Io Shirai vs. Shayna Baszler, STARDOM Stardom of Champions 2017 (2/23/2017)

This was for Shirai’s World of Stardom Title.

It is the exact match that I imagine you would want out of an Io Shirai vs. Shayna Baszler match, or at least that I imagine you would want if you’ve found your way into reading this review.

Shirai tries to fly and do wild stuff and Baszler tries like hell to stop her via targeting a limb.

Both attacks are wonderful in their own right.

Shayna Baszler’s attack on the arm is stellar stellar stuff. She’s like a shark taken human form, constantly going wild whenever Io gets close enough to let her sniff even a single drop of blood in the water. Shayna has a way of countering pins into armbars in a way that I’ve found exhausting and phony when people like 2010 Davey Richards have done the same, but that she manages to make feel cool and dangerous. Equally and especially gratifying is the way in which Baszler completely zeroes in on the left arm for the rest of the match, not only delivering something fairly new with such a focused attack on Shirai, but feeling like a real challenge in a way that Io hasn’t had in some time at this point.

Yet again on the other end of the match, the high flying attacks of Io Shirai have a recklessness, force, and utility to them that feels unmatched in wrestling outside of one of her spiritual peers in Kota Ibushi. It is yet another performance from Io Shirai in which I think to myself that someone could call her the best wrestler in the world here, and I wouldn’t care enough to fight it, and might even be won over for a moment or two. In part, that’s also because of her selling of the right arm from Baszler’s attacks. It’s always hurt, she throws likke eighty percent less elbows than she normally might to sell it (please everyone in wrestling take notes), and eventually learns her lesson about pins where she holds onto Shayna after a move. Pure technique that might have beaten other wrestlers is abandoned in the favor of pure artillery and attrition, opting instead to simply bomb out Baszler.

Io drops Shayna with a god damner of a jumping Tombstone Piledriver as a set up instead of German Suplexes, with the fear of God put into her after her previous tries at it, and then puts on an especially impactful feeling Moonsault to keep the title.

The best Different Style Fight in STARDOM history, hitting at the core of what makes those matches work, which is as much a styles clash as it is the simple story of a wrestler called into question and answering emphatically.

***1/4

Io Shirai vs. Viper, STARDOM 6th Anniversary Show (1/15/2017)

This was for Shirai’s World of Stardom Title.

I liked this a whole lot.

Viper, to her credit, was not bad here. Her rope running was kind of awkward early on, and she made a few unfortunate nearfall selling faces (she also made good ones throughout the match, to be fair). Mostly though, her role here is simply to exist as she is. Not super great but a big wrestler with good looking offense where she uses her size real effectively. That doesn’t always lead to great matches, and in fact I can’t recall another match throughout her career even on the same level as this match, but against a wrestler as great as Io Shirai, it does.

In the nicest possible way, she is raw material in the hands of a master craftswoman.

Yet again, Io Shirai turns in an incredible performance. The energy, the striking, the unbelievably hard bumping that turns Viper from a likeable wrestler into a real threat for a few select moments, and especially just in terms of the composition of the thing. It’s so beautifully put together. The immediate attempts to lift Viper that don’t pay off until the end, the way Viper’s offense gets bigger and more impactful, the way Shirai’s gets more and more desperate, the way Viper starts to take bigger chances and only finally loses once one of them fails, it’s maybe not immaculate, but there is so much to love here. It’s yet another one of these Io Shirai performances in the mid to late 2010s where I cannot blame anyone nor would I argue with anyone who comes out of this saying to themselves that this is the best wrestler in the world.

Most of all, the finish is absolutely perfect.

When Viper finally misses off the top, Io crowds her and pours it on. The Moonsault to the back finally sets up Shirai pulling off the German Suplex to Viper that she tried and failed to do multiple times throughout the match. It’s a perfect sort of a finish, not only paying off a repeat spot but giving the overall big vs. small theme an appropriate climax. It is not, however, the coolest possible finish, which is what they opt for instead. After one regular German Suplex, Io instead hauls Viper back up and in a massive figurative and literal flex, wraps her up in the Package German Suplex to pin her.

It’s a wonderful sort of a victory for a character and a wrestler like Io Shirai, the world’s most confident woman and perhaps its most confident wrestler period. Once is a victory a different wrestler would have and that maybe one would expect out of this match coming in, but twice is the kind of statement that just feels right coming from the Ace.

