The Violence It Takes To Become Gentle

On May 5th, 2024 at Dragongate’s annual Dead or Alive show, five wrestlers representing three different units made their way into the steel cage for the main event. Hyo, current Brave Gate champion representing BigHug; Kzy and Jacky “Funky” Kamei of Natural Vibes; Shun Skywalker and Jason Lee of Z-Brats. 

The form it took was this; in each top corner of the cage is a flag. Each wrestler must fight their way through the others and up the side of the cage, high into the air, to retrieve a flag in order to ‘escape’. However there are five wrestlers and only four flags – whoever is left must lose whatever they have wagered ahead of the match. These wagers can be tangible or intangible. The stakes this time are mascara contra caballero, with Shun Skywalker wagering his mask and everyone else their hair. And Kzy, whose membership to, and by extension leadership of, Natural Vibes was also at stake.

We arrived here via a long and mildly convoluted series of events that encompass love, friendship, betrayal, heartbreak, joy, reinvention, and going into the event tensions and excitement were high. In addition, to speak more personally, this would be part resolution of the storyline that got me into Dragongate. 

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?1

Unwinding a match like this in a promotion such as Dragongate is always challenging. It’s very easy to find yourself going years back in the telling of it, speculatively diagnosing the root causes of each participant’s behaviours that led them to this point. And it isn’t just the plot beats, the individual occurrences that pull together to construct a narrative: with the particular structure that Dragongate employs in its unit system, everyone has history with everyone and it will always come back around to inform future dynamics.

Often Dragongate will pull threads from multiple places at once that don’t seem immediately connected, lay them parallel to each other, and then tangle them together in a Gordian knot of kismet and terrible coincidence, to be unwound and resolved or cut at the root. There is always the weight of history, a narrative barometric pressure that sits upon the present, exerting tacit but tangible force upon the players. And the cage match is the perfect steel nexus in which these moments are pulled into sharp relief.

Anytime I try to explain the background of this particular match, I find myself running back along the tracks of eight different characters stretching back nearly three years. To me this is no chore; in fact, I find this level of character and story consistency in professional wrestling absolutely thrilling for its seeming rarity.

I can understand why this would be intimidating to someone on the outside, and this piece does assume base familiarity with current Dragongate storylines – it is not a review or recap; context is given where necessary but Dragongate’s approach to story is novelesque and in turn this is an exploration.

None of this is to say I believe you have to do an immense amount of homework to appreciate what is presented in the cage match and Dead or Alive as an event; I think it speaks powerfully for itself as a piece of art and entertainment. Maybe it won’t hit you in the same way emotionally if you don’t have much of a pre-existing relationship with these characters, but that’s the way of any serialised piece of media. In truth, there are many, many moments and reference points that I have had contextualised in hindsight for me by other people – friends, acquaintances, and Jae’s indispensable English commentary during the match itself. 

And Dragongate fans always want to talk about Dragongate.

evil and flowers both come and go2

Units are the lifeblood of Dragongate storytelling. At any given time the majority of the roster is organised into several units whose memberships and allegiances shift over time. Everyone has their favourites in what regularly amounts to boyband warfare. Factions are nothing new in wrestling, but units don’t just exist in Dragongate as a matter of narrative convenience, they are the very foundation upon which the entire promotion sits. And Natural Vibes has long been the beating heart of modern Dragongate.

Earlier in the year, Skywalker made an overt play to get at this heart by driving a wedge between the ribs of Natural Vibes; using a recurring plot device called Masked Z to intimate someone’s secret defection from the unit to Z-Brats. Concurrently, for a while BigHug had been making plays to convince Jacky to join their burgeoning unit, and Shun had also thrown the gauntlet down with his own twisted courtship of Jacky. 

Masked Z was no one of consequence in the end but the dominoes had been set, and the first had been tipped; Natural Vibes had been successfully rattled. All Shun needed to do was wait for his opportunity to capitalise.

Suddenly, Natural Vibes were not immune to finger pointing and suspicion. Communication issues started to plague the unit as the roster moved into the Rey de Parejas tag tournament, a slight moment of insecurity enough to destabilise what had been so solid for so long. But how solid were they actually if this was enough to shake them so thoroughly?

