Akki vs Mei has been a long time coming. Their last, and until this only, singles match came on ChocoPro #6, a time before Best Bros. Since then, they’ve been kept stubbornly apart, waiting for the right moment to finally clash again. One has to imagine that they’ve talked about it, though. Akki and Mei have spent hours training, travelling and wrestling together, so it would be mad if they hadn’t gone back and forth, trying to figure out what this match would look like. Who knows how many ideas they’ve had in that time, how many they’ve come up with and discarded before the moment finally came.
It’s that thought which made me nervous about what this match would look like. When you’ve spent that long thinking about something, it is easy to overdo it. To allow a combo of ambition and nerves to create something unwieldy and flawed. There are a million first novels that prove it. There were a lot of expectations on Suruga and Akki’s shoulder coming into this, and I think if they’d been asked to do it a few years ago, they may well have done too much. Back in the days when Mei was wrestling near-hour-long main events against Minoru Fujita, I suspect we would have got a version of it that was packed full of every idea they’d ever had. I’m sure it would have been athletically impressive, but I’m even more sure it wouldn’t have been as good as what we were given. Akki and Mei are better wrestlers now.
And because they’re better wrestlers, the key to this match was, in many ways, its restraint. Don’t get me wrong, they went big towards the end. Suruga, in particular, dove deep into what she can do, but they’d earned it by that point. They’d earned it by wrestling a patient match based around the idea of Mei having to find a way to beat her best friend. I adore that they spent a good chunk of the action building to a simple slam. Not only did it remind of Sayuri’s quest to once do the same, but in this context, where Mei’s wrestling someone who is not only bigger and stronger than her but also knows her every thought, it felt huge. That simple move was the opening, the proof that she could, if she kept going, win this match.
They also benefited from knowing exactly who they are to each other. Mei is the menace, the cocky wee shit who is constantly getting herself into trouble, and Akki is the one who is finally getting a chance to take out his frustrations. He doesn’t just cut her off at the start of this match – he revels in it. Blocking her go-to moves with ease, exploiting her vulnerability to leg kicks and at times simply lifting her into the air, resorting to the tactics you might use if a particularly angry toddler was kicking you in the shins. Mei’s cockiness is louder, but there is just as big a streak of it running through Akki, and he delighted in putting his nuisance of a partner in her place.
The more he did that, the more it pushed them towards the natural conclusion. For all Mei is one of my favourite menaces, and I love watching her torment opponents, this was her match. As she crashed into more and more of Akki’s walls, she became its hero, and the crowd went with her. There was still biting and scrabbling, but now it felt fuelled by desperation (although always with a touch of her goblin nature), and as she went bigger and bigger, it was the easiest thing in the world to go with her. To start hoping that she could find what she needed to get over the line. Mei is a great goblin, but when the time comes, she is also a brilliant hero.
This match kinda blew me away. I’ve made my complaints known about the more epic styles of wrestling many a time, but this is how you make it work. Akki and Mei kept those last-ditch kickouts under control, mixing it up with rope breaks or Suruga being unable to find her way to a cover, and it meant those moments still meant something. When Mei survived Akki’s biggest hits, and he escaped her scrambled flash pins, there was no sense of overkill. Everyone in that room was glued to every desperate second. Akki and Mei found a way to match the long-build of expectation, and that is a rare feat. I came in nervous, and I left hoping it’s not another six years until we see it again.
Thanks to their No Pay Wall initiative, all ChocoPro content is available for free on their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2HtPsU4U7TNSv2mSbPkj0w
Ramblings About Wrestling 
Leave a comment