Dorothea, the dissatisfied daughter of a nobleman, makes the impulsive situation to run away from home, dye her hair, and use her inheritance to buy a farm in Mistria. It works, somehow. For a year. Barely. Then her older sister Marisol is at her doorstep, demanding she come home, and Dorothea makes another impulsive decision. She tells her sister that she can’t leave Mistria. Because she’s fallen in love. Worse: that she’s engaged. And when she and the bane of her existence, March, are caught in an awkward position, she figures that there’s no turning back now. All she has to do to save her life in Mistria is convince her terrifyingly perceptive older sister Marie that she and March are the real deal. She just hopes that he plays along. She comes to find out that they’re both a little too good at the lie.

Danny had no illusions that Yuta was still the man he had been, back when they wrestled in a heatsick warehouse. He wasn’t even the man that occupied so much of his 2022. The feud between the Blackpool Combat Club and Jericho Appreciation Society was chaotic, but Danny had a part to play in beating Yuta, so Yuta had been an anchor, the reason for him to be there to begin with. It’s been over for the longest time. He’s not itching to dig up their grave today. It’s more of a tentative curiosity he wished to satisfy. It didn’t matter whether or not he liked what he found on the other side.

Nonchalance is in vogue. So much so that I tire of rehashing it for what it feels like the umpteenth time. As someone whose entire existence is rooted in the arts (creative writing and theater, baby), I think I’ve had at least twenty conversations with people about how everybody is too afraid to care lately. My peers are too concerned with appearing cool and intellectual, people refuse to engage with media beyond a surface level and often ridicule those who do, media itself often feels like it’s punishing and insulting the investment of fans, the rise of AI art and the failure to understand that art isn’t meant to be easy — that struggling, that creating your way out of the darkness, is the point. Why should there be shame in other people knowing that you struggled for what you love? 

To me, professional wrestling (and all of theater!) is often about the uncontainable. Emotions which must be expressed in the most spectacular ways due to their intensity. Emotions spill out of the ring, tumble out of wrestlers’ mouths like gutter poetry, they bleed and scream and cry. Perhaps the feeling in “restore the feeling” is purposefully so nebulous because what we’re looking for is permission to feel anything at all. 

Ospreay/Hangman is one of those matches that feels like permission. For the entire build, both men were committed to conveying one message: that this is, for their own personal reasons, the most important thing in the world to them. The world title is important because they dared to allow it to matter, even at the cost of heartbreak. In that sense, they left themselves vulnerable to feeling — unafraid of whether it was joy or sadness. They gave it meaning.

I feel that much has already been said about Hangman’s wonderful performance, but as I was reflecting on the escalation of Ospreay’s anger and violence through the match, I thought about a cut line from a play I wrote: “Love is no tender thing. It cares not who you were. It violently remakes us all in its image.” I cut it because I thought it was too overwrought, too overdone, but I suppose it’s overdone because there’s truth in it. There is humanity in Hangman’s passion for the world title bringing him back to goodness and in Ospreay’s passion making him stray towards the darkness. So many people talk about how to be loved is to be changed but not enough people talk about the other side of that. We aren’t just loved by others passively. We actively love too. And loving transforms us, for better or for worse. Love is an action as much as it is emotion, and professional wrestling is the marriage of both action and emotion.

i think danny's trajectory since he re-signed has been interesting (if underexplored). like, in his interview with renee he questions whether or not someone has to sell their soul to succeed in aew. and ofc a lot of the rhetoric of the jack perry feud was about whether or not he was willing to do what it took to be champ. hell, even though him getting booked against babyfaces during his reign was disappointing, in kayfabe i sort of see it as his current character valuing these concepts of honor, fairness, and goodness and fighting under those values.

and obvs post wrestledream when he called yuta a coward in his ig comments also goes along with this. danny sees yuta as in the wrong, and with the way the deathriders treat yuta at this stage, that's not a terrible assessment (we'll see what happens when yuta stands up for himself eventually). but at the same time, danny's attempts at goodness fail him too. in the cole match i thought it was interesting that he kind of started working more aggressively / heelish for this, like he was losing the thread of his own morality there.

how do we break out of our own cycles when every solution we come to only digs us deeper into them, how to cope with us being mirrors of each other's capacity for both goodness and evil, etc.