Strong Machine J has long quietly simmered in frustration with the unit’s lack of results, and by that measure his own lack of success within the unit. As the stressors began to pile on, this would lead him to point the finger at Jacky, at Kzy, anywhere but himself, drawing another narrative string taught.

Natural Vibes is the last unit you would ever want to see fall apart to infighting, but for a brief moment it seemed like a horrible inevitability – the wheels of fate and tragedy grinding a horrible accompaniment, as the conventions of wrestling imposed themselves upon the pawns on the board. 

As much as it would feel like a violation of who Natural Vibes have been and the role they have played as a unit in Dragongate for them to crumble under veils of suspicion and resentment, it seemed to be unavoidable, which is why the prior few months of the storyline had been so stressful to watch. 

Sometimes that kind of drama is delicious, the Schadenfreude of watching a human experience that lives separately from you and reality, but we all want good things for Kzy and pals. The best things.

Fans were on edge to see what the flashpoint would be, what would take the players into the final conflagration.

And then, in the short weeks before Dead or Alive, during one of the penultimate matches of the Rey de Parejas tour, Jason Lee blindsided his Natural Vibes teammate Jacky “Funky” Kamei with a kick to the head and in doing so betrayed his home to join Shun Skywalker and Z-Brats. 

The fallout was explosive and instantaneous. 

I can’t really do justice to the segment in words, and it’s not entirely relevant to outline all the events again here. Nevertheless, the genuine palpable sense of betrayal was immediate in the crowd present as much as I felt it watching, as I was, at my dining room table.

But here it was finally; the escalation that would lead to the cage.

kzy
      all the sea which only is deeper than the sea
3

It was a cocoon of emotional self-preservation with which I went into the cage match mostly convinced that Kzy would lose – focussed on the dramatic layers of how much he had to lose, the rhyme of his inheritance of leadership of Natural Vibes from Susumu, how on paper he had so much more riding on this than anyone else. The fear of one of the bedrock acts in current Dragongate under existential threat by the machinations of its current greatest villain distracted me, as I tried to mentally construct a safe place to land in a world where Natural Vibes might not be standing on the other side of Dead or Alive.

Whatever happened, I was sure that this would be another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Tragedy of Kzy – a long and storied collection of torturous almosts. Ultimately I was wrong about the outcome of the match but due to my anxiety over the result, I had forgotten that gaining and losing take many forms, and some of them occur comorbidly.

Kzy is a powerfully empathetic presence in Dragongate. His defining characteristics as leader of Natural Vibes have become unconditional kindness and unwavering support. Though there are people much more equipped than me to talk about his journey from debut to the man he is here, I think a lot of that journey is palpable in how he interacts with Natural Vibes. He is protective without being stifling, allows the members their agency, and wears his heart on his sleeve. Unfortunately, this makes his heart an easy target.

The accusations that Shun Skywalker had been levelling at Kzy for weeks did their damage; that he holds back young talent, uses their stagnation as a means of assuaging his own mediocrity, that Natural Vibes is just a ponzi scheme which deals in ego. Shun is wrong, of course, if he even believes what he is saying in the first place. It is not beyond Shun to leverage the thing that would hurt most, to be just a thumbnail pressing into the hairline cracks that Jason’s departure left in the confidence of Natural Vibes’ leader.

At any rate, It was enough to needle Kzy and drive him into putting everything on the line. Because how else can he prove Shun wrong? Verbal refutation is not enough, engaging with Shun Skywalker in a war of words is futile, but being willing to lose the thing of which you’re being accused of leveraging might be proof enough; at least to oneself. 

Maybe, with everything going on in Vibes, Kzy was afraid that Shun had a point, or at the very least an echo of one. And Kzy would rather remove himself from Natural Vibes than see it fall apart because of him.

Throughout the match Kzy takes mild exception to Hyo helping Jacky, because all he has really seen from Hyo is a conspicuous disregard for Jacky’s power of self-determination. But much as Kzy would probably prefer to be the one for Jacky to rely on, he is still in a cage with Shun Skywalker, and their particular history and present make it hard to prioritise. At a crucial point Kzy is brutally crushed into the mesh of the cage by Shun, there being a scant inch between the ropes and the wire, and this incapacitates him enough that he cannot even be present for Jacky in his moment of escape.

