Prometheus is a thief.
Or he is remembered as such. The myth itself is much less simply a storybook than that. And, as with any myth, there is more than one version and more than one thing to learn from any of them. In the broadest telling, Prometheus the Titan stole the fire that Zeus was withholding from humanity. In at least one telling, it is a rebellious act of care for humanity, and thus does Prometheus suffer eternally at the whims of cruel Olympians.
Prometheus, a translation of which is “fore thinker”, is also said to have had a hand in creating mankind, of moulding them from the very clay. Prometheus nurtured his progeny and set them to continue creation upon the earth from which they were formed.
Prometheus played with powers greater than himself, and in doing so committed hubristic transgressions against the gods.
Shun Skywalker is the best character in professional wrestling in my opinion, and I do not believe it to be a particularly close race. This is not to dismiss, minimise or disparage the work of other wrestlers telling great stories and performing great characters, but Skywalker provides something that I have yet to see in any other.
When it became clear that the intention was forming to write an exploration of Shun, I knew that I would not be able to approach his work within a typical ‘writing about wrestling’ framework. So much of what makes his work so compelling is in its atypicalities of how Shun himself approaches wrestling and character.
I am also not particularly interested in relitigating match results and championship win histories. Those cold facts of wrestling are the least interesting parts of the medium to me – and it is a medium within which contains multitudinous genres. In fact, I cover practically nothing about the wrestling side of wrestling in this piece.
I wish to look at Shun Skywalker as a character constructed within and of the narrative of Dragongate – in the physicality and space he occupies, the aesthetic values of his costuming, and the mental landscape of the character. Shun Skywalker as a metaphor, a fallen hero, a villain, and a figure of tragedy. What does “Shun Skywalker” really mean?
Thus, this piece has simmered for months as my experience and knowledge of Dragongate has grown, and my reading list has gained entry after entry.
When I wrote about the 2024 Dead or Alive survival cage match I did so in a near delirious flurry. Whilst in the process of writing that piece, I reached out to more than one person asking for their opinion of Skywalker in the match as I struggled to find any kind of solid reading on him. Since Shun has revealed himself to me piece by piece, like razor thin layers of sugar shell on a jawbreaker as they crack and dissolve. Even as I read essays and fictions that should have had nothing to do with wrestling at all. Often I would message someone a thought, or pose a vague question fraught with philosophy and receive the sharp response “is this about Shun again?”.
Yes. It is about Shun again.
I am not so self-involved to present this as an unequivocal true reading of Shun Skywalker – there are prominent elements of his presentation that I gloss over or eschew mentioning entirely. This is conscious on my part; a combination of ‘staying in my lane’ and playing to my analytical strengths in literature and theatre, and not just a little out of self-preservation. In exploring the madness of Shun Skywalker, I wonder if I might not have wandered into the shallow proscenium of my own.
all of yesterday
But first, the briefest sketch possible of the relevant elements of Skywalker’s backstory.
Watanabe Shun debuted as part of the class of 2016, and was quickly masked and rechristened Shun Skywalker. Through 2018 and 2019 he was part of Mochizuki Dojo – an almost-unit comprising the rookies of 2016 to 2018 and mentored by Mochizuki Masaaki – before he ejected himself from the unit to wrestle unaffiliated ahead of an excursion to Mexico.
Upon returning to Japan, Shun won the Dream Gate, the heavyweight title in the company, and formed his own unit named Masquerade. This unit would eventually crumble through a combination of warring with heel faction R.E.D, compounding losses, shifting loyalties, betrayals and escalating controlling behaviours from Shun.
January 12th 2022. Korakuen Hall. After a final miscommunication in the main event led Masquerade to lose the trios belts they held, Shun blew up at teammate Minoura Kota, losing the last thread of his sanity and joining R.E.D. The last elements of Masquerade would go their separate ways shortly after, and R.E.D would be rebranded into Z-Brats with Shun at the helm where he remains to this day.
This is not an adequate summary of the enormity and deftness with which this story was told, but it suits our purposes if you are unaware of Shun Skywalker before we begin.
I’m building a body of balsam and ash; I’m building a body with no God attached
Masks in wrestling have a long and storied history that I am not strictly equipped to explore. The history is as long as masks in theatre, and it is full of as much myth and legend. In this particular case, I am more interested in how the mask interacts with character-building as a symbol; the mask as a representation of what and who Shun Skywalker has become, and how it communicates that to the audience.
