long digression about プロレス
Yeah, as far as I’m aware, Rhea has never self-identified as LGBTQ herself. She’s dating a man right now, which of course doesn’t mean she’s straight, but… I feel like if she was LGBTQ herself, she probably would’ve said that to get herself out of the backlash after the slur incident 
.
Thankfully there’s no shortage of butch women in pro wrestling, haha.
If only it were that simple, haha! There have been both English and Japanese parts basically all along, though the story started in a very unconventional Japanese company called DDT Pro Wrestling, so most of the early history is in Japanese. Basically, in 2008, Canadian nerd Kenny Omega found a DVD with DDT wrestler Kota Ibushi’s matches on it and it was almost quite literally love at first sight.
Despite never having met the man in his life, Kenny somehow knew that the two of them shared the same vision for wrestling, and he was like “I must fight Kota Ibushi.” So he issued a challenge, and DDT took him up on it and brought him in for a brief tour that summer, starting with a singles match with Kota. Their match ended up far surpassing everyone’s expectations (it won awards), and the two of them were immediately taken with each other. So DDT brought Kenny back for another tour in 2009, and the company wanted him and Kota to do a singles program, but they pushed instead for a tag team.
They could tell that they had something special, because somehow, they were physically so well-matched and so incredibly in sync, to the point where they have the same jump height and rotation speed. This earned them the nickname the “Golden Twins” (Kota Ibushi is called the Golden Star), and they were like “No no no. We’re the Golden Lovers”.
Kenny ended up moving to Japan to wrestle in DDT full-time, and over the course of his first few years there, he learned Japanese and became fluent. At the time, DDT had exactly one bilingual person on the roster, Michael Nakazawa, who would translate for Kenny (though Nak would comment that Kenny and Kota had an uncanny ability to understand each other even though they couldn’t speak each other’s language. Kenny said they communicated via “telepathy”).
So the Golden Lovers’ DDT years were mostly in Japanese, haha, with only incidental English. Things started to change, though, when Kota and Kenny both left DDT to go to New Japan Pro Wrestling, which is the top Japanese wrestling company in the world. NJPW’s coverage at the time was almost exclusively in Japanese, but starting around 2016, they started to get a lot more global interest, a lot of which was actually centered around Kenny (Kenny’s series of singles matches with Kazuchika Okada are considered by many to be the best pro wrestling matches of all time).
His character was part of the Bullet Club stable, which is sort of the “evil foreigner” faction (NJPW has tried to somewhat move away from that vibe with the faction, but the company has never fully escaped it, in my opinion. Kenny didn’t originally want to join it, but got sort of pigeonholed into that role when he entered the company, so he worked with it as best as he could).
As part of his Bullet Club persona, which was a heel character (a bad guy), Kenny stopped speaking Japanese (when he was in-character), so a lot of the stuff from this era, particularly his interviews and post-match comments and such, as well as Being The Elite, which was the vlog he started with his friends (and fellow Bullet Club members) the Young Bucks, was in English.
Official NJPW content would get subtitled in Japanese, but BTE wasn’t an official product, and they absolutely didn’t subtitle it, haha (they don’t even subtitle any Japanese parts in English). They received a bit of criticism for using BTE so heavily for storytelling during 2017 and 2018, because a lot of the Bullet Club faction drama (including the later Golden Lovers stuff) ended up on the vlog and not on official NJPW materials, which made parts of the story less accessible to portions of the fanbase.
Then, in 2019, Kenny left NJPW to help start All Elite Wrestling in America, and Kota stayed in NJPW 
. So for a few very long years, Kota’s side of the story in NJPW was in Japanese (thankfully now with a lot of English translation, though his tweets for the most part would remain untranslated except by fans, with one pretty notable exception, which Michael Nakazawa translated), and Kenny’s side of the story in AEW was in English (without much translation into Japanese, except by fans. Again with one pretty notable exception).
AEW and NJPW had a very complicated relationship at first. There were some, uh, hard feelings there because NJPW was bitter about losing Kenny to a sudden new competitor. But they did actually manage to work something out (largely thanks to Kenny), and by early 2021, the companies had a working relationship, so a Golden Lovers crossover storyline was back on the menu!
Unfortunately the timing didn’t work out, though, at first due to the pandemic making travel and other stuff hard, and then due to the wrestlers’ own health keeping them out of action. Then 2022 happened, and there were a good several months where I wasn’t sure the story would ever be continuing.
But here we are at last. It’s 2023, and the Golden Lovers are in the same company again, teaming up again 
. They’re both in AEW now (well, Kota sort of is. He’s not officially signed to the company, as far as we know, but he’s about to be in their biggest show yet, and clearly they have plans for him, his health permitting, which is unfortunately still not a guarantee…), so going forward, I expect most of the main story beats to be in English, with some extra stuff (like tweets and such) supplemented in Japanese. AEW also has much more Japanese support these days, so it’s a lot more accessible to Japanese fans.