A month after a far more heralded match, this is an Io performance that I enjoyed to a much greater degree. One of the most fun matches of the year to me.

***

Io Shirai vs. Mayu Iwatani, STARDOM Year End Climax 2016 (12/22/2016)

This was for Shirai’s World of Stardom Title.

In the interest of complete honesty, I’ve never entirely understood the acclaim around this match that seemed to spring up as soon as it was over. I didn’t at the time, I didn’t a few years later when I watched it a second time, and I still don’t today.

Maybe it’s one of those cases where a lot of people are seeing something for the first time. This got a lot of wider spread acclaim at the start in ways that better Io Shirai matches didn’t, and while that sort of thing will always annoy me, I do understand it to some extent. The same sort of thing happened a few years later, where it seemed a lot of people began watching deathmatches during Masashi Takeda’s 2018 run. I hate it, of course, but I do get it. I also don’t think that’s entirely it in this case. I know people who adore this match who I either know for a certainty or who I suspect had seen Io Shirai, or at least Peak Io before this match.

Something about it just doesn’t work for me.

I used to think it was the leg work, but on this watch, I didn’t actually care all that much. Yes, Io should have never worked Mayu’s leg even for a few moments. Mayu Iwatani does not have it in her to sell a limb all that well long term. That being said, she really did give it a try for a little bit and given that Shirai never went back to it, it’s not the end of the world. I honestly didn’t care too much about the leg here, and so I know that isn’t it.

I think it’s just Mayu, honestly.

I don’t like her.

She’s a weird and offputting presence to me, and I do not believe in her as genuine on any real level. Something about her unlocks some bullshit Jim Cornette ass part of my brain that I despise, but that constantly screams that this is not real. That’s not to say she can’t be in great matches, such as this, or even contribute to them. Her elbows are especially good here and she’s a perfectly fine tackle dummy for the real star(s). But in matches built around the impulse to want to see her succeed, I almost always wind up finding those matches lacking, simply because I do not want to see her succeed. She offers up nothing, she does not feel like an actual wrestler at this point so much as she does someone pretending, and that gut feeling is only doubled down on when her opponent is generational superathlete and ultramagnetic Io Shirai.

All that being said, on some level, this is still great. Mayu Iwatani, for all her faults, is not quite bad enough here to ruin anything. Certainly, a better wrestler in her role would make for a better match, but Io’s also faced a lot of worse wrestlers in title matches in 2016 as well. It’s a fun athletic match full of a lot of really cool moves and nearfalls and while Mayu is completely dwarfed here, she’s exactly enough of a replacement level wrestler to undermine yet another God level big match Io Shirai performance.

I’m not going to tell you it isn’t great. I am going to tell you that I’m not positive it’s a top five Io Shirai match in 2016, and I am definitely going to tell you it’s not the best World of Stardom match that these two will ever have together.

***

Io Shirai vs. Mayu Iwatani, STARDOM Gold May 2016 (5/15/2016)

This was for Io’s World of Stardom Title.

It’s one of the great ones.

Mayu empties out the arsenal, Io gets real mean with her now that she’s taking aim at the throne, and then she completely obliterates Iwatani at the end in classic Ace fashion. It’s the sort of match you’ve seen a bunch before, even if you’ve never seen Io and Mayu do it. The challenger exhausts the arsenal, can’t get it done, and once the chamber’s empty, the champion THEN comes back and drops bombs until something works. Io’s often been cited as a big Tanahashi fan, and it shows in a match like this, playing with a lot of the same tools, both ideologically and mechanically, while still making it very much her own.

A classic, something predictable, and an unbelievably fun time.

Not without flaw, but just good as hell.

One might know me or have read enough to have a fairly decent idea, watch this and expect me to have a problem with the knee thing. It’s not something that I love, but I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker exactly. While Io does make the mistake of filling some space early on with knee work, it’s not the end of the world. Iwatani sells decently enough. There’s one nerd-bait stagger step sell off a whip across the ring and she touches her leg a few times, but given how little Io really does to it, that’s enough for me.

Given how nutty the rest of this match is, it’s forgivable.

Because this gets REAL nutty.