So we contend with the concept of how far the mask is also the character. Historically, we know what Watanabe Shun looks like, but Watanabe Shun is not Shun Skywalker much as Skywalker inhabits him. So, the mask is the character but the mask also shields the truth of Skywalker.
A much underrated power of the mask is what it allows you to see of the face beneath, and what it denies you. In truth there is little in wrestling with all its bodily exploitation that is quite so violent as the demystification of a character involved in the act of unmasking. Suddenly their form is more human and knowable. The mask can be redonned a hundred times, but the dispelled mystery cannot be reconstructed. Any unmasking becomes a radical, irrevocable shift in identity.
Shun wears a mask that covers all of his face – usually save for his mouth – and a bodysuit which covers him from head to toe, to the tips of his fingers. The only skin that is visible is his mouth, and the sliver of neck between the edge of his mask and the beginning of his collar. Denying the viewer readership of his face and body, for fear of being too accurately perceived. Shun Skywalker is terrified of being seen; but he forgets that imagination thrives in the ambiguous.
The structure of his mask filters attention towards his mouth, towards his voice. In an almost Beckettian manner the rest is stripped away, unimportant to the pathology of words.
Wearing a mask always risks ‘baking in’ an expression. The skill of the performer is to transcend that expression, to make it read as many different things even when the warp and weft of the material does not move. It recalls the Noh masks, which are built in such a way that the performer is able to convey subtle changes in emotion merely by tilting their head, thus allowing shadows to filter across the ridges of the masks at different angles, allowing for the illusion of shifting expression.
Shun’s masks have a fairly neutral expression. The design of these masks is not concerned with emulating a new, replacement face to build a character, but instead embracing the existence of the mask as a mask. The masks of Shun Skywalker signal themselves as masks to the consciousness of the viewer, rather than the illusion of a face. This is not a wolf, or a bird, or a dragon – this is a man wearing a mask because he does not want you to see his face.
The mesh over the eyes also confounds the ability to read or understand Shun at an emotional level. When you’re able to see through the mesh a little due to the lighting or the angle, it feels almost scandalous, a violation, a transgression to see the Real beneath. It is trite to say that “the eyes are the windows to the soul”, but by that token there is fertile ground upon which to analyse the denial of seeing them. How do we connect to someone emotionally when we cannot see their eyes? As put by the poet Anne Sexton; “our eyes are full of terrible confessions.” So what do we do when we no longer wish to confess?
By contrast, Strong Machine J is another wrestler in the company who also wears a mask which covers his eyes. Strong Machine J however is a character whose entire journey has been about his slow humanisation. The obscuring of the eyes in SMJ’s case is a tool to similarly eschew humanity, though this time to a much softer goal. SMJ has become more human through his story, despite these obfuscations.
Wrestling masks don’t quite work like Noh masks and do not have entirely the same goal but, mutatis mutandis, the principle remains the same. It is always impressive how masked wrestlers can still communicate such ranges of emotion without being able to actually read all of their features. Shun Skywalker achieves nearly every emotion by just the set of his mouth. He tilts his head and somehow his false eyes narrow.
Shun wears masks upon masks quite literally – often when making his entrances, he wears elaborately designed overmasks that recall totems and old gods. Occasionally he has a laser eye.
Shun will, and has, sacrificed other’s masks in order to retain his own – most notably Dragon Dia during the Masquerade era, but also Diamante in not dissimilar circumstances. Shun recognises that unmasking is its own form of violence, and he uses it as a tool against others. But with so much of his identity wrapped in his own mask, he will go out of his way to avoid losing it. Even after Dia’s unmasking and subsequent disappearance, he is still intrinsic enough to Shun’s dream of Masquerade that for a while Shun adopts Dia’s pink-and-white colour scheme for his own gear, desperate to retain his teammate in some way. To keep the fading dream of Masquerade alive.
No single word in any language ever has only one layer or one single dynamic to its meaning, and the roots of the word mask itself are a journey in literal, substantive nouns that explicit function, and poetics, what a mask’s metaphorical function and figurative implications can be. Aptly, what is the spirit of a mask? The Medieval Latin for mask is Masca, meaning all the things you would usually expect – a cover for the face, a layer of protective something or other – but there is a third meaning, one that suits my particular poetic yearnings when it comes to the construction of Shun Skywalker.
Masca also means witch or spirit, a nightmare.