Jacky escapes, and then Kzy is at the top of the cage on the precipice of doing so himself only to be halted by Shun Skywalker. When Strong Machine J comes to the ring seemingly having made up his mind to aid Shun in his menacing of Kzy, presumably defecting to Z-Brats after a brief courtship spearheaded by KAI, it appears that J has not made it through to the other side of his becoming completely. Shun offers his hand to J, all too willing to take his victory over Kzy here on the top of the cage.

It’s a moment of eerie reminiscence to the mists of 2021 and Jason’s initial rejection of Skywalker’s offer to join Z-Brats when Strong Machine J takes Shun’s hand and shakes. Shun, thrilled by what he sees as another victory of his objective superiority, passes over the steel sheet with which he was threatening Kzy. J takes it, rears back as if to bring it down on Kzy’s head like the flowers from J’s earlier match with U-T, but he pivots at the last moment to instead take it to Shun, swatting him from the cage.

And then, with Skywalker dispatched again, Strong Machine J takes Kzy’s hand in his own in order to guide and close his fingers firmly around the pole so Kzy can hoist himself up, pull the flag free and escape the cage. Kzy collapses into J’s arms, full of relief and tears that his ordeal is over and his wayward son has come back to him. That another has not fallen prey to Shun’s manipulations and the thrall of Z-Brats.

Kzy’s deep kindness is also evident in the near beatific tenderness with which he treats a broken Hyo at his lowest after the conclusion of the match. He has no reason to treat Hyo so carefully – in fact Kzy has every reason to resent Hyo, to partially blame him for the spiralling of events that led to this. But Kzy is the only one of the participants in the match who truly knows what Hyo is experiencing, having lost his own hair as part of a wager in 2014. Kzy understands Hyo at this moment and he is moved by him. 

Kzy pushes Shun and Jason out of the way, barely lays the clippers against Hyo’s head for hardly a moment, notably in an area that’s already been shaved, and satisfies the demands of tradition before he moves away and turns his back to the whole scene. 

He can’t stand to see Hyo’s suffering and Jacky’s heart breaking.

jason lee
      loyalty lost for the love you lack
4

When speaking of radical transformations, it’s hard not to see Jason Lee as a case study in the long game. Jason’s position within the promotion has been interesting, varied enough but arguably without great stakes for a while.

While we were all, perhaps naively, distracted by the Rey de Parejas tournament and the other tensions and miscommunications that had bled into Natural Vibe’s interactions, Jason Lee made a decision. When he kicks Jacky in the head and joins Z-Brats, he redresses what he would later state he considers to be an error he made two years prior when he chose to join Natural Vibes. 

In narrative function, the cage match serves as Jason’s true establishment as a villain. Turning on Jacky and Natural Vibes, the shock of joining Z-Brats in an act of incontrovertible betrayal, and the hounding and baiting of Vibes in the wake of that was sheer unadulterated gloating. But there was still some chance of walking it back, however slight and improbable that chance was.

Arguably Jason’s tipping point was losing a chance to pin Mante, at the time Dream Gate champion, in a Rey de Parejas match between BigHug and the Kung Fu Masters sub-unit comprising Lee and Kamei. When Jacky gets the pin on Mante, a shock in and of itself, wrestling logic dictates that it gives him a solid claim to a title match. Jacky did not seem concerned with that at all; that he pinned the champion was hardly a footnote to him in that moment, what mattered was the tournament win, the team win. 

Jason’s frustration that Jacky so casually took what maybe should have been his is evident – he steps to Jacky, angry that he doesn’t seem to be aware of what he’s done, and crucially what’s he done to Jason. At this moment Jason is seemingly talked down, but still waters run deep, and in hindsight it’s almost too obvious that this would be the turning point. So masterful was the misdirection, it was almost forgotten – enfolded into the unit drama that was rippling out across all of its members.