Both women are entirely out of control in all the best ways. Firstly and most obviously, they are taking these truly obscene bumps. Onto the apron, off the apron, off the top, all as expected. What’s less expected are these god damner ass neck-cruncher shotgun bumps that both women take at least one of at different points here. It’s a hard thing to make look great, and these two make it look greater than most. They’re also god damned monsters on offense. Real crisp and nasty kicks, elbows, and chops from both women, without a weak shot to their names in this match. Mayu picks it up big time in general to hang with Io, and Io raises her level of performance even further by leaning into a bully routine here that is absolutely killer. She’s able to put an extra emphasis on everything, an added snap on suplexes or the finishing Moonsault in a way that is both real real nasty, but also comes across as insulting and dismissive. It’s a rare gift to be able to do that with offense alone, and it’s one Io does so much with it in a match like this, and that elevates the match that much further.

If not for the knee work and the lack of any one truly obscene next-level kind of a spot (instead having 100 like B+ level ones), this would be a true God Damner. Possibly even the vaunted Encounter, like the best Io title match to this point. Alas, this is a more unrefined version of what this can be compared to later and more notorious efforts, but still a gigantic step forward.

Yet another hit from the Io Shirai hit factory in 2016.

***+

Io Shirai vs. Kairi Hojo, STARDOM 5th Anniversary Day One (1/17/2016)

This was for Shirai’s World of STARDOM Title.

A revelation.

Not that I haven’t seen it before, but after watching a lot of 2021 STARDOM, hating most of it, and after seeing things like their WWE work in years since more recently than this, it really is just blowaway great. Elements of what made this work are present in all the best work each woman’s had throughout their career from Kairi being a generationally great babyface to Shirai combining a 1990s Rey Misterio Jr. level of body control with a Kota Ibushi level of psychotic offense, but they all come together perfectly into a truly sensational piece of work here.

It’s big and dumb and absolutely wonderful.

A delightful continuation of all the best stuff from the previous month’s main event, and a match that works in many of the same ways. Kairi and Io aren’t quite capable of delivering the tension and violence together that Meiko Satomura did either the month before against Shirai or in the summer of 2015 against Hojo, but they’re able to find a tension and urgency that still gives this something. It’s a big dramatic main event, and they’re able to add more to it than just being a series of great moves, between Shirai’s sudden overflowing confidence after taking the title from Satomura and saving the company and all of the incredible ideas that they have. Truly, they have SO many incredible ideas. Insane shots, lunatic dives, a few really sensational counter ideas, and rarely ever anything that immediately rings out as false or stretches the match along to an artificial length. For as insane as many of their sequence-based and offensive ideas are, it’s also a match that has a really really great sense of pacing and escalation for the most part, that serves them so well.

This also succeeds as a result of something very simple, and that many other STARDOM matches are not able to do. For the most part, the striking here is great. Not always, there’s some light elbows here and there, but in the bigger moments and in the moments where they need to deliver the real loud and nasty shots, Io and Kairi are killing each other. Even when it’s clearly filling space, there’s something about the loud smack of flesh on flesh as someone clobbers another’s back of neck or face with their arm or leg that makes it a little more okay. Do it with obviously phony shots and it blows the whole thing wide open, but lay in some heavy lumber and it’s a lot easier to buy. More importantly, it’s a lot easier to have a little patience in between the big moments in a match like this if the smaller moments can pack a punch too.

If you want to be technical and specific, it does have to be said that this is not perfect.

There’s some time filled on things that don’t matter, time killing holds that feel a little out of place in the middle sometimes, when both your gut and the early portions of the contest tell you that this is simply going to be a match about huge and spectacular offense and nothing more. The usual issue I have with STARDOM matches involving both Io and Kairi is also present, as they shoehorn in a fight up into the bleachers of Korakuen Hall so that one of them can leap off of the concourse. Not every shot is perfect, and a lot of the times, they get caught waiting around for the next thing, if even only for a moment.

It’s just so ambitious and largely successful that it doesn’t matter.

Sometimes a match simply does so much right, or in this case, gets the big things so wildly correct, that the flaws simply do not mean as much to me. The font shrinks on the ledger, or the font grows on the other side, and what seems like it might even out on paper results in an equation that barely even matters.

This match just rocks too much.

If not quite an Encounter, certainly yet another certified God Damner from STARDOM’s two best ever.