Shun Skywalker is the nightmare of Dragongate, and he is a recurring one. Skywalker creates the monster to forget the iniquities of man. Shun Skywalker becomes a monster to absolve himself of the vagaries and responsibilities of being human; all the faults and flaws. The unbearable vulnerability of being perceived in all your joys and failings. To borrow a phrase; the mortifying ordeal of being known. In inhabiting the monster, he has carte blanche to be monstrous.
But mortification also means subjugation; an active and conscious self-disciplining of desire. It is the act of self-reduction in the face of shame. To abdicate authentic selfhood to avoid exposure, to mortify oneself is to make lesser and it is simultaneously revealing and injurious.
Denial is paradoxically revealing. By disguising, you reveal that there is something to be disguised. And Shun Skywalker seems to be all disguise.
Masks are also created in the likeness of the fearsome, abhorrent and Other upon ritualised ground so that we may find catharsis in their explication. We give form to the formless, and its tangibility makes it conquerable. So what happens when someone makes a mask for themselves, which is also an explication of themself?
Shun didn’t always wear a mask, nor did he always wear a bodysuit. At the moment of apotheosis, Shun leading the remains of R.E.D into their Christening as Z-Brats, he debuted a new look; the pattern of which he has maintained since. All black, covered from head-to-toe, Shun Skywalker is a shadow and a spectre. A gestalt of ideographs that haunts Dragongate like a particularly self-satisfied poltergeist.
Shun rarely, if ever, wears much of the yellow of the Z-Brats signature black and yellow.
Notably at Kobe World 2024 alongside (ex-Masquerade member now Z-Brats teammate) Jason Lee, Shun resurrected the signature aristocratic purple of the defunct unit, but fallen and once again subject to the distortion field that is the Shun Skywalker of today. A suit with near holographic designs: it creates an almost stereographic effect, producing the illusion of teeth, but further confusing the delineations of his shape. In certain lights he looks like an oil slick, like the depth of the shadows in the lacquerware that Junichiro Tanizaki describes as a “pattern on the surface of the night itself”. This is the suit he wears in his GAORA roster page image – the image that represents him and his identity in a kind of paratext.
Debuting in January 2025, Shun has another suit that is pure luminous Masquerade purple in colour, complete with filigree Venetian mask detailing across the mask. These symbols of Masquerade are continually distorted, perverted by their resurgent use in villainous Shun Skywalker’s visual lexicon. Into an almost iconoclastic dismantling of something that Shun already broke for himself.
After all, what is a masquerade but an assembly of people wearing disguises; masks anonymising revellers in order to liberate their hedonic impulses, whilst removing the threat of accountability.
Ironically, so much of Shun’s identity seems to have been wrapped up with the form and ideals of Masquerade. Aesthetically, but also in the foundations of a Shun who had come back from excursion, won the Dream Gate championship, and immediately put form to his own dreams in the creation of Masquerade. The fracturing of the unit was such an existential threat to Shun’s sense of personhood that it caused him to shatter in response, to experience a disturbance, from which he has yet to truly recover.
Something in Shun still calls out to Masquerade – we would not be seeing such overt calls to the history now, three years after the disbandment of the unit, were it not still immensely important to the way Shun Skywalker is contextualised, both in relation to himself and the characters which surround him. That he still hinges so much of the external understanding of his character of the parts left over from the saga of Masquerade.
And in the hearts and minds of the audience, he is so much more compelling for being someone who had once shown some goodness.
Shun Skywalker wears masks upon masks.
I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth
Shun’s ring presence and comportment frequently feel like a transplant of the cackling Dr Frankenstein in James Whale’s 1931 Universal picture, hollering “it’s alive!!” over the slowly animating corpse, the shambling body of Boris Karloff – but much as Shun joyfully emulates these campy melodramas, there is also much of the novel itself about Shun Skywalker.
Mary Shelley’s seminal 1818 novel Frankenstein pioneered science-fiction as a genre. Rather than what modern audiences may consider scifi – post-industrial, sterile, extraterrestrial – Frankenstein is a novel that is very much about the natural world. It is a novel of world travel, soaring and sweeping vistas, and great imagination. It is also a novel of the deeply personal; ambition, personhood, Otherness, human capacity for violence, the responsibility of a parent for a child. Of a Maker for the Made.
It would be easy to draw parallels to Mary Shelley’s Creature, in the legitimately unasked-for tragedies of his existence – Skywalker in many ways is a similar monster of circumstance. However, in Shun Skywalker I do not see the Creature; or not only. Instead, I see Victor Frankenstein. A man who cannot see the harm of his actions until it is much too late for regret let alone remorse, there is only the reckoning.
