Shine Today, Believe Tomorrow

As someone who still longs for a return to the halcyon days of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People I was really excited to see that Telltale is essentially still going under a new name. I've fucking loved Dispatch so far. It feels like a completely natural evolution of where the Telltale games were at before they shut down that adresses a lot of the issues those games had... And adding or keeping some of their own.

I think whether or not you wish they were still making Adventure Games comes down to preference, but personally I think there are plenty of really cool, traditional style adventure games still around. I find the more important thing to be that Dispatch is good, even if it is a lot more like playing a TV show, with the last trappings of adventure games really dropped at this point.

The last of the Telltale games had an issue with their choices "not mattering", which becomes pretty major when the whole point of the game is ostensibly affecting the narrative with your choices. The topic of what choices "mattering" in a game even fucking means is a much bigger one than I'm interested in getting into here. Does just changing the cosmetics of how a thing happens count as affecting the story if the same things ultimately happen? I remember actually appreciating that I could just pick whatever I wanted without anxiety in those games, not worried I would end up on "bad route" I didn't want or anything like that. If bad shit happened, it's because it was going to happen regardless. But it was unwieldy in those games, it reached the point where it affected investment. It wasn't room to enjoy the story with small details changed, everything just felt meaningless, I stopped investing at all.

I haven't found Dispatch to have that same issue, despite it walking a similarly fine line as to how exactly to make decisions matter. My issue is more that I don't love which decisions matter, or how they're made to matter.

The Dispatch shifts themselves, which are a major bulk of the game, feel impactful & important, even though as far as I can tell they're actually not. You can play Robert as a completely disinterested piece of shit dispatcher who sucks and the story will still advance and play out the same, I don't think you can even get a game over for fucking up a shift badly enough. But like... Doing that would feel terrible. The characters are great and I want to help them succeed. I think that's fine! Personally I think that's motivation enough. Making the characters good and wanting to see them do well is mechanical motivation, getting a +2 sword at the end shouldn't be the only reason to do things in a game, that's stupid as hell.

The major story decisions so far mostly relate to which characters' stories you see, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about it! On the one hand, that IS stakes, for sure. Choosing to romance Invisigal or Blazer genuinely picks who you'll see more of. Choosing to add Phenomaman or Waterboy decides who you see at all, as well as whether to cut Sonar or Coupe. That said, I don't think I like implementing it like that! I don't really like that those are the stakes, or doing it like that.

Like - I find all the characters genuinely interesting, so I want to see their scenes & their stories! And it doesn't make sense to me the way they're exclusive to each other. Like, the story provides no explanation for why if you pick to add Waterboy to the team, you can't pick Phenomaman as well. Especially when you have heroes skipping shifts and stuff! The shifts are really well balanced in that losing one hero does make the difference between feeling like a competent god vs feeling like you're just barely scraping through and can't keep up with everything happening, but there's no justification provided for why you couldn't just go "hey, we need another person, actually." Like at least a line about SDN not budgetting for another hero or something wouldn't really be satisfying but it would be something!

Why, when I cut Sonar, did Sonar & virtually any reference to him just completely disappear? Why, when I went to the movies with Invisigal instead of the date with Blazer, did Blazer virtually disappear from scenes, the chemistry just completely gone? Like I get it's unlikely to expect games to provide the polyamory routes that they fucking should, that it's a quick game for people who are unenlightened to label a game as for perverts as if that's a negative, especially given the rampant chemistry between Blazer & Invisigal as well, but WHATEVER. It still doesn't make sense just how stark the dropoff in interaction is. You should be able to date Invisigal AND Blazer. You should be able to add both Waterboy & Phenomaman to your team. You should be able to justify not cutting either Sonar or Coupe.

