Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Toryumon

Go To

  • Americans Hate Tingle: Hagure Gundan/Aagan Iisou was one of the most popular stables in Japan yet one of the least liked among international fans, who cited its generic gimmick and boring booking as a huge step down from other stables.
  • Badass Decay: KAGETORA, who went to lead the STONED stable in M-Pro to being betrayed and reduced to a regular face in El Dorado (and something even worse in Dragon Gate).
  • Creator's Pet: Takuya Sugawara in El Dorado Wrestling. Despite he was the least interesting major member of Aagan Iisou, as well as the lowest ranked, the bookers somehow saw fit to write the promotion's first storyline entirely around him. And not any storyline, in fact, but one in which everybody talked about him and all the stables of El Dorado wanted to recruit him as if he were The Undertaker or something. Having in consideration that Sugawara was pretty disliked in the West for his boring wrestling style and lack of charisma, it's easy to understand why many fans were just tired of watching him as the protagonist of the promotion.
  • Designated Hero: Toryumon's bookers wanted to picture the Sailor Boys to be babyfaces, yet they booked them to cheat routinely with their Sato twins schtick (in which they always had an extra wrestler in every match) and to attack opponents who had defeated them fair and clean (especially Los Salseros Japoneses, who, to make things worse, were usually acclaimed by the crowd for their funny gimmick despite being heels). Even when Ishimori returned to the Toryumon system in Dragondoor, history repeated, as his faction had their manager Venezia intervene in true heelish fashion in a match in which Ishimori and company already outnumbered their opponents. It's little wonder that Ishimori and company never took off.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Los Salseros Japoneses were meant to be the bad guys of Toryumon X, but they ended up being the most popular faction at the promotion's closure. It helped that they had a very entertaining gimmick and that they weren't particularly villainous next to the Sailor Boys.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Back in Toryumon 2000 Project, Jun Ogawauchi was very popular thanks to his good looks, athleticism and neat wrestling style. Even if the crowd turned momentarily on him when he joined Crazy MAX, on the belief he was too green or unfit for their poise, he proven them wrong and became one of the hottest members. This was, however, right before an injury forced him to retire from pro wrestling. He would return many years later, but it was too late.
    • Manabu Murakami in Toryumon X. Although he was an unaffiliated wrestler caught in the middle of a Mob War and who sported a ridiculous gimmick (or precisely due to those reasons), he was surprisingly memorable.
  • Epileptic Trees:
    • The strange, convoluted angle of the creation of Do FIXER (namely, with Darkness Dragon forming a fake version of the group before M2K was revealed to be the real Do FIXER) is thought by many to have been a botched storyline that got patched up.
    • There were wild speculations in 2008 that Osaka Pro Wrestling's masked wrestler Orochi was actually Jun Ogawauchi making a covert return to the ring, as they had the same finisher and body size, and it came to the point that several reviewers actually listed it as an official statement. This proven untrue when Orochi was later revealed to be MIWAYAKI from Kaientai Dojo (though ironically, Ogawauchi did end up returning to pro wrestling only a year later).
  • Evil Is Cool: Crazy MAX. They became so popular as evil punks that Último Dragón was forced to introduce M2K as "true" villains to make them officially good. Ironically, the same happened to M2K, so it was needed to disband the group and create Do FIXER with its nastiest members.
  • Fandom Rivalry: With Dragon Gate, obviously. The rivalry is mostly symbolic, as the Toryumon system barely exists or has fans today.
  • Friendly Fandoms: With Michinoku Pro Wrestling, as most of Toryumon X went to form what M-Pro is today.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: A somber guy becomes True Companions with a group of similar-minded people, later an evil faction tries to lure him towards them and their evil philosophy, and finally the guy joins the baddies and adopt their views, but only after kicking the ass of their leader and declaring a new faction. Takuya Sugawara in El Dorado in 2006 or Magneto in X-Men: First Class in 2011?
  • Rooting for the Empire: One of the big problems with Dragondoor. Their top heels were Aagan Iisou, a very popular Dragon Gate stable that had been controversially fired from its promotion and whose return had their fans on the edge of their seats. Meanwhile, the main good guy was Taiji Ishimori, a pretty boy with a pop idol gimmick who had failed to gain the crowd's love in Toryumon X and headed a team of little known indy guys. Ishimori wasn't disliked, but he wasn't even close to being charismatic enough to be the main draw of the promotion, and Aagan Iisou's popularity effectively dwarfed his. Some have gone as far as to say that the three main Aagan Iisou guys were really the only wrestlers who were truly over in the whole promotion.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Mini Crazy MAX, Koichiro Arai and the rest of "mini wrestlers" of Toryumon X. Grabbing a bunch of talented workers and putting them to play gimmicks based on established wrestlers achieved virtually nothing aside from delaying their individual breakouts. Not only because it impeded them from developing real personalities on their own field (Mini Crazy MAX's role in X was a random third party that sometimes antagonized the heroes For the Evulz), but also because they had no presence in Toryumon Japan either (with the exception of Naoki Tanizaki) and thus they could not even play the role of Adorable Evil Minions which their characters were best cut for.
    • Dragondoor ended up with the hottest stable in Japan's independent circuit and a secondary roster of skilled lucharesu wrestlers, and they also received connections with Mexico which would grant them big name guest stars. What did they do next? Putting said hot stable to play the villains, improvising an heroic faction out of some random wrestlers with no real background or history together (and even worse, crowning them with a wrestler who had already proven himself unfit for that role), and burying both of them under an endless mass of Mexican wrestlers whom few fans knew well in Japan. As you can imagine, the company's closure was just inevitable after so many awful decisions.

Top