Jason’s interactions and history with Shun could be the subject of yet more thousands of words of spilled ink. The dissension and dissolution of the unit they once shared being tentpole to Shun’s turn to the dark side and break from reality, and the aftermath thereof still underpins nearly everything that leads up to this cage – and not just for the two of them. Shun visibly calms his pursuit of Jacky once Jason has come over to his side; not to say that he has permanently shelved his efforts. 

I can’t help but question whether this was another of Skywalker’s silent mastermind moves. That Shun’s treatment of Jacky was so eerily similar to the way he fixated on Jason in the aftermath of Masquerade that Jason was forced to remember himself in that position, and relive and re-evaluate the choices he made then. Born of jealousy, another nail in the coffin of feeling overlooked and underappreciated. 

There is often a pattern where we as fans do not talk about Jason’s choices so much as Shun’s influence on him and ability to manipulate him. and in that we deny his character agency. But here in this match once Shun has escaped, Jason is left to act alone and as an audience we have to finally fully reckon with the fact that this truly is Jason’s choice; he is too far gone. 

In direct contrast to Hyo proving his virtue, Jason crosses the event horizon and becomes wholly unforgivable through his actions in the cage. No questions are left about his allegiance being to Shun; even if he insists that it is a matter of convenience and not a matter of loyalty the outcome is the same. Z-Brats’s Jason Lee makes threats, and Z-Brats’s Jason Lee makes good on them.

For now Jason is Shun’s dragon; not his belonging, nor his pet, but a willing accessory to his crimes – at least while their purposes align.

As Shun shaves Hyo’s hair, Jason entraps Jacky’s head between his hands, restraining him by the neck in a position not dissimilar to a submission, and makes him watch as Shun roughly strips Hyo’s hair from him. Jacky sobs for Hyo and Jason laughs.

This is the level of gleeful sadism that Jason has fallen to; forcing a former best friend to bear witness to something he knows will cause him pain. 

shun skywalker
      there is only tragedy this side of the sky
5

Shun Skywalker is a man who sees everyone else’s decisions as folly and delusion. To him there is no merit in any philosophy other than his own. There is no relativity of good or evil, there is only one objective morality; that of Shun Skywalker. Whenever his plans fall through, he rewrites the narrative until a new reality is formed that makes space for his cognitive dissonance to continue unchallenged.

If you look at the broad picture of the match and its preceding events, Shun Skywalker succeeds. He causes chaos, he gets Jason back, he puts Kzy through emotional turmoil and throws Natural Vibes into an existential spiral, he does not lose his mask, he humiliates Hyo. On paper this could be considered an almost total success for Skywalker. 

Except in the end, it barely scratches the surface of the perception. Yes, he did all those things but none of them resolved wholly in Shun’s favour. And Shun is not the personality to accept a partial success. 

There are some lessons Skywalker will never learn. He is so enamoured with his own brilliance, that he is occasionally a little too ready to believe that someone has fallen thrall to his manipulations. He talks and talks and talks, and it is never clear if he’s attempting to perform some sort of belligerent conversion, or hypnotise himself into believing the doctrine he’s laying out. This self-hypnosis is a protective layer for Shun and it belies a deep set anxiety; if he just keeps talking he does not have to look internally and admit fault and flaw. Shun Skywalker is a superhero distorted, who will justify his distortion before he ever acknowledges that he has unmet emotional needs.

In his own twisted way, Shun craves connection. He keeps trying to build family in whatever ways he can, and in order to do that he feels like he has to keep people. That craving for connection is a largely relatable experience, but the way it manifests within him is tangled and mired, sunken deep into his desire for control. MASQUERADE, his dream unit, was little more than a glorified marionette show, and when the other members began to chafe at its rigidity, it was prelude to Shun’s final break from reality.

Unfortunately the only acceptable path to connection is control. Despite having others around him at almost every turn, Shun Skywalker is alone. He is a planner inasmuch as it satisfies his particular anxiety for having a read on and a hand in every situation. He likes to undercut people with his plans because he enjoys Knowing too much. Shun is highly emotionally driven, but desperately uncomfortable with that fact because he is afraid.