A great improviser, more so than a great planner; he is so often the unwitting architect of his own downfall. Needling other units into conflict, and then being surprised when Z-Brats become embroiled in the consequences because he forgets that other people have power and agency.
Masquerade was Shun’s perfect creation, or the dream of one. Unfortunately, when other people’s desires and wants become embroiled in another’s idea of perfection, things get messy. Unconsciously, in the building of Masquerade Shun was not actually looking for people to create his ideal unit, he was looking for puppets.
Victor Frankenstein did not consider what might happen if his creation could think.
Frankenstein transgressed natural boundaries to pursue more perfect science and so concerned with building life itself, he forgets that Life is not just electrochemical processes that can be mastered. The things that make life are also matters of personhood; free will and the soul. Where Prometheus could set free his creations upon the earth with trust, Frankenstein feared the imperfections of his creation and sought its destruction, and Skywalker sought a level of devotion to his vision and control that denied the will and humanity of his pawns.
Shun may be in denial of how highly emotionally driven he is, but that makes him vulnerable in its own ways. One is driven to construct more and more elaborate cages to maintain control and insulate against the free will of the other. He is a man who has been failed by vulnerability because he has refused to be vulnerable.
Probably the most famous lines from Frankenstein come in chapter 17. The doctor and the Creature are engaged in conversation. Victor is terrified of his creation – knows him to be capable of great violence and destruction – but the creature is “content to reason” with him. And indeed the rest of the chapter that follows is a tense negotiation. The Creature wishes for Frankenstein to make him a companion, and Victor fears putting another being so powerful and so capable of great harm in the world.
During this interchange, the creature utters the words “if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”
These lines resonate through Shun Skywalker, and indeed through any wrestler who has become fallen in some way. A person inspires love; it is a resonant emotion. There is almost a passivity to it even in its positivity. It is beautiful and honest in its spontaneity.
But fear is caused. It is wilful and intentional; inflicted. Skywalker is generally “content to reason”, with a subjective and malleable definition of what reason might be, but in this iteration he is built to cause fear and awe. In the way he looks and moves and talks, he is a gothic cathedral of a man.
And Shun is a liar who no one believes.
To bring the abstracted concept of a constructed self into the realm of the physical once more; Dragongate fans have an only slightly ironic running joke about pointing out the padding that Skywalker may or may not have incorporated into his bodysuit. As frivolous as it seems, it certainly plays into the concept of construction I am trying to explicate – especially the idea of obfuscating a clear reading of the self by putting up literal and metaphorical barriers. The suit is skin tight, but there is yet another layer between the body and the viewer, another physical untruth. This conscious building of a body is an insulating layer against perception and the harm that can do. An outward projection of monstrousness so the soft skin below cannot be seen. The eye is disloyal.
The wrestler’s greatest tool is their physicality and not just in the sense of what one body can do to another.
The least inviting and moving performances in professional wrestling are the ones where the performer is not possessed of themself; either they have not yet gained the gross and fine motor skills to convey a performance convincingly, or they have not yet found themselves deeply enough mentally or emotionally to use their physical self to make an internality readable for an audience. Our greatest film actors can tell whole stories with their eyes – stage actors, conversely, due to their necessary physical distance from the audience cannot rely purely on their eyes, and wrestling is much the same. Though, there is some tension between wrestling as a live entertainment medium, and as a film or television equivalent; some things play to one, and less so the other.
Skywalker is incredibly self-possessed as a performer. He is fun to watch, unambiguously a once in a lifetime kind of wrestler. He is a thrilling, dynamic and fairly fearless performer. He has immense control over his body in both the sense of the wrestler who does wrestling moves, but also in the theatrical sense. He knows how to convey mood, emotion and attitude in his body alone.
So who is Shun’s maker? His sire? Against whom does he rail?
Masquerade haunts Shun, and Shun haunts Masquerade, and both haunt the narratives of everyone who was previously involved in the unit. And Masquerade haunts every viewer who watched the drama unfold.
My conjecture is that in ways metaphorical and literal Shun is the architect of Shun. The evil of heel Skywalker constructed as a buffer between himself and the clay he refuses to believe he has been moulded from. A face that is by Shun Skywalker but not of him.
He is decalcomania; the act of placing two painted pieces of paper face to face and squeezing them together to produce a mirror image. Skywalker formed in this compression of half-faces to construct a whole. Abstract reflections of himself so as to suggest infinity. How many times has the tough carapace of Skywalker slipped, and the tender flesh beneath become visible?
