On the foreign heel in 2025 re cmll

 Interpromotional feud week at cmll. Fun stuff but personally for me a bit of a meh week for cmll solo advancement. Though I will admit if I were actively invested in mlw the synergy would be peak. The thing that actively caught my mind was my reaction to Yutani and Okumura on the Saturday show.

The fact that they are used as heels and given the history of Japanese workers in the states being used as nebulous heel figures with varying degrees of racialized aesthetics and i found myself thinking this should bug me and yet it doesn't.... why? it makes me realize i've never fully written down the things about the oriental heel archetype in wrestling bugs me. the part of it as a young person the racialization plus the rarity of face presences kind of tied into the creeping realization of the otherness of the east asian american experience specifically the lack of us our lives and experiences on screen and on page in the 2000s. it lead to a strange mixture of excitement at seeing someone that broadly looks like you on screen in a medium you love mixed with this building anger at another example a version of us filtered for the purposes of a presumed white audience. what's different with cmll then? the answer for me at least is there is very little about the heel act in question that uses the racialized shorthand of things like basic fake martial arts and mist. Aside from Okumura's outfit having a Japanese flag on the back of his top it's the absence of the evocation of 80s or post war villanization in the us stuff plus the lack of mystical elements. It's a weird feeling questioning is this better like actively better or is my focus just elsewhere like my conflicted feelings on stuff like Jackie Chan Adventures and American Dragon Jake Long. idk but i'm relieved that i've made my piece which the presence of more asian american wrestlers on the american indie scene certainly helps in that regard.

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