Hello SquaredCircle! Welcome to our Weekly Discussion Thread!
What have you watched lately? Seen any great matches? Have suggestions for things to watch? Anything not getting covered in other threads that ya wanna fill people in about? Questions about promotions, wrestlers, ‘the business’ or more?
Feel free to post below!
(Reminder, this thread can and will contain spoilers for possibly any show. Spoiler tags are not required in here, but if the show just happened try and keep spoiler talk it to its respective discussion thread for the first day).
I’d say you pretty much got it. As for We Are Stardom, it’s more of a ‘1-2 months behind recap show’ (watched an episode from a week or two ago and I think it was covering late Nov/early Dec-ish?). It’s your "I dont follow Stardom regularly and don’t keep up with the news about shows but would still like to watch the occasional wrestling match’ program essentially. I forget how the subtitles are on it or if it covers promos (if it does its another helpful avenue for those), but match wise I wouldn’t worry too much about it since you’ll already be watching those matches in full during the events.
Beyond that you pretty much got it. There’ll be the odd NJPW show and Rev Pro show as you said, some AEW/ROH appearances for the odd person like Mina, AZM, Hanako, etc. Later in the year there’ll also be some other interpromotional fights (once things got up and running at a good pace under Okada as the booker they opened up the ‘forbidden door’ a bit more and have had more people from Sendai Girls/Diana/Wave/Oz/etc come by, as well as sending Stardom women to their promotions to win/defend titles.
I need to ask just one more question if you don’t mind lol. Just started watching ‘GoldenWeek’. I don’t think I saw this listed (amongst a couple of other things here) on that Wikipedia page. And on the steam I’m watching at least, there’s no commentary or match graphics / stats. And the sound quality is pretty weird, like the ring is loud and you can even hear the vinyl of their ring gear squeaking. At least in this first match I’m watching so far.
Are these kinds of shows basically just house shows that they’ve recorded? Or should I expect any story and rivalry developments here?
S’all good! Golden Week is a holiday week in Japan (29 April to 5 May) which contains multiple holidays within it. During that week/week and a half Stardom did a bunch of shows, 5-7 of em I believe, all starting with that title. During Golden Week pretty much everything shuts down, so most of the work on editing/uploading the stuff gets put off until the holiday period is all over, so between new people taking over production, a (probable) rush to get the product up for viewing and possible technical problems, ya got this lol.
Can’t remember a lot of the shows by memory, I do see at least a couple title matches during the shows. The time period is also kinda their period after ‘Wrestle Mania’ so to speak so you can probably fast forward through a lot of it, but, watch it.
Thanks! I might skip through some of it, or else I feel like I’m probably only going to catch up to 2025 by 2026 lol. But I see now it is worth checking out, even not just for title matches. Coming up to a tag match with SLK & Tam Nakano in a team, which I guess advances that story I saw start in Queendom. And honestly I think I’m kinda liking the no commentary.
Right? I find it makes me appreciate things more cause I’m just focusing on the fighting and the sounds of the match, plus when the crowd does pop for something there isn’t someone chatting over it.
Nice, thanks for all the info. And I’ve actually just found another ‘watch-wrestling’ website (this one with a hyphen) that has Stardom and a lot more Japanese stuff on offer than the old watchwrestling website I’ve been using. And it seems to list everything here in a handy chronological list. So looks like I’m set.