Hanan vs Waka Tsukiyama

The Hanan to Club Venus saga continues. I mean not really since Mariah was about to leave and it’s more just a fun interaction than a real story per se but it’s still fun seeing them interact. Anyway I thought this was a perfectly solid singles opener. Maybe a little slow but I think that’s understandable given Hanan was in the 5 Star and this is right in the peak of when people were dropping like flies. It’s interesting in hindsight given where Hanan’s at now and the two of them feuding over the New Blood Tag belts but nothing crazy, totally fine for what it is. - 3

Koguma vs Saki Kashima vs Yuna Mizumori

Wow…. Saki before the days of “No running, no bumps, no high speed”... I had fun with this but it’s also a very standard house show sort of high speed three way. It was fine and the finish was fun but there was really nothing to it and all 3 of them can for sure do more. In my insane dedication to watching my backlog shows it’s such a bummer seeing perfectly fine matches like this that just have no story running through them at all. - 2.5

Suzu Suzuki & Mei Seira vs Megan Bayne & Hanako

Mei really really brings out the best in Megan and Hanako is so good, especially for how long she’d been around at this point. I don’t like Megan no-selling and warping a whole match around her at the best of times, but she actually gave Suzu & Mei a little, and even got to lose bc she was with a rookie! She’s also at her best just literally tossing someone like Mei around, even better given how much fun Mei obviously has doing it. She took some gnarly bumps here too that were really not necessary for what the match was or this house show but I hope she had fun. - 3

Red Stars: Syuri vs Starlight Kid

I thought about skipping this match bc I didn’t really want to watch Kid bust her ankle, but she came in with it already taped up and was pretty clearly trying to work around it already. Given she was working against that I thought this was really solid and I remain pretty consistently impressed the 5 Star is as good as it was given the backstage stuff at the time. I liked Kid trying to work Syuri’s leg vs Syuri being. Syuri. And you could kind of see Daichi and Syuri using the fake checking on Syuri’s knee at the end to actually check on Kid’s ankle, which I thought was sweet. I’m sure in a better situation Kid and Syuri could do way more than this but I still liked it. Oh, and the booking of this show itself - like, the order of the card was fucked. Why on earth was this not the main. On a 5 Star show where it’s the only 5 Star match???? - 3

Mina Shirakawa & Mariah May vs Natsuko Tora & Ruaka

Every Rose Gold match is a precious treasure to be cherished, and this was the last one…. Truly tragic, not doing anything crazy but an enjoyable sendoff for a tag team I would not have expected to like as much as I did or see kiss as much as I have. I hope everyone else is taking notes. - 3

Giulia & Maika vs Hazuki & Saya Iida

Alright so just right off the bat I'll say that this show was pretty packed (~1300 people) and the crowd was very hot and that... did nothing for me. Moments that make me feel very alienated from what is apparently the average wrestling fan, let me tell you. People make such a big deal out of loud active crowds and idk I mostly just found this one annoying. There's something about them being so audibly almost exclusively men that is really not fun. Rossy spent 10 years being so bad at appealing to women that I think it's fair to say it just wasn't a concern of his at any point, and Harada was absolutely gunning for a product in that same vein and it SUCKS. Oh my god it sucks. idk why it bothered me so much on this show, it's not like it's anything new, but it was really getting to me. I'm looking forward to getting to the show from, I think late November, when Kid specifically commented on how many women were there and seeing if it feels any different. Shout out to the one very loud woman who was a huge Komomo stan though, mood.

This show was originally billed as the Generational Struggle Part 3, the culmination of the Generational Struggle stuff from earlier in the Summer, a storyline that nobody ever understood and none of the wrestlers had any interest in, ultimately just completely dropped by the time this show actually happened, really emblematic of Harada's era of booking. I think this show stands out in a similar way, a peak of popularity and hype during a period where the quality was already starting to steeply decline, but before people had really noticed in numbers and before things had really cratered, with the wrestlers still mostly able to cover up the increasingly obvious holes. As such I think it's worth talking about as a shining example of this incredibly weird and bad period for Stardom.

Lady C & Hina vs Miyu Amasaki & Hanako - I like the sort of QQ vs QQ feeling to this match, but iirc it was one of those matches that were frequent at the time that had to be changed at the last minute bc someone was hurt or sick. So idk it was a fine opener though, no strong feelings but like it's the first match it's fine.

