Tradition.
Tradition is what Lethal Weapon drives him, motivates him, what has set him on a path against me.
Not the tradition of professional wrestling, but rather the tradition of everyone that seems to oppose me having their head crammed way up their own ass.
Because if you want a traditional professional wrestler you don't have to look much further than me.
This sport has always been about size and spectacle. About larger than life physical specimens with equally large and vibrant personalities. People come to wrestling shows to be awed, to be entertained, to stare in wonder at feats of athleticism that the average man on the street is utterly incapable of performing.
They come to watch other human beings doing flips, twists, and rotations as they soar through the air. They come to watch masterminds sizing up their foes and picking them apart, reducing them to a physical wreck as they destroy a single body part. They come to watch behemoths trade blows that would fell a normal human being.
I am a sight to behold, a wondrous creature from another realm of existence. I am a powerful, agile, beautiful titan. I tower over the vast majority of humanity. There are less than a hundred men in the US that are taller than I am. The tallest living woman in the world has a scant four inches of height on me.
But I'm not one of these immobile, lumbering oafs that seem to flock to professional wrestling because their creaky knees can't take the NBA. I can not only climb the ropes, but I can walk on them. Not only can I walk on them, I can run on them. My agility, balance, and grace are unparalleled in the professional wrestling world.
Not only am I huge, not only am I powerful, not only am I agile, but I'm also tough. I can take a beating that would literally kill any and every human being on the face of this earth. I can compete in the most terrible, horrible, dire wrestling matches with the most agonizing stipulations in existance week in and week out, night after night, year after year and I will never break. I will never erode. I will never wear down.
And on top of that? I'm an interesting person, with a vibrant, passionate personality. I am capable of entertaining the masses with anything ranging from dark pronouncements, threats of violence, excruciating detail of the violence which I can unleash, or I can be light and funny, like I used to be.
I used to be bouncy and happy, joyful and bubbly. I came into work each week with a smile on my face and a spring in my step. My promos used to be filled with comedic silliness, strange banter, and delightful weirdness.
So not only am I capable of effectively using a microphone, unlike certain members of the ULW roster who break out in hives when they get near a microphone, or a promo camera, but I am able to deliver a spectrum of emotion.
Ask one of the darkity dark batshit dungeon fucks to do something lighthearted. Ask them to do something that makes little kids giggle, rather than recoil in fear. You're not going to get Brandon fucking Vow out here making the tiny tots laugh with his goofy dragoncat companion. You put Nightrain on screen with some sort of animal and he's going to pull an Ozzy and bite its fucking head off.
And I'm reliable. I have competed on each and every ULW show since we debuted. I am the sole person on the roster to have fifteen appearances under her belt. Fifteen matches. That means I've wrestled on two more shows than Jason King has. I don't get sick. I don't get injured. I don't go smoke crack in the parking lot and eat Jackson Adams' funny pizza and produce shitty matches that make baby Jesus cry.
I'm what every decent professional wrestling promoter dreams about, and do you know what? I haven't even been on TV for a year yet. I'm awesome now, and I'm only going to get better. I can hold my own against the likes of Jason King and Willow Wilkes now. Just imagine what I'm going to be like a year or two down the road. Or five. Or ten.
I have every trait that correlates with success in this business. My match with Adam and Willow was not only the highest rated TV segment in ULW history, but it was also the recipient of the biggest star rating that ULW has had to date. Critically acclaimed, publicly adored, tremendous ratings draw Kalinda Kriegsdottir!
So what's put a bug in Lethal's butt about me? What exactly is it about me that isn't traditional, that riles him up, that sends him into a disgusting, mouth-frothing fit of masturbatory hatred?
Well it's that pro wrestling has been the domain of white dudes. A certain Stamford, Connecticut based promotion has never had a person of color as its top champion, for example. The best they've got is a Samoan fella whose complexion is noticeably lighter than the hoary hide of the Orange Goblin at its darkest and most leathery.
It took until 1992 before a black man won an internationally recognized World class title, 87 years after the birth of the original World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship Title. You can count the number of black world champions whose titles can be traced to the original belt on your fingers and have room to spare.
And of all those myriad titles, do you know how many women World champions there have been? The same number of books that have been read by Champion the Wonder Horse. The same number of people that are actually entertained any time Angel Kash can find a few seconds from her busy schedule to speak on air. None. Nada. Zero. Zilch.
