How Kenny Omega Is Bringing Back AEW's Biggest Weapon
There's some sweeping to do.
"That Kenny Omega I can't stop talking about has fallen off the map, I'm afraid!"
- Wrestling Twitter
Kenny Omega first entered the wider wrestling conversation in 2012, by wrestling what many cited as the greatest match of the year opposite Kota Ibushi - but he became the talk of it upon joining NJPW and its renegade Bullet Club faction two years later under the guise of the 'Cleaner'.
The persona was originally envisioned by New Japan creative, per Omega's January 2017 Talk Is Jericho appearance, as "very silent," "very cold" - a mafioso figure modelled on the guy in the movies that cleans up the murder scene with zero emotion in the face of ugly death. A void of humanity.
Omega compared NJPW's idea as adjacent to the Ringmaster, but, channeling the rebellious spirit with which he no-sold wrestling's only path to pave his own, he played with the idea, mischievously, using it as a prism through which to reflect his full personality. He played it with an hilarious, literal bent, by removing a brush from a dustbin and sweeping the aisle he walked to make his ring entrance, but the Cleaner was no joke. New Japan asked him to play it cold, but he played it cool.
In a sense, this was Omega's core appeal, distilled: this was a fairly stupid idea, only from otherwise great creative, and it almost proved in itself that he was capable of transcending a WWE machine he was never much interested in.
Omega was intelligent enough to grab whatever amounts to the zeitgeist in this atomised cultural landscape; if there's one thing that unifies a millennial generation blessed with endless choices for escapism, but cursed with a constant need to escape, it is a yearning for a more innocent past.
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