Mariah May & Waka Tsukiyama vs Mei Seira & Megan Bayne - Okay I hate to say it but Megan is kind of growing on me. I still think the way they brought her in was all wrong, and trying to push her for singles matches again later was still a mistake, but I do think she found a pretty entertaining niche in these less important tag matches. A lot of it is everyone else figuring out how to play off of her, and I don't really think it's a *good* thing when one wrestler warps an entire match around her every single time like she does, but in a match that's not all that important so there's less to detract from, yeah it's actually pretty fun. I just like seeing Mei Seira get thrown you know? Or when Mariah tries to knock her off the apron and she just doesn't move. It's annoying as hell when it gets her title shots, but in contexts like this, it's a pretty good bit.

Natsupoi & Yuna Mizumori vs Syuri & Saki Kashima - I'll talk more about it later but this whole undercard felt really disposable to me, which is always disappointing, especially given how much character Stardom packed into even their smaller matches before this period. Yunamon was in the middle of her joining CA story (still, somehow) and Poi and Syuri are always entertaining together, and they still are here with some fun spots and stuff, but I just didn't care. Like I said though, broader issues going on during this period so we do know why it was like that and I'll get to it later.

Mayu Iwatani, Koguma, & Momo Kohgo vs Natsuko Tora, Fukigen Death, & Rina - Again, perfectly servicable undercard match that doesn't really have anything fun or interesting going on under the hood, but we know why now so I'm not trying to like, criticize, just saying yeah wow it was bad huh. This was Komomo's second last match before she got injured iirc which is incredibly depressing, I don't think she even tagged in once during this match so she was probably already hurt and I hate it.

Mirai vs Saori Anou - God, okay, this match was kind of the one that made me think about typing up my thoughts about this show. I did not like this match anywhere near as much as I expected to. It just was not clicking for me, like, at all. This felt like a very clear "first time singles match", especially between two wrestlers who I guess don't really know each other outside of wrestling and haven't trained together or anything. There's a reason first time singles matches are rarely actually all that good and I really felt that awkwardness and lack of chemistry here. Mirai and Anou are both good so it was like, fine, but I was really taken out of it and unimpressed after I had assumed this would be really good. I do like Anou winning the white belt, and I do think Mirai's run needed to end bc it was not... working, but man I would not have devoted like Mirai's entire Fall to this feud after watching this match. Shining example of why you should put wrestlers together with people they want to work with and not just whichever names you think sound good against each other.

Hazuki vs Starlight Kid - This match on the other hand totally lived up to expectations. Hazuki and Kid obviously know each other super well and are both freaks, it was great. Brawling through the crowd always gives me kind of, idk, a sort of secondhand embarassment feeling? It just feels wrong my brain doesn't like it but I still appreciated what they were doing with it, with Kid angry and desperate and trying to prove herself more intense and bad than Hazuki. Hazuki always looks amazing getting tortured in submissions, and Kid's whole gameplan being trying to build to the Black Tiger Leg Killer makes sense. I couldn't actually remember who won this so I was even biting on the near falls at the end and liked Hazuki's quick, desperate win. They're both so great and I liked this a lot.

Tam Nakano vs Suzu Suzuki - This was like, the exact opposite of Mirai vs Anou to me. It still had a little bit of that first singles match awkwardness I think, but the amount you would expect given that's what it was, and they both brought enough to compensate for that. Tam really does have the same chemistry with "mini Giulia" as she does with the big sis herself and this match was really great for it. Again exactly opposite to Anou vs Mirai, this match totally would have left me excited for a title match program between these two - which ofc unfortunately never actually happened. I think the booking was incredibly stupid though, because of course it was, but why give Suzu the win over the champ to build to her winning the tournament and... earning a title match she already earned with this match? I guess there is the possibility that as people seem to believe Utami was meant to win and Suzu was an audible when Utami got hurt, which would make some sense booking wise. I still think Utami winning would have been extremely nonsensical from a story standpoint, but all the rest of Harada's booking was disjointed and very obviously ignored story too, so it would be consistent in that way at least. But anyway, I really enjoyed this match.

