The 🤼 プロレス thread! Learning Japanese through pro wrestling

[rodan]

@fallynleaf

I will say, I do wish other joshi promotions that are less idol-based in terms of aesthetics were as accessible for non-Japanese speakers as Stardom and TJPW are. I’m hoping to eventually get to a point where I can expand my own horizons. I actually tried to include SEAdLINNNG, Ice Ribbon, and Marvelous in the original draft for this thread, but had to cut them because I didn’t know enough about them in order to describe them.

Honestly the idol aesthetics in Stardom seem all but vestigial at this point since it seems like they’re focusing on straightforward athletics these days. For the others though there was one magazine I recapped a while back that had a rundown of lots of women’s promotions that might be somewhat useful.

I think Ice Ribbon would definitely be one to include - they were listed second under Stardom in that list, and my impression from watching some shows was a bit of a “super indie” vibe - like a smorgasbord of different sides of wrestling - from major feuds, to your idol types, to deathmatches, to mixed tags, to martial arts focused matches, Ram Kaichou from 666 was in there, etc.
They also have a niconico channel that’s subscribable like nicopro, so it’s accessible at least in some form even if it’s not nearly as straightforward as Stardom or TJPW. I was briefly subscribed to both and my impression was that the Ice Ribbon channel was a back catalog of prior shows while nicopro was new shows on timers, and I found both a bit stressful to navigate and hard to tell what exactly I would have access to (especially not knowing how to buy additional niconico points overseas…). Now that I’ve accumulated some amount of Ice Ribbon matches I’d like to have watched from the magazines though - it might be fun to resubscribe and see if I can’t track them down.

As for SEAdLINNNG (every time I type that name… what a name!) and Marvelous, I’m not sure the best way to get into them (since I haven’t yet)… shows might show up on niconicopro, I think?
But my impression is they’re both small promotions guided heavily by a couple of veterans running them - in SEAdLINNNG’s case, Yoshiko and former Stardom founder Nanae Takahashi (in my recap a couple posts ago I should have remembered THAT’s who that was not just mentioned the cute dog), in Marvelous’ case, former Crush Gal Chigusa Nagayo and Takumi Iroha.

I suppose it’s a wiki so I could update it huh (though I’m not sure I know enough to fill in “style” without just cribbing heavily from shupro)