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Highlights of Hiromu Takahashi vs El Desperado NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 18

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the typical wrestling dashboard

user 1: *picture of joshi wrestler drenched in blood* i need her expeditiously.

user 2: ffs i need that bag of bones to drop dead NOW [could be talking about any number of wrestling entities]

user 3: *zowens gifset* #biting and screaming and chomping and throwing up and

user 4: welcome back everyone, this week i'm going to be analyzing the character of swerve strickland through the lens of commedia del'arte. so the natural conclusion and the first one i draw when applying this lens is that sw

user 5: do you think danielson is a fujoshi

user 6: i hope we all blow up and die #sd lb

user 7: gay sex! #stardom lb

user 8: *picture of eddie kingston drenched in blood* i need him expeditiously.

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TNA | 01.18.24

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Peter Paul Rubens, Cain slaying Abel, ca. 1608-1609 (X)

AEW Revolution - March 5, 2023 (X)

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So today I learned that despite wanting to become a wrestler, El Desperado took French in college, because at the time he was playing the tactical RPG / dating sim Dreamcast game Sakura Taisen 3, which is set in Paris. This is very funny to me because Zack Sabre Junior also took French in school. Which means that after Zack joined Suzuki Gun, the only overlapping language that he and Despy would've had was... French.

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A while back, I got pretty frustrated trying to figure out what people meant when they used the phrase "strong style." I’d seen people throwing it around frequently in English language wrestling discussion, but I’d never been able to get a real, clear definition for it from anyone, especially not one with actual citations or sources.

I decided to try reading about it on my own. And I immediately learned that people use the phrase "strong style" very differently in English than it’s used in Japanese. 

Strong Style has it’s own Japanese-language wikipedia page. Here are the first couple paragraphs, translated by me:

"Strong Style" is a concept / -ism of professional wrestling. It’s a style in which one expresses one’s "emotions (rage)" in one’s wrestling. [The source for this sentence is given as a now-private Youtube interview with Shinsuke Nakamura.] It was conceptualized by Antonio Inoki, and passed down primarily within New Japan Pro Wrestling.

In Antonio Inoki’s "Autobiography of Antonio Inoki" he said that "Strong Style" is the fusion of the Karl Gotch style of offensive and defensive wrestling techniques and the Riki Douzan style that displayed the fearsomeness of pro-wrestling."

The article goes on to say that in addition to the raw emotion and the stylistic amalgam of Riki Douzan and Karl Gotch, Strong Style is also associated with a specific style of wrestling gear - short black trunks, black wrestling boots, and bare elbows and knees.

When I’d heard people use the term "Strong Style" in English, it had felt like it had a completely different, completely unrelated meaning: "something hard-hitting, MMA adjacent, pro-wrestling that’s similar to a real fight." "Strong" taken literally and simply, as physical strength behind physical blows. But the term as conceptualized by Antonio Inoki had a completely different meaning. The "strong" here was at least as much emotional as it was physical, and the inspiration wasn't so much MMA as it was wrestling.

It’s not unusual for this kind of disconnect to occur between Japanese pro wrestling and the English-language fans, but I was still surprised to learn that the meaning of a term this widely used, and this foundational to Japanese wrestling, had been so profoundly lost in translation.

The Japanese-language wikipedia page also addresses this alternate English-language definition of the term. Towards the end, they include a quote from Shinsuke Nakamura, where he says that unlike in Japan, in America people think of Strong Style as "shoot style" with elements of boxing and amateur wrestling. It also includes a section towards the bottom of the page for "Shoot Style" pro wrestling, which it defines as completely separate from Strong Style, with a European origin and unrelated history.

In any case, reading this gave me a real sense of clarity when trying to understand how the phrase is used within New Japan Pro Wrestling.

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Based

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El Desperado in One Two Three MV by ASH DA HERO

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Tsuji’s farewell match with Naito - Naito the secret softie

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Welcome back, Yota Tsuji.

Future IWGP World Heavyweight Champion? That's incredibly likely.

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They're almost all back <3