Giulia vs Maika - Wow, man, I liked this match so so much more than I was expecting to. Idk why it quite feels like this because I haven't skipped any of these shows, but if 2023 was the Maika starmaking year, this was the match where her popularity really felt like it exploded basically overnight. Like she was already liked, but this match out of nowhere was where it was suddenly like, oh my god Maika is SUPER popular, god damn. I think all of Giulia's singles matches have some holes, like, I wouldn't exactly say she is "good" at "selling" even at the best of times, but Maika is really good at compensating for her weaknesses, and most importantly the match really really excels at her strengths, namely intensity and homoeroticism. Given the things I've heard or seen I think this might be the last Giulia singles match I really enjoy, uh, either in her time in Stardom or possibly ever, but still if it does turn out that way for me, what a note to go out on. Really really fantastic, I thought this match was great, even if the story stuff and the booking around it was extremely inconsistent and stop and go with a whole Giulia vs Maika storyline they teased repeatedly and clearly wanted to do and never actually got to. At least they got to do this one.

Which I guess brings me to how weird this period of Stardom was. There have definitely been times I've wondered myself why I'm so dedicated to not skipping anything even when I don't exactly think it's fantastic, but I don't know, I still want to see what it was like, you know? I want to see what the wrestlers cared about even when there was no guarantee at all the booker would pay attention to any of it. There are definitely still good moments, even if there are a lot of bad and a lot of it is disjointed and weird around it. I just want to see it for myself.

I did improv in high school, and I remember after regionals one year we tried to do our regular weekly practice the next week, and it was terrible. Everyone was just creatively tapped and needed to recharge too badly, but we didn't realize that at first, and there was just this feeling of like, "we're doing the same things we always do, why isn't this working?" A lot of stuff from this period gives me the impression that that's how the wrestlers were feeling during this time.

I guess the shortest way to put it is I'm not really upset about it? Maybe it's naive or "cope" or whatever but I'm even kind of cautiously optimistic? Mostly I'm just glad this isn't some huge WWE Japan coup or whatever. Between the year I had last year independent of pro wrestling and watching Stardom go to shit in real time, I kind of already decoupled my personal identity from being A Stardom Fan, something that probably sounds ridiculous given my entire online identity but I promise I was somehow even more personally invested in a much worse way this time last year.

Obviously the big thing to be seen now is how exactly the rosters shake out, who's going where. Of course it's distressing when on screen relationships just suddenly come to an end but I kind of already went through this when Unagi left. As far as a wrestler leaving a company barring like retirement or tragedy that was basically as bad as it could get for me, so like, that's just not an element of it I'm particularly worried about. For every relationship we stop seeing, at least the way we have been, we'll get to see some new ones too, right? I guess personally I'm more interested in what's coming next than dreading anything that might be coming to an end.

I think it's also worth noting that nobody is making permanent decisions right now. Everyone is just as capable of going freelance or changing their mind and going to a different company as they were before. I also assume both companies will have to be at least somewhat open to bringing in freelancers and sharing talent so like. Maybe some people will end up working both! We just don't know at all.

As for whatever Rossy's new company is, barring some announcement I completely hate, obviously if it's watchable on the internet I'm going to at least check it out. I'm not a fan of Rossy's but I'm also just like, so unbelievably sick of Rossy discourse online. He's not the god booker that so many men went to paint him as or whatever with his unforeseen insight into The Business and definitely not mostly just luck allowing him the success he's had. But he does let the wrestlers tell their own stories how they want to, and while I wish that was considered the absolute bare minimum it's instead all too rare, and I'm glad it seems like so many people who have worked with him do enjoy working with and want to continue doing so, something else that's all too rare in wrestling.