But Dragongate is also the machine that built Shun Skywalker – and in the machine this abstraction soon becomes a self-interrogation.
Is there no play to ease the anguish of a torturing hour?
In her discussion of David Lynch’s film work in a YouTube video entitled INLAND EMPIRE: what is going on here?? film critic, author and musician May Leitz (NyxFears) summarises the Lynchian ethos of narrative with the words “cinema is… the dream of reality, that can never truly be reality.” Such that even the most naturalistic of films can only ever be a representation of reality and not reality itself. Cinema is only ever a construct, and that cognitive gap wherein the viewer entangles with the notion of suspension of disbelief is where filmmakers can play with that which is unreal, or challenge concepts of realism or literalism. Is professional wrestling not itself a dream of reality? A dream of sports and a dream of theatre?
Like any fiction it is the pretence of truth. A facsimile, a simulacrum, that uses a verisimilitudinous analogue of sports to invest a viewer. Writ large, much like the soap opera, wrestling is a theatre of human nature; a production that is at once consciously false but often reflecting something emotionally true even in its absurdities.
To reference another of Lynch’s works; No hay banda! And yet we hear a band.
Mark Fisher describes the iconic scene in Club Silencio from Mulholland Drive as “ostensibly demystifying.” Similarly to all the moments of notable falsity and fantasy in wrestling, “the Club Silencio performance tells us that what we are witnessing is an illusion, whilst at the same time showing us that we will not be able to treat it as such.”
This echoes Hamlet’s soliloquy at the end of Act II, scene ii from William Shakespeare’s 1601 magnum opus Hamlet. In this scene he is left alone on stage after seeing the actors rehearse the play within a play which is due to be performed before the Danish court and King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle – who Hamlet believes has murdered his father to usurp the throne:
“Now I am alone.
O, what rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his own conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?”
Hamlet speaks of his fascination with the deftness with which the actor in the play-within-a-play can summon facsimile emotions that move an audience, despite not feeling them authentically, despite the actors and the audience all knowing that it is a performance. There is no band, it is not “real”, but we experience and respond as if it is. Il n’y a pas d’orchestre.
Wrestling is this self-same consensual deception, but the boundaries of it are a little less concrete than that of a conventional play or a movie. When an actor steps off the stage, away from the set, unless they are committing to a level of Method acting typified by Stanislavski and his ilk, it is fundamentally understood that their character has been sloughed off. Not abandoned, but put aside to be redonned at the next performance.
A character is generally confined to a place, to a work. In wrestling, a character is confined to a person – a wrestler brings their own mise-en-scene with them into new contexts, even if they might perform a different narrative function in this new place.
Wrestling as a performance only ends when there are no spectators to be performed to – once a wrestler is out of the ring, they must still retain performance through the hall until they are ensconced backstage, some may retain character when signing autographs and selling merchandise. At the very least there is generally not a conscious acknowledgement of the artifice of wrestling. To do so would be considered gauche, a breaking of the social contract around wrestling, a transgression, and a violation of the work that a wrestler is doing. In many ways it is like interacting with mascot performers at a theme park – if you are not engaging with the fictionalised reality that is delineated by the space, why are you even there?
In the soliloquy, Hamlet describes the act of acting as “a remaking of the self”, forcing the self to fit into a conceit or a previously devised notion. A man must put his cognition into a constructed place that is not emotionally authentic in order to perform. A creation, but it is also described as “a fiction… a dream of passion” and Hamlet asks of the audience is it not “monstrous” that this can be done? Fundamentally this frames acting as a form of manipulation, to take the emotions of the spectator and overlay a spectre of truth. That something untruthful can provoke truth. How startling it is that we should treat acting as a benign, acceptable form of lying.
He goes on to speak of how powerful a performance the actor might be able to give had he Hamlet’s true motivations and real emotions to bring into his affect;
“What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.”
The actor does not truly mourn Hecuba, because Hecuba is nothing to him but a name on a page. He has not lived a life that has known Hecuba. Whereas Hamlet truly mourns his father, the king murdered by his own brother, and he speculates that the ability to use such profound truth could make an actor’s portrayal of grief so powerful as to “make mad the guilty and appal the free”. This becomes the crux of his scheme to propel Claudius to admit to killing Hamlet’s father – to use performance as a method of compelling truth.