One of the things that makes Shun so compelling is that it is so easy to read conspiracy in everything he does. Even when his plan fails, it’s easy enough to believe that perhaps he intended it to fail the whole time as part of another, even grander plan; forming a sort of Matryoshka doll of diabolical schemes. It certainly helps that his ability to pivot to a new strategy when something falls through is second-to-none, so you can never be entirely sure that you are not playing into his hands. How much of his plans are truly premeditated, or just the supervillain version of a cat landing on his feet and pretending it meant to fall the whole time?

In his successful escape, Shun literally vaults off Kzy; plants his foot in the centre of his nemesis’ back to launch himself up the wire mesh, like an overly large spider skittering to safety. On the nose it may be to say that he literally uses Kzy as a launch pad to his success in the ways he has metaphorically used him as such in the past. Stranger yet, is the echo of one of Jason’s cited reasons for his frustrations with Natural Vibes; that he was tired of being used as a stepping stone for others. There’s a friction here where the very thing that Jason would go to Z-Brats to escape in Natural Vibes, Shun would enact literally upon his former unit leader.

In some ways Shun’s masterminding is often incredibly transparent. He is a terrible person to embolden and it is generally safest to assume that he is always up to something. Time and time again he’s proven that he is not a man to trust, but he still manages to convince people that he is the only way they could possibly get what they want. If that dovetails with exactly what Shun wants? Well, that’s ideal.

But at the end of the cage match it feels like Shun has to overindulge, gorge himself on this moment of Hyo’s utter defeat in order to come away feeling like he achieved any measure of real victory for himself; and even that is not really Shun’s victory. Jason is the one that put Hyo through the planks, and his MaxiMuM driver onto a pile of chairs that finished Hyo, and left him splayed on the canvas to suffer his fate. Jason was the one that raised the final flag to seal Hyo’s fate.

For all his… everything, Shun in this match is less of his traditional variety of antagonist, and more predominantly a thorn, a nuisance. His presence looms large at all times, as the instigator, but this match is about Jason severing the final thin tendons that still connect him to Natural Vibes. Shun knows and trusts, in his own way, that Jason does not need him for that. Shun can prioritise protecting his mask because Jason can finish the job.

As he and Jason lord the victory over Hyo and take his hair from him, Shun cackles in a manner that’s just this side of forced, to enough of an excess to feel insincere, performative. 

hyo
      when the oil runs out we’ll go deeper down the well
6

Kzy may have had the most to lose on paper, but Hyo had the most to prove. So the Dead or Alive cage match became less The Inevitable Tragedy of Kzy and instead The Trials of Hyo. 

More than once I said that I believed that Hyo may not be as noble as he thinks he is. Going into this match, no matter how loud and assured he was about his intentions to protect Jacky, there was a sense that this was all sound and fury, and maybe when it came down to it Hyo would not follow through. Perhaps Hyo had learned some of the wrong lessons spending so long around Shun and his habit of one-sided obsessions. Hyo’s relationship with Mante away from Z-Brats has been simple, without friction or challenge.

It was barely weeks after leaving heel unit Z-Brats that events started escalating. BigHug’s courting of Jacky was forceful from the outset despite their being babyfaces; a better option than Z-Brats purely by virtue of not being Shun Skywalker, but no real option at all when Jacky was still comfortable in the arms of Vibes. Hyo and Mante had not yet learned how to make new friends without the spectre of old habits hanging over them; maybe that’s why it has taken so long to add anyone else to the unit, they simply had yet to figure out how social interactions worked with people who were not already predisposed to like them. 

Hyo’s semi-regular attempts to covertly shuffle Jacky away from Vibes felt underhanded, not just a little disrespectful as on multiple occasions he would literally attempt to roll an incapacitated Jacky out of the ring whilst the rest of Vibes were distracted. In fact, much of The Courting of Jacky Funky Kamei saw Jacky’s agency and consent discounted by both Shun and BigHug – pushing his physical and emotional boundaries, and ignoring his ability to make choices for himself.

