The REAL Bullet Club would give Kenny Omega a swirly while calling him a weeb
Note: I’m slowly editing and adapting blog posts I’ve written elsewhere to this new blog, so it’s going to be things that aren’t necessarily timely. I hope you’ll enjoy them anyway!
This piece was originally published elsewhere on October 17th, 2017.
These days, Okada and Tanahashi being dicks to the wrestle dads get more heat than the Bullet Club can reliably muster. Go back and watch early Bullet Club stuff: nothing in New Japan today gets boos on that level. Aside from insufferable frat boy oafishness, today’s Bullet Club retains just about none of the character of the Bullet Club’s golden age. A lot of that is because merch is king, but at least some of it is because the essence of Kenny Omega and the essence of the Bullet Club are fundamentally at odds. This won’t end well: with both Kenny and the Bullet Club trying to go back to their roots, they’re becoming increasingly incompatible, and soon something will have to give.
The Bullet Club were successful as heels, in their early days, because the faction was founded on (in kayfabe) a specific, Western disdain for Japan and Japanese fans. Despite most of the Bullet Club’s founders being not-American, “American” is pretty good international cultural shorthand for “shitty clueless entitled foreigner.” Japanese cultural attitudes toward foreigners can be pretty insular, and that combines very poorly with the American tendency to ignorantly assume our own correctness; at our worst we consider it beneath us to bend to others’ expectations of our behavior. Without awareness of that dynamic, one can imagine entitled Americans (or people acting out American-ness) getting angrily resentful pretty quickly in a country with etiquette much different than our own.
That’s why everything about the Bullet Club, from the imagery to the attitude, is pretty clearly meant to evoke that very American brand of sinister, insecure violence (and even more specifically, NWO-era American pro wrestling). Guns, too, are great cultural shorthand, because (especially, I’d imagine, to a foreign audience) a gun does a pretty good job of symbolizing that entire American dynamic of violent power with no understanding of (or desire to understand; in fact a specific desire to remain ignorant of) its gravity, and more specifically the dehumanizing, powerless terror it evokes for those on the outside of it. Basically, the Bullet Club was at its most awful (thus best, as heels) when it absolutely embodied American toxic masculinity.
Kenny Omega, though, is an anime villain. He even speaks English in Japanese, if that makes sense—his English has that very characteristic dramatic, stilted tone of dubbed anime. I don’t watch a lot of anime, but a lot of the villains come off as melodramatic—even sometimes to the point of silliness—to a Western audience. And a lot of them obviously have a scared, vulnerable heart not too far beneath the surface. They always have A Reason They Are Like This, which is usually Dramatically Revealed prior to the villain’s defeat. Kenny looks like shit and he’s lost his center–we’re getting closer to the point in the anime where the villain has to Confront The Reason He Is Like This. (We may not be getting there in storyline, but we definitely are in terms of character development.) And over the past few months, Kenny has redeemed us Golden Lovers Truthers by dramatically ensuring NO ONE IS CONFUSED about The Reason He Is Like This.
But that comfortably trope-y anime villain narrative has been running parallel to this attempt to restore the Bullet Club to its former glory, and the two storylines don’t work well together at all. It’s been fascinating and uncomfortable to watch Kenny simultaneously moustache-twirl AND try to turn into an actual villain; selling his soul in an attempt to become as horrible as he needs to be to lead The REAL Bullet Club. That’s the Kenny I see now; broken and worn down by trying to bring the Bullet Club back to its former heel power.
Anime Villain Kenny Omega is ultimately completely unfit to lead a Bullet Club renaissance. The Kenny Omega heel character (The Cleaner) is built on anime tropes, and the Bullet Club was built on a specific disdain for Japanese cultural norms. You can see how these things are fundamentally incompatible: Anime Villain Kenny couldn’t really hate Japan or feel that western superiority that started the Bullet Club–in fact he is following some pretty well-worn Japanese cultural tropes. (Also, he is literally paying homage to some of Tyson Smith’s favorite anime series. Go look up the plot to Yuri on Ice.) Moreover, my feeling about Tyson Smith is that he wouldn’t do that, even in character or as part of his character’s story arc, because he is pretty open about Japan being more home than anywhere else, and that very clearly seems to include social customs for him.
You cannot have a heel faction that is deliberately made up of gaijins without having a reason it’s made up of gaijins. Tama Tonga’s speech at the G1 press conference was long and rambly, but content-wise, that was vintage Bullet Club. The Bullet Club’s development has been leading them back to their Japan-disdaining roots, and Kenny’s has been leading him to The Part Where The Villain Is Changed Forever. They can’t coexist. I’m not hopeful for this to go anywhere that makes sense (Hot Topic, you know), but for these narratives to not completely implode, logically either the Bullet Club has to go, or Kenny does.