IWC and ULW have had precisely one black champion, Orlando Cruze, and that was AFTER he sacrificed his melanin at the crossroads to the pro wrestling devil to become an alien plant monster with his brains in his armpits that made him capable of no-selling cage top piledrivers.
SCW? I have no idea. I've never watched it. Considering all the entitled suckwads in IWC and ULW that crawled out of the place, I've dubbed it a wretched hive of scum and villainy and have no interest in poking through its archives to discern its umpteen years worth of World champions. I'd have to watch, shudder, Jason Wheeler promos.
"Hey, I'm an Ultimate MUSCLE guy! I'm a girl pretending to be a man from Legend of Zelda! Nope, now I'm a ancient vampire from days long gone by who happens to have biological siblings, none of which predate the Nixon administration. Oh! I saw a new outfit I want the company seamstress to make me, I'm changing my gimmick again for the sixth time this calendar year!"
Is THAT the tradition you're looking to defend, Harris? The history of exclusion? The decades of inequality. Trying to struggle against the tyranny of egalitarianism? Clinging valiantly to the shining ideals of sexism and racism waving the Confederate flag proudly in your Ku Klux Klan hood while you mutter your rage about how the male gender is having its balls crushed under the stiletto heel of femi-nazi-ism.
I doubt it. I give it like maybe a ten percentage chance of being the reason. But it's just so gods-damned stupid that I figured I ought to address it. Because if there's one thing I've learned being trapped on this obnoxious ball of a planet it's that you should never underestimate the capacity for human stupidity.
It isn't the tradition of professional wrestling itself Nick Harris is seeking to uphold. The promotion of powerful, agile, charismatic people.
It isn't the tradition of the unfortunate white male, clinging with all his might as the base of power and privilege that have been his by seeming divine right begin to erode away as the rest of humanity decides that it doesn't want to be under the boot of Mighty Whitey anymore.
It isn't even trying to protect the business from the big scary blue monster that's responsible for inflicting injuries on schmucks like Adam and Mr. Joshua. Because seriously, it'd be the most fucking hypocritical thing in the world. I've injured all of two people, both of which were perfectly capable of walking around after the attacks.
Mr. Harris, on the other hand, has at least two corpses to his name. Well, so do I. I'm not exactly sure what my body count is. You kind of lose track after the first hundred or so mooks as an adventurer. But my kills aren't my pro wrestling co-workers.
Cell Block died of complications stemming from injuries suffered during a match with the aptly named Lethal Weapon. I don't think Luke Tanner even made it out of the ring alive.
And let's face it, if Harris was here because someone's this horrible, terrible danger to the other wrestlers, he'd be here for Mya Denton. Not only does she have the same number of injuries racked up that I have, she's actively seeking out more all the time and carries around her chosen weapon everywhere. Cattle prod in the mouth is her signature. Me? I've just used what's on hand. Mya has a whole theme going, making it obvious she's a premeditated serial offender.
And even if my Onyx Prismatic Superplex did end Adam's career, I don't think I'm the one to blame for it. After all, Mogui yanked him out of the ring, which could easily have aggravated any neck or back injury he might have suffered.
And honestly, the injury couldn't have been TOO dire. Adam walked his creepy eyed self right down to the ring along with the rest of Weeping Willow's menagerie later in the evening. Cindy Todd probably got pissed that he failed to defeat Jason King and shoved a cactus up his rectum that perforated his colon and caused a severe infection and has put Adam on the list for an ass transplant.
I'm not stupid, Harris. I'm not like OTHER prominent women in this sport, too stupid to actually WATCH the program they participate in each and every week to be informed of the goings on around you.
You're reporting to somebody. You were so happy you were fit to burst when you discovered what any six year old with a DS and a copy of Pokemon knows: that cold is opposed by fire. Weeeee! Whoop de doo, such an incredible leap of logic!
So I know the real reason Nicholas F. Harris has come out of retirement and is all up in my grill smelling of mothballs and sticking his overly large nose in my business. See he's not just coming out of retirement as a professional wrestler, but he's also coming out of retirement in his OTHER career; a hired gun. A hit man. An assassin. A mercenary thug that will do nasty things to people for the sake of the almighty dollar.
"Tradition" is just his excuse, the justification he's using to get the world to try and believe that he's coming after me for reasons of his own rather than the fact that someone is lining his pockets to do the deed.
And we all know who it is, ladies and gentlemen. It's the same people that have been trying to demean and discredit me from the moment I stepped into a pro wrestling ring. The same people who have hounded me here in ULW the moment I first saw success and became this federation's breakout star.