That makes perfect sense from Shun – he is not a man who cares much about the complex inner lives of other people unless he can manipulate it for his own purposes – but it’s the kind of behaviour that feels a little out of step with arguably one of the most popular babyfaces in the company in Hyo. Until you remember that at this point Hyo is barely six months out of a long tenure in Z-Brats, out from under Shun’s direct influence, direction, and employ. Some behaviours needed to be unlearned before BigHug could truly move forwards, and Hyo had not yet learned how to be selfless.

Jacky did not, would not, respond to these methods of coercion, especially when living in the relative paradise of Natural Vibes – a land where interpersonal cohesion had never truly been threatened. Natural Vibes is the place where Jacky found his confidence and sense of identity, and Vibes was as much of a family as any unit could hope to be until the cracks started to form. Even then, as everything started to crumble, Jacky would not be swayed.

And when it came to the cage, would Jacky even accept Hyo’s help to that degree when he never asked for his protection in the first place?

Hyo’s trials within the match comprise two significant moments. The first is when Hyo has a clear opportunity to leave the cage. He was nearly out – then Jason and Shun capture Jacky, threatening to garotte him with a chair, taunting Hyo to lure him back into the cage. This is the first time you get to see Hyo truly decide to put Jacky’s well-being above his own, and live up to the words with which he’d been so free. There is a moment of pause, of deliberation, where Hyo finally understands the full gravity of the situation he has put himself in, and he has to decide whether it is worth it. Hyo turns from his almost guaranteed escape and goes to Jacky, shields him with his body while Shun and Jason beat down upon them both.

And the second moment of significance is Jacky’s escape itself. In the grand scheme of things, Hyo’s job is done early. Jacky is the first one to escape from the cage directly thanks to Hyo’s ingenuity – a much clipped and marvelled-at feat of spontaneous engineering wherein Hyo uses a rope brought into the cage by Z-Brats brought  to create a pulley system over one of the support bars in the corner. As Shun and Jason try to stymie whatever Hyo is up to, Hyo leverages their bodies as well as his own to provide counterweight and lift Jacky up through the air and to the top of the cage. It’s almost too on the nose, almost poesy, that Hyo must literally give himself to Shun and Jason’s arms in order to facilitate Jacky’s freedom. To allow him to fly.

Hyo doesn’t need to do anything else to have fulfilled the promise he made. BigHug has always been defined by forms of love but through Hyo’s actions in the cage, a new type is explored; that of a giving, selfless agape. Hyo fights until he can literally fight no more. And when Hyo is brought lowest, he experiences an apotheosis; having committed a true act of selfless love, given to someone from whom he truly, finally expects no reciprocation. 

And the only promise he made was to protect Jacky, because he loves him. In many ways he didn’t even make that promise to Jacky but rather as a pledge to himself. Hyo did not ask for his love in return, or for him to join BigHug off the back of whatever the result in the cage was. Hyo truly only wanted to make sure that Jacky did not suffer further at the hands of Shun Skywalker and Jason Lee. He didn’t ever need to be in the match, ontologically speaking; Hyo had spent a lot of time getting himself involved in the situation between Z-Brats and Natural Vibes when no one asked him to be. 

Emotionally, however, he was driven to use himself as an insurance policy, unwilling to risk leaving Jacky to the cruel mercies of Z-Brats because he knew intimately of what they would be capable. Hyo uses the only tool he has left at his disposal to achieve this goal; himself. And he loses the match, and he loses his hair.

What hair represents to an individual in terms of their self-determination and identity is often regarded as frivolous, diminished or relegated to silly vanity. However, hair is more than just a mode of personal expression, though that should not be discounted either. It carries more significance than is often acknowledged in Western dominant culture.

Hair carries a lot of emotional baggage; this is why a hair vs hair match can have the weight that it does. Having your head shaved in the middle of the ring after suffering a defeat is humiliating even before you add any other element of storytelling. It is an act of public shaming. It is visceral, having part of your aesthetic identity removed from you by the hand of another. And an unavoidably visual mark of failure; in that you cannot hide what has been done to you.

