern of his estranged acquaintance Kenny Omega, we’ll never know unless they tell us someday, but either way it had nothing to do with the Golden Lovers IMO.

#golden lovers #golden lovers trutherism #kota ibushi #kenny omega #anon did you just get me to do your dirty work for you?#apparently kota's butt has its own hashtag on twitter #which IMO it did not merit until he came back to NJPW for the G1 #but i should figure out what it is and use it #seems important to my brand

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