The Shadow Cartel.
Angel Kash is a talentless hack who tried to tar me as an ugly, unmarketable, ratings pariah. Lenore Price-Mason tried to ruin my matches for months to try and springboard herself to stardom, and fell flat on her face. The whole of New Eden combined tried to stop me and found out that hard way that while you can put me down, you can't keep me down.
Everything they've tried to throw at me in ULW has failed. They cannot get the job done out there in the ring. The fact that I don't break has finally managed to pierce their empty little heads and the innate weirdness filter that most human beings seem to have.
Seriously. I'm a seven foot tall, bright blue, fire-breathing, water-teleporting dragoness. I display these abilities all the time. I can make mist like I'm a living fucking fog machine. One of my trademark moves is to blow sub zero air into my opponent's lungs via a kiss. This isn't a flag pole sticking out of my ass, it's a fully functional ten foot tail that I use in a large variety of offensive, defensive, and supportive ways.
And yet still people like Angel Kash and Lethal Weapon seem to insist that I'm not what I seem, that I'm a lie, that I'm not a real dragon. That I'm somehow disgracing the wrestling business by stating that I'm a partially non-human creature from a different world in a different universe. That I'm somehow a liar because I state that I was summoned here via sorcery.
That somehow magic being real is perfectly fine when New Eden's dark forces demonically possess someone, but it's totally fake and not a thing when used to rip unwilling dragonesses from their homes and thus forcing them to get a job of some sort because you people hate fun and have zero magical power to make things interesting.
I'm a seven foot tall woman whose primary talents are beating the crap out of people, killing monsters, producing witty, comedic banter, and making pizza. And let's face it, I make more money and get more exposure by being a pro wrestler and utilizing my seven foot frame than I would, say, in the WNBA.
A significant portion of the seven footers in the US are employed by the NBA. Seriously. Fifteen to twenty percent of all the men over seven feet in height in the US are employed by the NBA. I'm sure there are even more being employed by the various professional wrestling feds out there. I can name a dozen seven footers that have competed in ULW and IWC without even having to think hard.
This is where tall people end up. Well, if they don't want to risk catching whatever sexually transmitted plague that bred inside Wilt Chamberlain after he slept with several thousand women. I'm sure that festering rot can survive for years exposed to open air.
I'm huge and most of my life experience is beating the fuck out of people. So after having been accidentally abducted from my own world why WOULDN'T I go into the world of professional wrestling.
I can't go into MMA, after all. They don't have a weight division for me. I weigh as much as any three women's division fighters put together. My tail alone's about the size of one of those ladies, for pete's sake.
Weapon's said on Twitter that he has "standards" because he's never said he's from another world or another universe. No shit. Aside from a metamorphosis from a skinny looking dude into an overly ripped bodybuilder, which can easily be explained by the usage of steroids, and a mosquito-like proboscis that is supposedly within the limits of normal human genetics plus plastic surgery, Harris is obviously a normal human being.
Me? I'm obviously not normal. I literally cannot possibly be a product of normal human reproduction. And even being a genetic freak would only provide me with peaks and a 141 ⅓% chance of victory at Sackerfice.
So I'm A, a cyborg, B, a robot, or C, a genetically engineered and artificially aged lab specimen. And it is an absolute testament to the depths of human stupidity that I have to explain how stupid those three options are.
If someone had the tech to make a prosthetic tail, a humanoid robot indistinguishable from a living being, or use DNA like a child would use LEGO bricks they're not going to be using it to make TOPS a few million bucks by tossing it into a pro wrestling ring.
These are technologies that would change the world, that would make billions if not trillions, and make Angel Kash's GNP of Australia-level fortune look like chump change. They would usher in a new age of cyberpunk era where artificial limbs can be created that are superior to mundane human appendages, a dystopia where menial labor has been removed entirely from the hands of humanity, or a world where you can order the man or woman of your dreams created from scratch. Even if your dreams are wet ones involving characters from Disney's Gargoyles or one of the X-Men.
Seriously, you people calling me Barney the Dinosaur, or Silas Mason calling me fucking Baby Bop. I look like the lovechild of Mystique and Demona for pity's sake! And it's only going to get more obvious in the years to come when my wings come in and my legs take on a digitigrade configuration.
Yeah, that's something you people don't have nagging at the back of your mind. The fact that one day your collection of shirts and shoes are going to become totally unwearable. Well, maybe if you have tremendous weight swings or something like you're Oprah.