Most people cannot abide to look at themselves in the mirror in a salon because it is a uniquely, strangely vulnerable position to be in. You have no control over how you look in these moments. It is a private thing made public. And wrestling, like all soap and melodrama, is about private things made public; 

Hyo’s usual self-confidence could easily be interpreted as vanity. He is tanned and muscular, he is popular, he knows he’s pretty. In his role as Prime Zone GM, he is glamorous and self-assured and powerful in this small pocket dimension of Dragongate lore. Textually he is renowned for being smart, a planner, with his time in Z-Brats being marked by various sobriquets about his quote-unquote great brain. And not the least of his achievements, his Brave Gate run has potential to challenge records in the promotion. He has a lot to be prideful about.

Throughout his humiliation Hyo doesn’t really cry at the loss of his hair. It is only when Kamei takes his hand that the dam bursts, and he is overcome. The stoicism born of shock and exhaustion wears off, and despite all the emotions Hyo now has to publicly process, it was not for nothing. Jacky is safe. Hyo has made him safe. Moreover Jacky has stayed, and this is a greater act of acceptance than Hyo could have anticipated.

Once Jason and Shun have committed the act of shaving Hyo’s head they leave, and Hyo finally has the chance and wherewithal to gather himself and speak. Through tears and hiccoughs, Hyo says his hair is important to him, but not as important as Jacky and for the first time without any reservation or hesitation or caveats I can believe him. He has shouldered the hardest test of love he has ever come up against. Hyo accepts being humbled in this way, as a worthy sacrifice to avoid Jacky suffering the same fate.

When Hyo leaves the ring he does so with no expectation that Jacky has to follow, because he has found that selflessness and thus the peace and satisfaction that his promise is fulfilled. Hyo does not leverage the sacrifice he made in order to convince Jacky of anything other than his honest love.

jacky “funky” kamei
      I howl the need to a startled moon
7

Sometimes we don’t understand the depth of what we feel for something or someone until the very moment where it is held to the fire and the mettle is tested. Before this match, Jacky had not really shown much that was deeper than the gradual building of respect for Hyo and Mante, notably once they stopped being so pushy about trying to recruit him. But once Jacky is free from the cage, his anguished screams for Hyo to keep going, to escape the cage, to not give up, evidence a strong bond that’s finally snapped into being in both directions.

Jacky is another character that I would argue is uniquely defined by his relationship to loyalty. Not blindly or naively so, though I imagine some may see his general youth and positivity as naivete, but Jacky trusts in a manner that is deeply reciprocal. Jacky is steadfast in Natural Vibes because of the faith that Vibes always had in him. Once Hyo’s actions have liberated Jacky from the cage he can finally give Hyo the entirety of his support and emotion because he finally knows for certain that Hyo is being truthful; that he did not make a hollow promise to protect Jacky. 

There is no small amount of guilt that could ensue for Jacky in the moment of Hyo’s defeat, but I don’t believe that Jacky is thinking about himself here. Jacky has that same empathy as Kzy; he grieves for the fact that he is at the root of Hyo’s pain and could not act to mitigate it.

In the aftermath of the cage match, Jacky is visibly at war with himself over the people that he loves – unwilling to leave the home of Natural Vibes where he had found himself, but compelled by Hyo’s words and, crucially, his actions. He looks to Kzy in this moment as a mentor and a friend, not knowing what or how to ask, so Kzy takes the role of leader over Jacky one last time and tells him to go to BigHug. This is the time for Jacky to learn that he does not only have to be Natural Vibes’ Jacky Funky Kamei, he can be other things too. Not more but new. To find parts of himself in new contexts.

In the same moment that Kzy welcomes Strong Machine J back into the fold, he lets Jacky go. Jacky has outgrown Vibes, or maybe just began to grow parallel, his needs no longer intersect with the unit. Whereas J needs Vibes to continue his growth, Jacky’s emotional journey has become less insular and is now reaching out to Hyo and Mante for something he doesn’t get in Vibes. That’s not to say that Vibes had him at a deficit, regardless of what Shun Skywalker might have to say on the matter, just that it was time for him to move on with a foundation of confidence that could only have been built sure and sturdy in an environment like Natural Vibes.

As Jacky runs from the cage to the entranceway and throws himself into Hyo and Mante’s arms, it’s more than Jacky performing the act that gave the unit its name in the first place, the full circle moment of BigHug’s aptronym; it’s Jacky embracing the next stage of himself, and the people with whom he’s chosen to build that person.

