Commissions continue again, this one coming from the most generous and prolific Ko-fi contributor of all, Kai. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
In which Akira Hokuto’s dream team meets her one-time former back up, now having more than come into their own during Hokuto’s time away from the sport. There is a little more to it, I’m sure. A short pre-match video thankfully included on the GAEA youtube upload shows Mita and Shimoda turning on Hokuto via chair shot, so one at least has a general idea of where things stand.
The match also does not make it all that complex either.
It’s both a positive and a negative.
Negative in that it feels like there is much more here than we totally got.
Some of that is not on the match itself as a whole. Etsuko Mita and Mima Shimoda were never the most mechanically perfect wrestlers to ever live, it’s why their best and most famous work came not only as a tag team, but as a tag team whose most enduring work lied in plunder brawls and big gimmick matches. This is very much the former, almost always involving chairs and having the benefit of blood, but it is not the world’s smoothest match. Nothing all that horrible goes wrong and at sixteen minutes, the match never really suffers under the weight of this for too long, but there’s a kind of b-show match feeling to this that I can’t get away from. Not the biggest or best weapon stuff they’re capable of, not the best action it feels like they’re capable of, and it also feels like these are not the best individual performances any of these four are capable of either.
Looking at it in terms of what they’re going for though, it is also a pretty simple idea.
Hokuto has not been back for long, and this feels like a simple sort of feel-good thing. The cheating heels draw blood and beat the asses of Hokuto and another all-timer, before then suffering the consequences and then getting their asses beat. This isn’t a match that aims for anything more than evoking that feeling, and while I wish it was more ambitious given the talent involved, it is also a match that totally and completely achieves this clear goal.
The positive in all of this is that it does still rule.
While not everything one might imagine in their mind’s eye, it is still fifteen minutes of big moves, chair shots, and blood. While not as perfectly organized or executed as one might obviously hope for, it is still a match that succeeds through its spirit. There is a very mean feeling to just about everything that happens in it that does a great deal to compensate for all that it isn’t, and given that it’s only sixteen minutes, it never becomes anything too upsetting.
Simply put, it is a very fun time.
After the chairs finally backfire on LCO and they get the beating returned, Hokuto beats Shimoda emphatically with the Northern Lights Driver.
Less than one might hope for or imagine, but hardly a match withouts its charms.
HANDWERK 