Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Hootsoot. 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.
When I was a kid, even while really only understanding like half of the contents of them at best, I fell in love with kaiju movies.
Somewhere around that six or seven or eight range, I remember my dad taking me to Blockbuster (yes, I am old and ought to be forcibly put down) and renting GODZILLA (orignal, not GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS), KING KONG, and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (my formative experience thinking that the protagonist in the story was actually a loser bitch) before watching them all in a twenty four hour span. In addition to establishing my ability to watch at least three movies in one sitting, somewhere also, although not often coming back to it again for another twenty plus years, somewhere in me, something was set up to want to see colossal figures fight over gigantic stakes and occasionally destroy each other in the process.
This is perhaps why it was so easy to slide into professional wrestling, in which, at its best, features larger than life figures fighting over gigantic stakes.
Is this what I mean by at its best? Yes and no.
No, because wrestling can have so much more to offer. Mechanics and the beauty of smaller narratives and long term character arcs. One can look at a working class hero fighting his own hero, failing, and then succeeding, and they can also look at a near ten year odyssey of a troubled young man having to learn that the fix to so many problem has to come from within, and so many other variation on any of the many many many concepts that professional wrestling can play with.
On the other hand, yes, it is, and I know that because I have seen Survival Tobita.
Which brings me to this.
Survival Tobita, in addition to being (1) very die hard, & (2) just a Japanese rock and roller, is also the greatest human defender of the Earth (second place: Don Frye in GODZILLA: FINAL WARS) that we have seen in our lifetimes. He knocks out all enemies and attacks all monsters, and in this, his home promotion, Saitama Pro Wrestling Company, all monsters are welcome to give Survival Tobita their best shot, and this includes metal monster and anti-littering warrior Bauxite Medium.
This match is a fucking experience.
On one hand, one could note that it is all a bit, Bauxite doing character work for half of the fight before being brought to life by Tobita chugging a drink in an aluminium can before hurling in front of him.
On the other, enjoy something for once in your life, you freaks.
Survival Tobita, Earth’s greatest defender, gets beaten to shit by the steel soy sauce container hands of a horrible unfeeling alien, and like many of the other greats to survive such hostile elements, like Ellen Ripley before him, finds a way.
Through tearing off the ring mats and running at the monster with them, Survival Tobita not only knocks the vile and dangerous canisters loose from Bauxite Medium, but he is finally able to not only to stop him but to knock him back and eventually to knock him down. Tobita buries him eventually underneath all of these boards for long enough to count, and though I am wary to assign such lofty motives to people like professional wrestlers, it is a lot too hard to look away from the message clearly offered up to the world by a match like this.
Confronted with a horrifying and seemingly unkillable robot monster, luddite ass Survival Tobita eschews technology and manages to defeat him through pure human grit and ingenuity.
Secretly up there with Tanahashi/Suzuki and Cena/Lesnar among the all time great Inokiist texts, as one simple man, armed with nothing more than his own wits and his own human strength does all that he can in the face of a threat much larger than him, before digging deep and finding the strength and genius within himself to rise up in the face of a monumental challenge.
The first great kaiju film of the century.
HANDWERK 