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| 17 has returned, which means story has progressed Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein |
Yesterday, at the Wrestling Is Intense show in Carbondale, IL, 17, the masked bizarro-world doppelganger of one Lightning Mike Quackenbush, reformed the Gekido and forced the company to close its doors at the end of the show. Obviously, some changes were in order. assailANT, as far as I know, is still assimilated within The Colony, and The Shard is off palling around with Jigsaw in the infamous sixth borough of New York, Philadelphia Parts Unknown. I'd like to think of the two having picnics and going to museums and superkicking random passersby all to the tune of this song.
The Gekido were shooed away with apparent finality at Under the Hood last year. Fire Ant, Green Ant, assailANT, and Quackenbush were defeated by Soldier Ant, deviANT, Jigsaw, and Shard in an atomicos match that saw Soldier break rank and actively help his team lose. Despite the victory, Shard and Jigsaw went their own way, assailANT embraced his Chikarametrically discerned new confines, deviANT faded into the background until the Colony: X-Treme Force debuted, and Soldier was left as a trooper without an ally, a ronin, if you will. In the tumult of every other action that has happened within Chikara in the relatively short period of time between then and now, Gekido could have been forgotten with ease.
Other big bads - Wink Vavasseur, the Titor Conglomerate, C:XF, Condor Security, Eddie Kingston, the Devastation Corporation - have all risen up in their place. Their debut and overarching apparent arc were greeted with disdain from a large portion of the fans to begin with; no surprise was required to believe that they would be as easily forgotten.
Nothing in the Chikaraverse, however, is so blithely set up to be knocked down in short order. Even I questioned what the mirror images were doing in the narrative, and I thought their dismissal from the company felt a bit too hasty to mean anything. Even the Bruderschaft des Kreuzes took two years to go from formation to ejection, and that arc itself took so much time to set up. Gekido wrapped up with a lot of loose ends and a lot of non-sequitur dismissals. Even though I haven't been initiated into Chikara storytelling for as long as some other fans, their narrative to me felt incomplete. Their return serves as validation to that end. 17 and combatANT weren't made to be broken.
I've heard people claim frustration at how glacially the storytelling in Chikara moves. I don't think everyone should watch wrestling in the same manner, but I also think that the slow burn is an art lost on so many wrestling companies that fans may have become conditioned to want their stories told with a constant stream of flashbang grenades and machine gun-rate rat-a-tat-tat noises. When a company, whether it be Chikara or WWE or anywhere else on the map, tries to paint with deliberate strokes, the backlash against the speed comes as no surprise to me. Fine, I get that some people want to go fast like Ricky Bobby, but Chikara has always been a company for me at least where the instant gratification comes with its matches and the long term satisfaction, the story payoff if you will, comes with the richness over long periods of time.
So while Chikara, or to be technically accurate about things right now Wrestling Is..., moves slower than the tastes of some observers would like, it is still moving forward. Their progression is the kind that sticks in the memory. They don't give you too much right away, but each development is deliberate and important. To use a crude comparison, each event run is like a box of cereal. The matches are the food inside, but the story developments are the prize at the bottom. Collect enough of them, and you've got an impressive collection to go with the delicious breakfasts you got out of each box.
I don't know how many of the parts to the complete set we've gotten, but now we have some sort of idea to the endgame at least. I may be jumping to conclusions, but Gekido and the Titor Conglomerate seem to be connected here, and as the latter shut down Chikara with the force of an entire Blackwater-type security force, it feels like the former is working as Titor's secret police to shut down each regional arm of the satellites, maybe even in response to Icarus' defiance. Remember, Saturday, he held court at the Art Museum despite warnings from Condor Security not to.
What we have here is a sprawling, expansive story, but this weekend marked to me a sign of everything coalescing in the future. I may be in the minority on this opinion, but I'm absolutely no hurry to get to the final endgame, even if the pace makes "leisurely" look like "ludicrous speed."
The Gekido were shooed away with apparent finality at Under the Hood last year. Fire Ant, Green Ant, assailANT, and Quackenbush were defeated by Soldier Ant, deviANT, Jigsaw, and Shard in an atomicos match that saw Soldier break rank and actively help his team lose. Despite the victory, Shard and Jigsaw went their own way, assailANT embraced his Chikarametrically discerned new confines, deviANT faded into the background until the Colony: X-Treme Force debuted, and Soldier was left as a trooper without an ally, a ronin, if you will. In the tumult of every other action that has happened within Chikara in the relatively short period of time between then and now, Gekido could have been forgotten with ease.
Other big bads - Wink Vavasseur, the Titor Conglomerate, C:XF, Condor Security, Eddie Kingston, the Devastation Corporation - have all risen up in their place. Their debut and overarching apparent arc were greeted with disdain from a large portion of the fans to begin with; no surprise was required to believe that they would be as easily forgotten.
Nothing in the Chikaraverse, however, is so blithely set up to be knocked down in short order. Even I questioned what the mirror images were doing in the narrative, and I thought their dismissal from the company felt a bit too hasty to mean anything. Even the Bruderschaft des Kreuzes took two years to go from formation to ejection, and that arc itself took so much time to set up. Gekido wrapped up with a lot of loose ends and a lot of non-sequitur dismissals. Even though I haven't been initiated into Chikara storytelling for as long as some other fans, their narrative to me felt incomplete. Their return serves as validation to that end. 17 and combatANT weren't made to be broken.
I've heard people claim frustration at how glacially the storytelling in Chikara moves. I don't think everyone should watch wrestling in the same manner, but I also think that the slow burn is an art lost on so many wrestling companies that fans may have become conditioned to want their stories told with a constant stream of flashbang grenades and machine gun-rate rat-a-tat-tat noises. When a company, whether it be Chikara or WWE or anywhere else on the map, tries to paint with deliberate strokes, the backlash against the speed comes as no surprise to me. Fine, I get that some people want to go fast like Ricky Bobby, but Chikara has always been a company for me at least where the instant gratification comes with its matches and the long term satisfaction, the story payoff if you will, comes with the richness over long periods of time.
So while Chikara, or to be technically accurate about things right now Wrestling Is..., moves slower than the tastes of some observers would like, it is still moving forward. Their progression is the kind that sticks in the memory. They don't give you too much right away, but each development is deliberate and important. To use a crude comparison, each event run is like a box of cereal. The matches are the food inside, but the story developments are the prize at the bottom. Collect enough of them, and you've got an impressive collection to go with the delicious breakfasts you got out of each box.
I don't know how many of the parts to the complete set we've gotten, but now we have some sort of idea to the endgame at least. I may be jumping to conclusions, but Gekido and the Titor Conglomerate seem to be connected here, and as the latter shut down Chikara with the force of an entire Blackwater-type security force, it feels like the former is working as Titor's secret police to shut down each regional arm of the satellites, maybe even in response to Icarus' defiance. Remember, Saturday, he held court at the Art Museum despite warnings from Condor Security not to.
What we have here is a sprawling, expansive story, but this weekend marked to me a sign of everything coalescing in the future. I may be in the minority on this opinion, but I'm absolutely no hurry to get to the final endgame, even if the pace makes "leisurely" look like "ludicrous speed."