***1/4

Utami Hayashishita vs. Syuri, STARDOM Tokyo Dream Cinderella Special Edition (6/12/2021)

This was for Hayashishita’s World of Stardom Title.

I’ve yet to read a positive review of this that wasn’t just the writer listing every single move that happened or just repeating what the story was, without any reason why the match was great, and I’m pretty sure that’s not a coincidence.

Utami and Syuri had a great match for the sorts of people who judge wrestling based on all the things that happen in a match, and significantly less so for people who care more about how or why things happen or the ways in which things happen. One has to consider the match a success though, if only because it’s hard to imagine that with a 43:00~ match without any real plan besides doing a lot of stuff, that was always the goal. Not an entirely worthless match, but one that dooms itself by committing more than any match yet to the bullshit desperately striving “pick me” nature of STARDOM in 2021 (credit to friend of the blog Alex for that one). One of many recent STARDOM matches aiming for epic, but not ever seeming to understand how to actually get there outside of doing a lot of things and doing a lot of things for a long period of time.

A bad wrestling match, marketed towards people who don’t know how to tell good things and bad things apart.

Meiko Satomura vs. Io Shirai, STARDOM Year End Climax 2015 (12/23/2015)

This was for Satomura’s World of Stardom Title.

Seth Rollins vs. THE FIEND inside Hell in a Cell was one of the worst matches in recent memory, from booking down to execution, just a piece of hot garbage. It was so bad though that I went out of my way to try and make other people watch it. Everyone in the Slack chat that used to belong to Wrestling With Words and now is home to many of your favorite independent wrestling media people. I also did my best to make anyone who follows me on Twitter watch it and even reached out to old friends to tell them about this all-time terrible and hilarious thing I watched. In the Slack chat, I called it The Encounter, but that is borrowing a turn of a phrase from a long time friend of mine from the old message board group turned MSN chat turned Trillian chat turned Other Slack chat.

“The Encounter” was originally applied to Shuji Kondo vs. Kaz Hayashi from All Japan Pro Wrestling in August 2006. It was his way to sell other people on this wildly bombastic, creative, energetic, and captivating display of total lunacy. He was right, I absolutely love that match. It was then later applied to the KENTA vs. Naomichi Marufuji match from Budokan Hall in October 2006, with “The Encounter” turned into an umbrella term.

“An Encounter”.

A term for a specific sort of wrestling, usually in a bigger venue, but sometimes where people just wrestle real big. PWG and ROH matches have earned that distinction, even the famous CHIKARA four way from 2009. Kota Ibushi and Kenny Omega are masters of Encounter style wrestling, although their Peter Pan match in 2012 was too long and wasteful at times to be an Encounter, to further define the term. It’s not wrestling that has to be dumb, so much as it is wrestling that has to feel big, and not all that weighed down by context. Ideally, it’s a match you can show to a more casual fan without having to explain more than “[x] wants the belt” or who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. A lack of waste is a major element, although certainly some is allowed provided the end product feel significantly big time. The most recent time my friend dubbed something an Encounter was the Kenny Omega vs. Bryan Danielson match from AEW Dynamite in September, and he hadn’t dropped it in years before then. My gut says it was the Naito/Omega G1 final in 2017, but I’m not positive enough to really come out and say that. Certainly, their 2016 match was an Encounter.

My point is that is is a specific term of endearment for a specific kind of match.

This is an Encounter.

Genuine maniac shit. A certified banger, a match that fucks, whatever superlative you have of your own that you would like to apply. The Board of Directors has given you the green light. Call this match what you would like because it is a wild piece of main event wrestling.

It’s not an especially complex match, and it probably could stand to lose five minutes, but it just rocks. The pace never really slows, the escalation is perfect, the execution is all nearly perfect. It’s a big time epic that never loses me, just the most watchable thing in the world. There’s also a perfect contrast in styles explored throughout the match, and leads to the majority of the wild shit that goes down. Io wants to fly and Meiko wants to kick her face off, and each woman gets progressively angrier about their failures to properly do what they want. Both women have ample opportunities to do this, in escalating ways throughout the match. Meiko is just mean enough to work as the antagonist and Io is the perfect babyface. No crying or crawling around in agony, just this super confident athletic phenom hurling herself around until it works, and setting up scenarios where she can succeed. She carries herself like a traditional Ace figure that I would like a lot, but has a little bit of that Ibushi nonsense to her as well. Io’s got plans and back up plans and big set ups, but she’s also kind of just a shooter and spends this match going like 17/27 for an honest 50.