Come on, Harris! Try and use the thinkmeats that you keep below that goofy-ass haircut and those obscene muttonchops. Being from another world is the LEAST ridiculous thing that could be used to explain my origins.
The most ridiculous thing here between the two of us, Weapon, is your excuse to try and take me out. That it's based on tradition. That it's because I'm a disgrace to professional wrestling.
You want a disgrace to professional wrestling? Take a look around, they're everywhere. The undercard puts on stinky matches, never bother to show up to film their promos, and do precisely fuck all to be entertaining. Angel Kash won't even wrestle he own gods-damned matches without someone moving heaven and earth. Adam's put on a couple of complete and utter suckfests out there in the ring. Even Willow Wilkes has shown up and dropped a deuce of a performance in the middle of the ring.
That's what's really disgraceful to professional wrestling, Nicholas.
That is what is completely and utterly ridiculous.
A bunch of reality TV rejects that won't do their jobs, that won't cut promos, that won't work the crowd, won't interact with fans, that treat wrestling matches as a chore, that go out there and gargle more balls out there in the ring than Missy Hyatt at an open bar Cauliflower Alley reunion.
Seriously, Weapon. Go into the locker room and see if you can find somebody who even knows who Missy Hyatt is.
I don't see motherfucking Priest coming on the air and launching into a discussion of racial issues regarding persons of color and the titles split off from the original World Heavyweight Championship created by the winning ways of George fucking Hackenschmidt.
I treat this business with more honor, more respect, and more reverence than anybody else on this roster, Harris.
And I'm going to break you in half for daring to suggest otherwise.
I step out of the recording studio not pissed off for once, but rather feeling proud. Feeling content. Feeling like I've taken all the stupid thing that my opponent has said, ground them up into tiny bits, then used the bits to make cat litter so that the addition of actual shit will make them less shitty.
It's a good feeling.
"You know he's not pissed at you for any of the reasons you mentioned, right?" says the Dark Man himself, Desolation. My mentor, trainer, and teacher has apparently decided to drop by and have a chat.
I grin at my one eyed instructor. "Is this where you come up with some ridiculous "Desert Cactus Named Claudia" scenario where Lethal Weapon was touched in a naughty place by his wrestling instructor, one Laughlin Mann, who used to humiliate him by rubbing his ass in his face when he screwed up in the ring, beat him about the neck and shoulders when recovering from a spinal injury, and pooped in his protein shakes every day?"
"So that as a result he's a bitter misanthrope who thinks that these damned millennials are spoiled, coddled brats who don't know the meaning of professional wrestling because they weren't crippled in their first training session to protect the business and drive those that didn't want to come back to train with someone who would break their bones on purpose?"
Desolation just stares at men. "No, not now that you've beaten me to it. But the real reason he's on your ass like his face on his trainer's poop chute is because you don't fit his "vision" of professional wrestling."
I raise a brow. "How? I've got literally everything you could ask for in a professional wrestler!"
Desolation shakes his head. "He's not only a bitter misanthrope, he's also a complete and utter asshat. He doesn't have a happy bone in his body. Aside from the one that Laughlin Mann put there."
"That's a humorous image." I say, making a pun referencing the actual person employing the methods of pro wrestling training that we're mocking.
"It's because he's done this before. Ten years ago he decided to come out of retirement, set his aspirations on becoming the ULW World Heavyweight Champion after being divorced from his wife. Captain Midlife Crisis cut promos with a bajillion girls to show that his dick works and accused me of the same shit that he's trying to pin on you."
"Because he accidentally ordered ten cases instead of one and the shit's going to get moldy before he can use it to make his milkshakes."
"They bring all the boys to the yard."
"And he could teach you, but he'll have to charge."
"And then snap your arm or your leg to show that professional wrestling is not a sport for wimps and will happily take your three thousand bucks because you're never going to come back because he totally on purpose fucked you up."
"See, it's this thing right here. This silliness, the fact that we have functional senses of humor. That we aren't afraid to do something utterly ridiculous. I did segments doing a LARP portraying Nicholas F. Harris as an old, senile out of touch wizard whose sole means of insult was insinuating that I was old. When, you know, he'd been retired for a few years and he's fucking older than I am."
"Was that the one where you ran around screaming that Desolation was really a 700 pound, fat, naked, Eastern European man with a grotesque beard that was 400 years old?"
"No, I think that was when I was pretending to be Romeo Damascus. I did that a lot. Because there was no way I could be as ridiculous as the real thing, so I just did an over the top parody."