Make the best thing or else make it nothing at all8

“The cage” as a concept is a lot of things in wrestling. The last resort for when the emotions reach a fervour, when a match becomes a fight, a matter of necessary survival, to retain a sense of self. It is not necessarily the end of a feud, but it is representative of a significant point in the narrative and emotional journey of the characters. When the environment has to be committed to enacting violence too.

The cage is an extremely malleable symbol, as such it can be a signifier of multiple things at once; some trite and overplayed admittedly, but here in the fiction of wrestling it generally represents a unique threat to the participants – literally, metaphorically, and in the metatext. A cage is beyond the normal scope of a match and the win conditions are different, therefore the strategies must change to accommodate that. The way the story is told must adapt to the new visual space and compensate for the metaphor in the viewer. We learn about the characters and how they interact within what they are willing to do within a cage – who the cage forces them to become.

Dragongate uses the cage as a stage for metamorphosis. It is a transitional space between phases of story and character. As much as there are often physical markers of this change, (i.e. the loss of a mask or one’s hair) the real change comes in the impact that loss has on the sense of self of the character. It is interesting that there are no victors in a survival cagematch, traditionally and semantically speaking: your only options are to survive and persist, or lose and change. To enter the cage is to enter an implacable place of inexorable transformation.

This match is all about big, big emotions. I was surprised by how much I was affected by it, even when I thought I was so prepared for any eventuality, because people can’t help but be affected by displays of human emotion. Every element of this match falls into perfect position to reward the investment of the audience, be it in the story as a whole or an individual wrestler within it.

In most promotions a cage match might be deployed as a deathmatch might; as a vehicle to enclose and escalate and force the characters to face their conflict head on. When the interpersonal conflict has gotten too much to handle conventionally, and the only resolution can be found in a structure built specifically to contain all the violence that two (or more) people can do to each other, it forms a reverse panopticon of spectator and spectated. 

In environments such as these, acts of tenderness become acts of transgression and a cage is defined as much by what it keeps out as what is enclosed. Acts of such great love in so many different forms, in a space such as this, are made all the more powerful for their contrast. I am fascinated by tenderness in professional wrestling; where love and kindness fit into a world built for violence.

It’s easy to talk about wrestling as if it’s something quote-unquote real. As if wrestling isn’t an art and entertainment medium which requires deliberate choices made by creatives and performers in service of telling a story. In the modern era wrestling is more overtly in conversation with the semi-permeable membrane between fiction and reality. And, to be true, in this piece I often live in the grey space where it is uncertain whether I’m talking about the work of the performer or the plight of the character. 

As with any performance art, it’s hard to find the distinction and I’m not entirely interested in trying to untangle that at all. I feel that doing so would be tantamount to denying the medium of wrestling its unique position to interact with an audience. It relies on being verisimilitudinous in order to be effective. In a movie, everything within the frame contains its reality, but you can always see the border of the screen. You can’t see the edges of the screen in wrestling. 

There’s philosophy and theory and metaphysics and spirituality about the Body as an entity, and what it means to subject it to violence. What hands mean as symbols themselves and also as the tools with which we interact with the world and each other. As it stands, I think this cage match is one of the most emblematic of all of those things in any wrestling to which I myself have borne witness. 

It is a match that is potently bittersweet and vibrant with humanity. A place where we can examine what we will do to and for each other; what it means to be loyal, and what it means to be selfless. 

A statement; this life is fleeting and all we have is each other.

With thanks to Ruth, Mark, Milo and Fen, whose thoughts helped me gather and refine my own.


  1. Leonard Cohen ↩︎
  2. “Evil and Flowers” BONNIE PINK ↩︎
  3. [love is more thicker than forget] by e.e. cummings ↩︎
  4. “24 Hours” Heartworms ↩︎
  5. On One Side, June Gehringer ↩︎
  6. “Still Love” Teenage Wrist & Softcult ↩︎
  7. “BCS” Boy & Bear ↩︎
  8. “Shimmy” White Reaper & Spiritual Cramp ↩︎