I think Shun Skywalker’s final break from reality in the climax of the January 2022 Korakuen show is an honest one, or as honest as Shun can be in his desperation. It is the final dissolution of sanity from grief, as his plans crumbled around him. The literalisation of his dreams and ideals falls apart, and through that his constructed ideas of his own selfhood is put under threat, and the only way he can cope is to flee.
But now does Shun mourn Hecuba?
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t
At this moment, perhaps even too late in this essay for an ingredient so essential to the crucible of Shun Skywalker, we begin to fully contend with the question of madness.
It is always challenging to write about madness without using stigmatising language, especially when dealing with the fictional extravagances of professional wrestling. I have done my best, but honestly Shun makes it very hard. Representations of madness are so intrinsic to his character and story, and they are as often broad and cartoonish as they are subtle and beautiful.
‘Madness’ itself is a complex, undulating, and undeniably political word. Though the word ‘psychopath’ is applied to Skywalker in sobriquet, I avoid using this term. Psychopathy is much more a pop psychological concept than anything truly clinical – the average person’s understanding of a psychopath as a knife-wielding serial killer, or a Patrick Bateman-esque dark-sided aesthete, is totally at odds from the lived experience of actual people with psychopathy or sociopathy. Any person has the capacity for immense harm, ‘insane’ or not.
Madness I find to be a much more nuanced and compelling word to use in this case; it has more poetry. I relate to it. And by this metric, we might recognise that a psychopath is not necessarily ‘mad’.
Shun identifies himself readily as mad, in many ways it is focalised as the foremost thing about him. His capriciousness, his unpredictability, and his disturbance is an ever threatening thing, lingering in the background and waiting for others to show any weakness at which he may strike. But capriciousness and unpredictability are not the sole domain of the mad. Then is it perhaps Shun’s viciousness and cruelty, his calculation that make him mad? The joy he takes in causing pain and conflict? In this case ‘mad’ becomes an overt moral judgement but he is not the only one even within his own faction to exhibit particular shades of sadism.
Shun’s madness is a literary one; that is to say fictionalised to the point of unreality. He is not diagnosable because he is not real. However, madness as a storytelling tool is the question here. How and why is madness the thing Shun has come to within the narrative of Dragongate?
In Hamlet, the eponymous Prince of Denmark spends the play in a crisis of action. He is paralysed by indecision. After the murder of his father by his uncle Claudius, Hamlet wants so much to be an agent of vengeance, but through inability to commit to a course of action or accept responsibility, he becomes mad. He wonders in the most famous speech of the play whether to die by suicide might even be easier than to be trapped in this indecision. Depending on your interpretation of the text Hamlet’s madness is either a grand scheme, a tragic lunacy born of mourning, or a combination of both. Perhaps he is mad and only believes himself to be acting.
Under this “antic disposition”, Hamlet is free from the self that is beholden to his role in the Danish Court – he is no longer overtly held to the standards of polite society, moral conscience, or good taste. He can, and does in the case of Ophelia, say whatever he might like without answering to a sense of propriety, and he is uncaring of the damage he might cause. Through his madness he is simultaneously liberated from having to act, and empowered to to act free from consequence.
Or, seemingly free from consequence; more so it is a reframing of what consequence actually means in the context of the play. Rather than social ostracism – and this is necessarily without even touching the class implications wrapped up in the play – Hamlet’s consequence is a consequence of genre. Eventually the play, a tragedy, catches up to him and in the final scene Hamlet’s death comes at the end of the poisoned sword of Laertes.
How true is Shun’s madness? Is it like that of Hamlet – an antic disposition reportedly donned in order to throw onlookers off his schemes of vengeance? An affectation of greater monstrosity, or a tacit admission of truth – a vessel for it? Or is the madness an embracement of baseness necessary so one might indulge in behaviours beyond the pale, without submitting to the accountability expected of the sane?
Shun’s instability that led to the crumbling of Masquerade and decimated nearly all his interpersonal relationships was arguably real. In the weeks leading up to the final implosion of Masquerade, Shun had a true antic period that led him to desperate, injurious and self-destructive behaviours. By the time he was perhaps able to gain any clarity on what had happened and the wreckage he had caused, like Victor Frankenstein the damage was too great and could not be soothed, repaired, or hardly even reckoned with. Rather than becoming a figure of true and noble Tragedy by succumbing to the consequences of his hamartia – in the finality of death like Victor Frankenstein and Hamlet before him – he has instead resolved himself to be the villain. Doing the work of repentance and healing is too great a task.
“I am malicious,” says Frankenstein’s creature, “because I am miserable.”