What’s kind of amazing to me, though, is that AEW also managed to somehow swing a partnership with DDT (which is a competitor for NJPW), so the Golden Lovers’ matches on AEW this year so far are getting shown to DDT’s audience and NJPW’s audience as well as the AEW audience. All three of the companies that they’ve told various chapters of their story in get to see the current developments .
The Golden Lovers story is really their story. It doesn’t belong to any one company. The wrestlers have carried it with them wherever they’ve gone, and they’ve refused to ever let it die. They’ve carried it for over 15 real human years now. It’s honestly incredible to me. They fight so hard for it because it’s clearly deeply personally meaningful to them, and as a result, it’s one of the things that has quite literally shaped the entire fabric of the pro wrestling industry. Not only were they both major figures in the Japanese pro wrestling scene, but we wouldn’t even have AEW at all without the Golden Lovers.
Extremely long answer, haha, but basically the story is a mix of English and Japanese all the way through, and likely will always continue to be. The fandom just muddles through. We have fan translators on both sides trying to cover as much ground as we can, and a lot of it transcends language anyway. Pro wrestling is one of the weirdest, most beautiful mediums.
It’s impossible to find a single totally comprehensive story explainer at this point, because the story is so long and convoluted (15 real actual human years…), but I can link you to a few if you want a much more in-depth explanation of the actual story beats.
A note on most of these: the DDT portions of the story recaps (except for the overview of Kota Ibushi’s career linked at the end) are a bit oversimplified and lack quite a bit of nuance. Part of the reason is the language barrier, as well as the fact that those matches and interviews and such were a long time ago at this point, which means a lot of context has been lost, and a lot of the matches aren’t even available on Wrestle Universe (DDT’s streaming service) after they migrated to the new site. Supposedly the full back catalog will eventually get uploaded, but… it is not happening very fast. The NJPW portion is the most in-depth for most of these.
that one tweet thread about the Golden Lovers, annotated (this was the essay that was responsible for getting me into pro wrestling entirely)
A Body From the Balcony: The Devastating Erotics of Omega-Ibushi at Budokan Hall (an analysis of the Golden Lovers’ second singles match)
Stories That Are True To Our Hearts: Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi (general essay covering the story as a whole through 2018)
A Golden Lovers Timeline (a more in-depth summary of the story through 2018, with a lot of gifs of specific moments)
For more modern stuff, I don’t really have much else to link besides my own work, haha:
a gifset essay about Kenny and Kota’s parallel stories in 2020
a gifset essay about Kota Ibushi vs Jay White in NJPW on January 5, 2021, talking about how it sort of summed up the biggest hits from his entire NJPW career (including the Golden Lovers)
a gifset essay about the direct Kota Ibushi references in Kenny’s work from 2019 through 2021
For stuff that focuses primarily on the individual wrestlers, I can recommend:
Two Contracts, Two Belts, Two Wishes: The Story of a Golden Superstar (an essay on Kota Ibushi’s career up until his fateful injury in 2021)
And also Kenny’s documentary, Omegaman: A Wrestling Love Story, which I can’t link you to haha because it’s technically only available in Canada. It was made pre-AEW, so it focuses on stuff through 2018, but it’s probably the best video summary of the Golden Lovers story up to that point. As you can probably guess from the title, the Golden Lovers are the heavy focus of the film.
For primary sources (translations of Japanese material without official translations), the best archive of material is here. There’s a lot of early DDT stuff covered in here, as well as various interviews and other material over the years, including the very depressing series of tweets from Kota Ibushi over the labor exploitation incident in 2022 when NJPW tried to force him to come back to the ring before he’d healed (this is why he’s not in NJPW anymore).
I suppose I should warn you (now that I’ve dangled all the bait, haha) that following the Golden Lovers story in real time is not for the faint of heart. Pro wrestling is a really fragile medium in many ways, and the industry can be downright awful at times.
The wrestlers have chosen to make a lot of very real concessions and sacrifices for their art, and for their vision of what the medium can be. They’ve basically never once taken the normal and safe path, which means that things have never been exactly easy for them. They staked their careers on the Golden Lovers story in DDT, and then again in NJPW, and I suspect have done so in AEW as well, and if they were any less talented than they are, those companies would never have let them do it.
A lot of the recurring themes in the story echo things that happened in their real careers (when Kenny is asked about the story in interviews, he always calls it “a real story”). Like feelings of inadequacy and loneliness, and the wrestlers sometimes being forced to choose between coveted singles glory or their tag team relationship (here’s Kenny on why Kota didn’t come with him to AEW in 2019).
The characters and the real people who portray them are both flawed people, so it’s not perfect unproblematic LGBTQ representation, haha, but you have to admire their boldness and their commitment to telling a story like this in a medium like pro wrestling.
🩷
Self introduction 
Daily Tasks 
Other resources 
Goals for january 2024 
Completing bunpro JLPT5
WK level ~10-15 (reached level 13)
I hope you enjoy your stay, and I hope this log will give you the motivation you need (I often loose track as well - which is really frustrating, because it keeps me from progressing; so I’m trying to keep a log as well 
Thanks for posting them.
I think we’re in a similar place right now, I’m sure I’ll be following your updates closely and cheering you on as you surpass me