On comics and wrestling in 2025

 It's odd how at least for my fandoms 2025 feels like a dark mirror of 2016-17 or maybe oddly darker given how dark the first administration already was. First administration... I'll stop before this becomes ranting about the triplet sins of wealth racism and ableism. This is my first month trying to test if the wrestling fandom in me was like dead yeast or not by picking out two shows and seeing how i reacted to them. the shows being Ase's televised product on YouTube and deadlock pro. Verdict yup it's alive and burning hot. It's interesting that there was or maybe still is an instinctive cringe at comparisons between comics and wrestling from the wrestling side of things. There's still a lingering trauma response to the cartoony elements of 80s wwf presentation but that's enough of that. 

It strikes me that both times I've successfully dived back into wrestling have been when the world has been going to shit. Now that I think about it the same holds true for comics really which has me considering the overlap between the two as mediums. One of the varying points of friction with marvel in particular is the phrase the world outside our window and the ways that means different things depending on who you mention it to. I can't help but question whether there's a shitty punitive side of me that comes out when seeing the villains get their ass handed to them. And to get to the wrestling of it all i think part of what makes me more comfortable with the violence in cape comics at their best is the high mindedness of it all relatively speaking in terms of for me when marvel for instance works at its best it's speaking on behalf of the little guy pretty consistently even if the character inertia means that there will be a centering of whiteness i always chafe against. Whereas I think of the violence of wrestling as being more purely visceral and at least historically has leaned into sexism and bigotry as opposed to the other way. Now i'd like to think things like Ase mentioning colonialism in the intro of their first episode is a harbinger of a change in the industry at large like i think of the better dynamics in terms of presentation of workers of color on the southern indies in the tens as a step in the right direction.

Now the thing that sticks out in my mind about deadlock pro in carolina is simple. I couldn't shake the thought through the three shows i watched up to their most recent one this is at the most ambitious what CWF Mid-Atlantic could've been or close to it. I never really talked about CWF folding and as for why they are coming up in a section about DPW the answer is one name Trevor Lee. Trevor at least in the circles I frequented late last decade was acclaimed for having in my opinion maybe the best babyface title run of the 21st century. In the intervening time between him going to the fed and his return to the indies CWF Mid-Atlantic had unfortunately closed. So the fantasy aspect of seeing him return home is obviously squelched but it's interesting to think that i had never really talked about the end of CWF before. I've had to wonder over the past year if i actually had any active enthusiasm left for pro wrestling in the 20s or if it was just a last ember that refused to die cause i kept finding myself feeling burnt out just via how much there was but i'm glad to have found a base again in Deadlock pro and i'll probably do these overviews on a monthly basis or thereabouts. up next on here 80s joshi. on my bluesky probably a skeet on the early writing of persona 4 having bounced off that the first time round.