And he is miserable because he is alone.
Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance
Even to Japanese speakers Shun’s tracts are difficult to parse, his discursive paths are challenging to follow; not least because of all the words, words, words. He is contradictory, actively hypocritical in thought, speech and action. Still, Shun frequently knows exactly where to press to force others to react to him. He thrives in spaces of ambiguity because they obfuscate him, make him seem more mysterious and abstruse in order to dissuade onlookers from looking deeper. Shun is walking melodrama – baffling and histrionic, but alighting something real in the human spirit. His abstract and abject presentation causes a fascination in the viewer.
Humans respond strangely to ambiguity, and look closer in order to simplify and solve what troubles them. This entire essay is a testament to how much Shun Skywalker troubles me.
And are we supposed to pity Shun to any degree? In 2025 he is perhaps much too far gone to be pitiable in the truly empathetic sense. Does this lack of pitiability make him less tragic? Or is it more tragic to see people making the same mistakes, over and over again?
Wrestling can never be a true tragedy because its narrative structure doesn’t lend itself too well to a classical model of Tragedy. Being that wrestling functions much in the way of a soap opera, it never has a true end. Characters move in and out of storylines, but they rarely leave the narrative entirely – the only true moments where a wrestling character is “written out” of the narrative are all ordained by real life circumstances; parting ways with the company, injury, retirement, or death. Tragic events may occur within the linear narrative of wrestling, but they only inform it as a melodrama. A tragedy has a fixed end point. The sense of dire inevitability, the inexorable hand of Fate, is compulsory to the form. Wrestling can never be truly Tragic in that sense because there is too much space for freedom, for the tragic figure to escape or positively reverse their fortune. Redemption is always possible in wrestling, no matter how dark the night may look, but it cannot be for a work to be truly tragic and produce cathartic results in the viewer.
What is Shun’s hamartia (his ‘fatal flaw’ in the parlance of Greecian drama)? Is it arrogance? Unfortunately for all and sundry, Shun Skywalker has an abundance of wrestling skill – and please remember that even after all this we are still talking about professional wrestling – any boasts of prowess are not unfounded. He is a tragedy that is now beyond the bounds of pity, because his actions are his own regardless of his cognisance or the reality of his madness.
Villainy is an indulgence of, and revelry in, baseness. And that is attractive to people because in many ways it’s easier. Struggle is perceived as noble. A person’s caliber is measured in how much they have resisted and overcome.
“You may make me the most miserable of men,” says Victor Frankenstein in confrontation with his creature. “But you will never make me base in my own eyes.” Yet one man’s base is another man’s liberation. We already know that Victor is condescending and possessive, enamored of his own genius, and surtout capable of desecrating the deceased for scientific progress. To this man of variable morality, what is a baseness to which he cannot be reduced?
Eve and Adam fall from the Garden of Eden because they are victims of a temptation which they could not resist. Villainy is often a seduction. Sometimes it is an act of cowardice, petulance. Rarely is it considered as a refuge or an escape from the arduousness of maintaining Goodness. A villain who enjoys their badness is worse for it, insane for abandoning shame over their transgressions.
“O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!… That one may smile and smile and be a villain,” laments Hamlet of his mother.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 5, scene i, Theseus and Hippolyta speak of the ‘madness’ of the lovers’ tale. Theseus says to his new wife;
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.”
Theseus outlines how these three types of people (lunatics, lovers, and poets), though of different disciplines, for lack of a better word, all find imagination in similar ways. They see outside of reality because of, through their inspirations.
There are conceptualisations of genius as being a transitory experience – that one is possessed by genius or inspiration, but it is a temporary state and not an enduring existence. One holds genius for a period of time, creates a work of inspiration, and then it moves on to be a muse to another. Though not the same in totality Theseus’ speech here implies a similar transitory, kinetic idea of inspiration. In the use of seething, a word that conjures negative connotations of wrath and tumult, even the lover and the poet, two states that are generally considered to be positive human experiences, are also aligned with this same seething of the madman.
Shun has such a seething brain. In his relentless pursuit of Jason and Jacky he is the mad lover. In his ability to craft manipulations and hypnotise with words he is the poet, giving name to “airy nothing”. And the lunatic, who has seen “more devils than hell can hold.”
This seething of the madman who sees beyond is reflected in Dazai Osamu’s seminal, and keenly difficult to read, novel No Longer Human. The narrator of which, Yozo, is deeply entrenched in a depressive nihilism, anxiety and agoraphobia, which he has through his life found ways and means to socially mask – to pass as a person whilst feeling entirely outside of humanity – but is rapidly destroying him. Yozo is not mad in a traditional sense, but he is affected profoundly by what modern audiences would perceive as mental illness much like Hamlet.