I also think it's somewhere between ridiculous and offensive to paint him as some freak pervert booking with his dick based on who he, personally, wants to fuck. Look not to get too into my personal readings of a guy I do not know but I have never seen a man who works as close with women and is as clearly personally disinterested in them as Rossy in my life. As an actual freak pervert who has seen a lot of product that he has produced, I'm fucking telling you and I've been saying it for years that that is not my guy. Especially if your reasoning for hating on him is that you think the wrestler's stories and presentations or anything are too horny when, like I mentioned, we know that comes from them. You don't have to like that but you do have to deal with it. However I do also think it's worth actually considering that when even the women who are most attached to Stardom as fans are pretty universally like "this guy doesn't actually know how to expand his audience, he is never gonna get women or bring things back to how they were" that's probably worth paying attention to.

It's just all so fucking tired and disingenuous and I've been exhausted with it for like 6 years. He's not the saviour messiah of joshi wrestling or the pervert demon who killed it. He's just a fucking photographer turned businessman and I think it's much more likely he got where he did thanks to flexibility and luck more than anything, and it's not like he hasn't had plenty of failure and piss poor management before Bushiroad was ever a factor too. I know I'm already off twitter so this doesn't even matter any more but stop putting everything on Rossy, please, he does not deserve the credit that should go to these wrestlers just for the matches he books. He's just some guy. (Hit him with your car.)

Anyway the big minus for me is that if Rossy's new promotion does have a service that makes it convenient and easy to watch it'll almost definitely be complete shit run by Sonny again since he's not Bushiroad staff he's a freelancer and I want nothing more than to be free of that hack. I so badly wish what we were getting were a promotion of this style that I like that was actually run by women but I guess this isn't the worst case scenario either.

So, wow. I spent a lot of last year joking "Stardom fire your entire office 2k24", really was not expecting them to actually take me up on it! Bushiroad fire Kidani as well 2k24??? idk if they even can I think he might control too much of the company but I may as well keep swinging while I can

So yeah, apparently immediately after the Osaka PPV last Sunday, February 4th, Bushiroad fired Rossy. On a practical level this isn't really a big change - as I've said before, Rossy was off of booking and apparently not even being listened to since last April at least already, this isn't a huge shake up of Stardom management. What IS a huge shakeup is why.

Bushiroad said they fired Rossy because he was poaching wrestlers & staff from Stardom. Rossy denies this, but has confirmed he is starting a new promotion. Which, first and foremost from me, I'm glad we can immediately put the WWE rumours to bed. Rossy says he told Bushiroad in November that he would not re-sign his contract with them in March since he wasn't being listened to anyway and told the staff and some wrestlers this and that he was thinking of starting a new promotion. Bushiroad claims he was deliberately poaching from them. Honestly, given the state of Bushiroad management, I could absolutely see them just being completely caught off guard by how many of the roster want to leave and freaking out, but we'll probably never know the truth of the matter.

It is confirmed that some of the Stardom roster are not re-signing with Stardom and are planning to join Rossy's new promotion. Bushiroad came out and openly said that, including some top names and even current title holders. That a number of people will be leaving is for sure happening. We do know for sure Mayu is the only person definitely contracted to Bushiroad later than March, as the movie about her comes out in May, but it seems likely she leaves after that. EDIT to add that a couple days later Tam said openly that she is staying with Stardom as well but I'm not gonna keep updating this every time someone says something new. Anything beyond that about who exactly is leaving or how many is pure speculation. I've seen everything from only one or two people leaving to close to a 50/50 split to only one or two people staying. We'll know in a month or two.

Last year around April, then-Stardom president Harada takes Rossy off of booking and apparently stops listening to his advice. Harada sucked, he didn't get the appeal of pro wrestling, seemingly mostly trying to push it as advertising and going for things like their stupid NFT collab. He also pushes a schedule on the roster that isn't workable or healthy, leading to rampant injuries up and down the card. He stops listening to the roster - Giulia came out and said that Rossy's style of booking is to let the wrestlers start what stories they want to themselves, and then book what he thinks would be good from among that. But under Harada, matches just got booked out of the blue without even talking to the wrestlers about it. A particularly egregious example Giulia pointed out was when Ami challenged her for her title and she told her to earn a title shot. Then days later it's announced on twitter that Ami's title shot is coming up in two weeks. Giulia was vocal on twitter about it at the time, saying "What show are you watching?!" and I remember commenting a lot that it felt like Stardom was suddenly being booked by someone who wasn't even watching the shows. Beyond that even the matches themselves aren't being run by the wrestlers, with Giulia mentioning no one telling them what was in the boxes in the money ball match last year and the hazard that presented.