"I remember you shaking a little plastic box with a cockroach in it."
"Yup, that was Baby. Murdered by the uncaring clown-hands of the dastardly swirl-browed mime Simon Cagero. It's unfortunate to see that the tradition of ULW dead babies has continued into the modern era."
"And it's fitting, because that's what Lethal Weapon is all about. That's what his vision for professional wrestling is. Transforming it from a stage where intense personalities confront one another to another daytime drama, an unscripted crash TV reality show where unlikeable people do despicable things to one another for the mere chance at fame and fortune."
"He hates you because you're different, because you're unique. Because you're not a weepy sob story. Women wrestlers to him are insane harpies and harridans that are crazy and pissed off at the world from the abuses they've suffered. They're not three dimensional beings with complex drives and motivations, they're hateful shrews who want to emasculate all men because they were raped. Or "raped" in quotations defining anything and everything having to do with being within 100 yards of a Y chromosome-bearing being considered rape."
"Just look at the characters that showed up in ULW under Weapon's watch. Lady Lust, crazy, abused, and raped. Aurora Rose, crazy, supposedly demonically possessed, and raped. Jesus fucking Christ, Harris, can't you find some pleasant, well adjusted women who can just come out and wrestle? And no, I don't mean oversexed sluts who had a drive-thru pro wrestling education and are using the international TV exposure as a springboard into acting and modelling."
"The legacy Lethal Weapon wants to leave the pro wrestling world are damaged men and women with dark, dull, depressing stories. Tarnished souls sinking forever deeper in a mire of misery. His are not the ways of traditional pro wrestling, no matter how hard he tries to make it the case."
"He's always wanted Joe Everyman types, "real" people with bland, generic personalities suffering through personal tragedy after personal tragedy. Happy, bouncy, weird Hellkat? Have a concussion and wrestle in the Weapon's Lair anyway. Sad, drippy, depressing sufferer of child abuse, not a dry eye in the building self-esteem shattered, Sheryl Gray snuggling Hellkat? Get that woman a title shot immediately!" Desolation virtually spits.
"You're on the road to be exactly what he wants. A woman who has suffered, who has had her happiness ripped away, leaving you with only your sorrow, your hatred, and your rage."
"He wants to make you a victim, Kalinda. He wants broken hearts, broken spirits, and lost souls. He doesn't want a powerful, dominant force of a woman. An empowered human being that brings cheer, levity, and hope to the masses."
"Lethal Weapon's bleak vision for professional wrestling is a roster of men and women haunted by their tragedies. Their loved ones dead of cancer, their children snuffed out before they're out of diapers, their bodies violated by violence, their minds sick from the harsh, wicked ways of the world. The tragedies of Willow Wilkes, of Jason King, of Clay Colton, and of Mya Denton all rolled into one."
"Because positivity doesn't sell. Because people think the world is turning to shit because all the sick shit humanity is capable of is splattered on the evening news, even though by all reasonable measures the world is getting better."
"Because people like Lethal Weapon think that the only art that means something involves heaping on the personal pain and suffering. That the only lasting beauty in the world is to be found in misery, the last withered petals clinging to a dying rose."
"Dude, do you wanna use the booth? You're cutting a promo right here. D'ya want that I should pull out of the match so that you can kick his ass? You seem more pissed off about this than I am." I say with a chuckle.
The Dark Man looks me over with an incredulous expression on his face. "Fuck no! I'm the last champion ULW had. I'm not going to step in the ring and allow shitheels like Weapon and Der Vaart to try and goad me into some stupidly one sided gimmick match based on my pride so that they can try and suck out every little scrap of legitimacy they can into this company from its former veterans and get tossed away like an empty pouch of Capri Sun."
He snorts, "Besides, ULW needs to learn how the fuck to book so that they rely on new stars and build up their own roster of modern talent, rather than ride the coattails of whatever big names they can coax back from the past, and what dismal reality TV-esque suckwads they can lure in with the big bucks."
I nod at his words, we've been over this before and it's familiar territory for me in conversation and promo alike.
"You're right. And you know what? ULW's took one look at me, saw that I wasn't one of the broken women that they so love, and as a result are throwing everything they can against me to artificially induce misery and tragedy by pissing me off, fucking me over, pulling shit in my matches, and outright lying about me."
"Yes." Desolation says with a nods, "Yes they are."
I grin, "It's a good thing that I've already got plans in motion to remedy the situation."
My mentor shares my grin, "And they'll never see half of them coming."
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