“There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.”
More than that, the sentiment of craving humanity stays apparent. The disconnect and disdain for humanity worsened by the pervasive craving of social integration, of belonging. “It seems that while I was extremely afraid of people,” Yozo writes in the early pages of the novel, “I couldn’t bring myself to give them up.”
No Longer Human is brutal in its exploration of alienation, andI do not speak precisely this level of nihilism and tragedy into Shun. It will always be filtered through the context of wrestling and its particular quirks and vagaries. I think however that this is the kind of melancholia that echoes through Shun’s construction. In how he seeks alliances and allegiances, even if he has a tempestuous relationship with loyalty.Shun. It will always be filtered through the context of wrestling and its particular quirks and vagaries. I think however that this is the kind of melancholia that echoes through Shun’s construction. In how he seeks alliances and allegiances, even if he has a tempestuous relationship with loyalty.
A lonely man is an unnatural man and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness
A foil is made to be a reflection of another character, who brings into relief the qualities – both negative and positive – of the protagonist or focalised character. Shun is an antagonist who believes himself to be the protagonist, and yet he is desperate for his foil to be everyone. In order to disguise which qualities are actually oppositional he disperses the responsibility amongst multiple people so that the contrast is less keen, less visible.
Simultaneously however, he seeks to create his oppositional mirrors – a Laertes to his Hamlet – so that he might slay the worst of himself, his weaknesses, in effigy. These are the devils that hell can’t hold, the monsters of ever more horrible shapes.
He attempts to do so without destroying himself, but this is internecine by nature. In the climax of the play, Hamlet and Laertes slay each other – are each other’s destruction because there is no room for them to exist alongside their mirrors. After all, every time he reached out to the image in the water, it fractured, and Narcissus died pining.
For Shun there is no reckoning with his own shortcomings because he won’t admit them as his own responsibility. In committing himself to his madness he attempts to abdicate all accountability for them. He either seeks to possess that which he desires in himself as the mad lover laying claim via unreciprocated courtship, or he looks to break the other so that their quality may no longer be noble in comparison.
Shun makes enemies in order to externalise and defeat his own preoccupations, and in that narcissism seeks that others might reflect the same fixation back onto him – become the point upon which they define themselves. In order to assuage his need for connection, he has involved himself with near everyone’s stories.
But nothing can be fixed, and the soul cannot be made whole again, until the madness is done. Can the Shun Skywalker who has caused so much chaos, literal grief, even truly make amends enough to recover?
Or will it be as Victor Frankenstein cautions his creature: “You will return again and seek their kindness, and you will meet their detestation.”
When Shun finally defeats YAMATO in the main event of 1 vs 1 in January 2025, he starts to suddenly speak of being bored of Dragongate. Never mind that the journey to this point took nearly ten years, he declares he will turn outward looking for greater thrills. At Gate of Bayside later that same month, he reiterates that he is not interested in dethroning YAMATO for the Open the Dream Gate Championship. In his words, there is no one worthy left on the stage;
“Now I am alone,
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”
Or maybe he’s just evil. I don’t know.
I mourn for thee, Prometheus, minished and brought low.
Sources, and other contributions:
Drama:
William Shakespeare. Hamlet. 1601
William Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1596
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Prometheus Unbound. 1820
Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. C. 479.
Poetry:
Anne Sexton. The Black Art. 1962
John Milton. Paradise Lost. 1667
Novels:
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. 1818
Daphne Du Maurier. My Cousin Rachel. 1951
Non-Fiction:
Junichiro Tanizaki. In Praise of Shadows. 1933
Jeanne Ellen Petroelle. Dancing with Ophelia: Reconnecting Madness, Creativity, and Love. 2018
Mark Fisher. The Weird and the Eerie. 2017
Simon Critchley; Jamieson Webster. The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing. 2013
Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. 1938
Robert Venturi; Denise Scott Brown; Steven Izenour. Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. 1976
Music:
Dessa. Poor Atlas. 2010
The Burning Hell. Duck or Decorated Shed. 2025
Film:
Shin Kamen Rider. 2023. Directed by Anno Hideaki.
Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch
Frankenstein. 1931. Directed by James Whale
Video:
May Leitz (Nyx Fears). INLAND EMPIRE: what is going on here??