Now, some of this stuff may have been worked - like, I think probably Ami and Giulia knew they had a title match they were supposed to work up to, and the frustration isn't actually that Ami was given it before she "earned" it, but that they weren't given a chance to actually build the feud they were trying to. I think it's worth remembering during stuff like all this that in Japanese wrestling we get pretty much no pure "shoot" interviews or news like you'd get in America. None, like, for real please learn to understand that you shouldn't trust dirt sheets and that almost no one ever 100% shoots in puro. But that said, the interview Giulia gave about this stuff was pretty much the closest to shoot I had ever seen from a Japanese wrestler, short of, like, maybe when Ibushi came forward about what happened to him in New Japan.

On top of that, apparently from Harada on down, Bushiroad staff were incredibly dismissive of the wrestlers and largely ignored them, seemingly seeing themselves as the company and the actual roster as just, I don't even know, some disposable resource and not the entire reason any of them even had a job. Just very backwards thinking, that the real work is running the shows, but as long as you put a show on people will just come to see anybody. Which, lmao, well that didn't work.

This came out when Stardom had a holiday show that needed to be slightly rescheduled, its start time ended up being, iirc delayed by about two hours or something like that. Maybe not the biggest deal to us, but especially for a company trying to seem like a major player like Stardom, this was an extremely bad look. Roster members are extremely mad and start to come forward about not being told about anything like this even though it affects them and they have to be the public faces of it; Giulia even openly talks about trying to find out what had happened and getting completely brushed off by the staff member who had been in charge of arranging the venues. This incident was one of those things that seemingly got a huge reaction not just because it looked bad for the company but because it was the dam breaking. I'd suspected Stardom was having management issues and ended up being more right than I could have imagined.

Ultimately in November Harada is fired and they bring in a new president, Okada. (Not, not that one. Different Okada.) He's been booking since he came in at the start of December. Ultimately they didn't change the cards for the remaining Harada-booked shows or reschedule any of the shows that had already been announced at that point. This leads to Stardom's lowest show attendance ever, at an Osaka show that draws 114 people, thanks to running at 6pm on a Tuesday at a venue that while technically in Osaka could not realistically be reached in time by anyone trying to get there from Osaka proper after work. Rossy at this point is publicly disparaging Harada's choices and policies, and says the method of "just booking any available venue whenever you want and saying when the show is happening on social media can't continue".

Normally I would post this on Twitter but I don't use twitter any more so now you guys get to deal with me instead! ShuPro dropped their awards for 2023 today so here they are in english. Right off the top, note that these are fan voted awards, so yes they're absolutely biased towards larger companies & popularity. To be clear I am not publishing this to be an unbiased news source I am posting this to be a bitch and tell you everything they got wrong bc I am right all of the time and have incredible taste. The numbers are how many votes they got. Anyway here we go.

They were pretty clear from the start about how the strap represented their relationship. And that carries through, early in the match with Poi forgetting about it or trying to ignore it and do her normal moves and having it cost her, while Anou is completely aware of it all the time. Poi doesn't even start to close the gap until she, herself, also acknowledges the bond between them and tries to use the strap on Saori no okay I'm sorry I thought I could sneak that one in there I really tried. Even if I can barely talk about a strap match with a straight face anyway that's still the story.

And then, you know, the match continues, and it builds to their dueling suplexes. Every once in a while during a wrestling match the crowd just goes a certain kind of completely silent. It's not like when a crowd's dead or bored, it's a crowd that's rapt, every single person hanging on every move. And then when Poi kicks out at 1 the way they just erupt, god it's incredible. It's not coincidental that towards the end they spent such a long stretch hitting each other over and over again with the same move. They're the same, and they know how similar they are and they don't understand why they can't get away from each other or stop hurting each other but they just keep doing it over and over again.

