Alright, so right now is probably the most I've enjoyed joshi as a style in close to fifteen years; maybe ever, honestly. It's basically all I've watched the last few weeks and I'm finding something to enjoy in basically all of it. For a style I struggle to immerse myself in, I feel pretty well immersed. I say all that because I've never *LOVED* loved this match - probably the most beloved match in all of joshi - and so if I was ever likely to properly GET IT it'd be now. I guess I largely buy into the notion that if you don't enjoy the hell out of something when it comes to a subjective medium like pro-wrestling then how great can it actually be? but this feels like a rare exception to that because I thought it was clearly great...and yet I still didn't love it. As daft as it might sound it's probably the best match I've ever seen that I have no real personal connection to. I mean there's an awful lot of really fucking good stuff in this. Hokuto's performance is great and I can see why it's often heralded as the best individual performance ever. I've seen it described as maximalist and that feels about right. Everything she did was huge and no matter how far back in that back row you were you couldn't miss it. She's not my favourite seller in joshi even though she's often talked about as being the best, but this was probably the best sell job over the course of any match I've ever seen in the style (or the GENRE, if you're one of those). The arm injury she picks up early isn't always the main focus, at least in that she doesn't obviously sell it all the way through (she's no Kevin von Erich, I guess), but any time Kandori goes for an armbar Hokuto's absolutely frantic trying to reach the ropes. What's most impressive about her selling is the overall exhaustion and physical toll as the match goes on. She bleeds twelve buckets and by the end she can barely crawl across the ring. She'll stagger around and use the ropes to keep herself propped up. She'll fight back in bursts, but afterwards it'll look like she took as much out of herself as she did Kandori. Offensively she was scrappy and gritty and all those other adjectives you want to use and she would not be denied. Kandori would need to kill her to keep her down and pretty much every move Hokuto hit looked like she did it knowing it could be her last. Her two dives towards the end felt totally reckless and at the same time totally necessary given the opponent and circumstances. It was a stellar performance, and whether or not you subscribe to the idea that it's the best ever, I think if nothing else she deserves credit for the fact only she could pull it off like this. Kandori ruled as well, obviously. Man she's awesome. She was like the fucking terminator and for as much as you believed she'd need to kill Hokuto to keep her down, you believed the opposite to be an even truer prospect. Every time she grabbed hold of Hokuto's arm there was widespread panic and the bit where she turned an attempted Tiger Driver into a kimura then back into another Tiger Driver was amazing. At one point she just picked Hokuto up in a suplex and chucked her out the ring like a bag of rubbish. She was equally great when it came to selling, as she usually is (she'd be my own pick for best seller in joshi). It was much more subtle than Hokuto's, but her KO selling is Fujiwara-level and there were about five instances of it. The pace being much slower than usual certainly helped this overall. Everything had a sense of gravity to it, and while talking about transitions and rhythm in joshi is beating a dead horse this clearly wouldn't have worked as well if it followed the standard AJW pattern of the time. It also has one of the best openings of any match ever, with Hokuto decking Kandori and shit-talking her on the house mic and Kandori responding by trying to rip her arm out the socket. It was Thunder Road or Gimme Shelter or the Mortal Kombat opening where Shang-Tsung steals Liu Kang's dweeb brother's soul. Just perfect. And of course there's the tombstone spot which is totally iconic. It's not just the spot itself looking crazy, it's the fact Hokuto was the one who took it there in the first place and learned the hard way not to fuck with Kandori like that (also the close-up of the dented table, and even if I'm pretty sure it was Kandori's knee that left it and not Hokuto's skull it doesn't take away from the visual). So yeah, great match. Like, really great. But not one I love.
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