Meiko keeps kicking her ass every time she tries something that can actually end it, but Io breaks out the finishers of her two generation rivals that Meiko’s stampeded through and carved up as champion. First it’s Mayu Iwatani’s Dragon Suplex, and then the Kairi Hojo style elbow drop off the top. From there, Meiko’s finally knocked down long enough for Io to hit her gorgeous Moonsault and get the win.

The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.

Not the perfect match, but something more memorable, and that’s a certified grade A absolute God Damner. An Encounter of the Decade contender, if not a MOTD contender.

***1/2

Kairi Hojo vs. Meiko Satomura, STARDOM Stardom X Stardom (7/26/2015)

This was for Hojo’s World of STARDOM Title, a rematch from the previous month’s time limit draw.

By far, this is the more celebrated and well spoken of the two matches.

It’s sort of a surprise to me, given that it’s a far far less interesting and less charming sort of a match.

The previous match between the two had flaws with Kairi’s inconsistent selling and going too long, but it was interesting in a way this isn’t. It was about the transition of Meiko getting less and less respectful, and about this promising young wrestler being in over their heads and just barely succeeding in the fight simply not to lose. It was a more fascinating approach than simply riffing it out and having a match just about trading offense as many Meiko matches can become. It stood out in a way that a lot of these matches don’t, warts and all.

As opposed to that, this is much more of a classical Great Match.

They begin at the level that their last match ended it. Everyone is fired up and mad, and there’s no feeling out or transition to it. It’s a more traditional kind of Meiko match at this point, which is great, but much more of a standard bombfest, which has a lower ceiling than something like the June meeting. The major strength of this meeting is that it’s seven or eight minutes shorter and there is less excess, but that’s matched by also having lower peaks. Kairi and Meiko run into the same problem repeat matches in a style like this tend to have as well, which is the natural diminishing of returns with things like Kairi’s comebacks and Meiko’s violence. Thrilling? Yes, absolutely. As thrilling as the first time? No, I’ve seen it before. The same flaw with some not great limb selling to follow up on repeated points of focus also still exists in this, only now with a less captivating story around those flaws.

In general, this is a steadier match than the last meeting, in a way that doesn’t do this one as many favors as that would usually suggest. The lows weren’t all that low, but the highs were also nowhere near as high.

That isn’t to say this doesn’t whip ass. It really really does. Meiko is beyond most comparisons in terms of being a professional sort of bully, and Kairi is a generational talent as a pure babyface. Something about this match is always going to work, and this largely succeeds for those reasons. So long as they don’t make any match altering mistakes or bad decisions, it’s going to be a match about Meiko kicking the shit out of an exceptional babyface, and Kairi fighting to survive and then trying to pull out a win over a classical tormentor. Kairi has also made improvements to her hitting in the six weeks since their last meeting, relying less on her inconsistent elbows and focusing on the spectacular double chops. There’s a fair argument now that there’s a story to this one being like this, as now having the measure of Kairi, Meiko attacked more aggressively and it paid off. I’m not going to say that’s true or not true, because it doesn’t especially matter. If that was the point after all, it’s still not as compelling or well executed of a story.

The ending however is undeniably an extension of that of their last meeting, and pretty great in its own right. Kairi doesn’t struggle quite as much this time or try and fail as dramatically, but Meiko again overwhelms her with the kicks and bombs. She manages the second Death Valley Driver that she got off right before the bell this time and just in case, adds in a second to do it. Finally, Meiko Satomura ends one of these excursions by taking home the big title.

It’s the more practiced and refined version of this match, but when it comes to this pairing, I prefer the dirt, the grime, and the more pronounced struggle of the more imperfect first meeting.

***

Kairi Hojo vs. Meiko Satomura, STARDOM Galaxy Stars 2015 Day One (6/14/2015)

This was for Hojo’s World of STARDOM Title.

Once again, Meiko comes into STARDOM and when challenging for the title, produces one of the better matches in company history.

It’s the classic story, a veteran outsider coming in against a determined and energetic young babyface. It’s not Tenryu vs. Hase exactly, but it’s not NOT Tenryu vs. Hase either. Kairi Hojo is among the best babyfaces of her generation, and for what she lacks relative to those opposite Meiko in this spot in experience and smoothness, she more than makes up for in the things that make a great babyface. Emotion and macro level selling and fire and pluck. She’s so plucky. Kairi Hojo puts on a real spunky performance, and Meiko absolutely hates it.