And then eventually Anou gets the advantage and manages to pin Poi again and this time touch all 4 corners. But by the end, she stops pulling her by the strap, she grabs her hand when she drags her to the last corner. They get to the end together.

Anyway then after that Tam kissed Natsupoi on the neck right there in public for god and everyone to see and Anou made this face while she watched them and trust me my feelings about it are Extremely Normal

Ooh this is a good question! I did talk about this very briefly when I was on episode 40 of Kick Out 2.99 which you can listen to here, I don't actually recommend an entire 2 hour podcast for like my 30 second answer when this question came up but I have to plug it if I can lol.

I'm honestly not sure I have a strong pick this year? I said in the podcast I knew people were saying Utami, and my answer at the time was, I guess that's conceivable? I'm still not saying I think it's like, impossible, but I've since seen people's actual arguments for why they think Utami is the obvious winner and now I mostly just think people on twitter can't follow a story.

I'm trying not to predict anything too strongly bc I'm already too emotionally invested in Tam's title run, and also bc I have a tendency to fantasy book my whole preferred story, and then even if what happens is really good I'm just bummed it's not what I wanted.

So I guess my firmest pick for a win right now is maybe Mayu? The 5 Star is less of a focus this year then it has been historically; they're not stopping their regular big shows while it's going on and lots of people, even people with belts, aren't in the tournament at all. I went into it feeling like this year the winner isn't going to be the person who beats Tam for the title, and the low-keyness of the 5 Star has kind of furthered that feeling for me. Which is fine, I don't mind a more relaxed tournament watching experience at all, but it doesn't really feel, like, the 5 Star is THE thing happening during the Summer, it's just one of the things happening during the Summer.

But anyway I'm kind of feeling Mayu bc being the first person to win the tournament for a second time would still be a big accolade for her, and the match with Tam would be a big one, but then Tam could beat her and that would be a big step for their story that wouldn't involve a belt change. Also could see Suzu doing well, maybe making it to the finals if not Mayu just bc I feel like they'll want to push her at least a little since they finally signed her. Also maybe Anou, in story she seems to want to challenge Tam but can't quite say it, and irl she's a huge get for them, but she isn't quite signed yet so idk they'd want to give her quite that much. Anou vs Suzu would also be a very emotional finals matchup given their history. Basically I have a lot of people I'm like, "sure, I could see it" for, with no one I want to write off completely and also no one who feels like a clear frontrunner.

As far as stories to watch out for, for individual matchups I think the big ones are pretty easy to spot this year. On house shows they've got them pretty spaced out acting as the main events, so that the main is usually at least a medium-big match and the rest are the matches just happening bc it's a round-robin tournament. I think there are two Korakuen Hall shows scheduled with tournament matches that are set to be more top to bottom big matches, and of course on the night of the final block matches it's all big matches that will either be important for the characters, the standings, or both. I won't get into every individual big match bc this is going to be long enough as it is.

As for individual stories, you can read my translation of the 5 Star press conference here, and I am who I am so here is my read on everyone's story based on the 5 Star press conference and their first few matches:

“It’s really important to respect the labour of translators, who are often erased in publishing and academia,” Wang said. “Publishers neglect to put the name of translators on covers, book reviewers forget to name translators, and now, this happens.

She added: “Translation is an art, and it takes me just as long to translate a poem as it takes for me to write an original one in English. I have to work hard to research the poet, the times they’re living in, and the literary forms they’re working in, then find creative ways to convey the spirit of their work in English. Classic Chinese poetry has many cultural idioms, archaic diction, and completely different grammar and syntactical structures to English.”

[...]

“If you don’t know that a book has been translated by a human being, you won’t even begin to think about what thought processes and how much work went into producing the translated text,” she said.

According to DeWald, the debate around AI in translation was emblematic of this misunderstanding. “Languages do not relate to one another in straightforward, one-to-one equivalences, not even the most cognate ones, so they cannot simply be plotted in a table of x in this language equals y in the other.”