The match shines the brightest in the moments when this contrast is clearer. When Meiko goes from all business in the start of the match handshake to exponentially a little meaner and pettier with every minute, the match gets better and better. There’s a moment in the middle of the thing where she snaps and drags Kairi out for the Death Valley Driver on the Korakuen Hall stage. Late in the match, when she tries to zero in on the arm and Kairi just won’t die, she goes positively insane, and it’s a delight. Every kick is nasty, every major piece of offense has a hateful little snap to it, and it’s yet another totally perfect performance from Meiko Satomura as the invader.

However, there are other elements to the match than just Meiko Satomura’s performance. They’re the sorts of problems that don’t quite ruin a match this great, but that bring the ceiling down on exactly how great it can be. Small problems, but problems all the same,

The first is that Kairi Sane is still a little raw. Of the two problems with the match, this is the more insignificant of the two. Kairi Sane excels at the big picture stuff, but suffers some mechanically. Her elbows are wildly hit and miss, but this is largely fixed by Meiko Satomura being great enough to only sell the great ones that land right and sound nasty. Similarly, while Hojo’s macro level selling is incredible, specifically the way she sells exhaustion and overall damage late in the match, she has trouble with the more minute details of it. Meiko spends a big chunk of the match going to her arm and it’s not until the last minute or so of the match that Kairi really ever registers it. It’s impossible for me to watch her performance in this match and say that her selling was bad, but it’s the only mechanical weakness that exists. As such, it has a way of standing out.

Of course, the real issue isn’t mechanical so much as it is that it’s a half hour draw, and they’re not quite ready to take this half an hour yet. That’s not all on Kairi Hojo either, despite being far less experienced, especially in matches of this length. Meiko’s another perfect example of a twenty minute wrestler, put into a kind of match that doesn’t quite make the most of every skill that she has. The match loses something stretching beyond that twenty minute ideal, in spite of the TREMENDOUS finishing minute or two where Meiko has the young champion totally scouted and beaten, only for one of the more literal “saved by the bell” endings in recent memory. They wind up both having obvious filler and then later repeating themselves with the armbars and the counters to them, and despite it all still being good, it’s stretching out a near perfect twenty minutes into a far more flawed half an hour.

As a result of these issues, the match goes from a near all-timer to just simply a really really really great match.

Still, a breakthrough for a generationally great babyface, and yet another stellar outing from one of the best invaders in recent wrestling history makes this one well worth noting and worth seeing. This isn’t as famous as the match that it leads to, but it’s still overwhelmingly great and you should put your eyes on as soon as you can. If not for the first time, then again, because it’s worth it.

***1/4

Io Shirai vs. Kairi Hojo, STARDOM THE HIGHEST 2015 (3/29/2015)

This was a tournament final for the vacant World of Stardom title.

It’s definitely a flawed match.

They have less than twenty minutes, but Kairi not yet being a fully finished product, they feel like they can’t just go totally nuts despite the main event slot. They instead opt for a double body part match, which is often one of my least favorite things to see joshi wrestlers do, because it rarely ends well.

It doesn’t end horribly here, but it’s clearly something that detracts from the match in a lot of ways. The work Io does on Hojo’s arm is great and occasionally really mean and shows flashes of how good she’ll be at a meaner kind of work a year or two after this. The selling from Hojo wavers in between really good and a clear sign of the all-world sympathetic babyface that she’ll become very soon, but then also often times non-existent at key moments in the match, like a lot of the late match offense she does. Naturally, they chose the right arm of Kairi Hojo to focus on, so as to make it as difficult as possible to do this without any issues. They’re so gifted athletically, but sometimes this match feels like it has two left feet.

The other side of it is that the action itself is all tremendous. Io is a generationally great athlete and has this perfect snap and smoothness on virtually everything that she does. Hojo isn’t quite as gifted, but the elbow drop that she wins the title with is up to her usual standard and she already stands out in perfect contrast to Io as Stardom’s all time best babyface.

Imperfect as hell, but there’s so much spirit promise to this thing. It’s no wonder they eventually got it as right as they did over the next two years.