Prologue: There's a Reason They Tell You Not To
"Hyung, that has to hurt like hell."
"It's all a show. A show."
"A show?"
"They're just pretending to hit and pretending to get hurt. Pro wrestling is all a show! It's fake."
I learned that red-pill truth at nine—earlier than any of my friends, and more shocking than the day I found out Santa Claus wasn't real at seven.
At the time I had screamed at my brother, three years older, not to lie to me. And then I got the living daylights beaten out of me for it…
Pro wrestling is a show.
But even if my brother hadn't been the one to tell me, wouldn't everyone have swallowed that red pill by eleven or twelve? By that age, didn't everyone figure out pro wrestling was scripted entertainment?
That there was a fixed script, though—that took a little longer to sink in.
I still loved it. No—the more I understood, the more I loved it.
The punches and kicks were only pretending to hit and pretending to take the blow. But hurling each other across the ring, launching off the top of a ring post, diving off a ladder—those were real. Every last one of them.
And every so often a twist would hit so hard you had to ask yourself, Was that the script, or was that an accident? I loved those moments too.
Sure, there were the absurd storylines that made the locals pass out cold—That's not your son. That kid is actually mine—but those were the kind of plots Korean dramas served up every other week.
The real problem was that pro wrestling just wasn't popular in our country.
Even so, the cable ratings still beat pro soccer, and every now and then they rivaled pro baseball. Zero-point-five to zero-point-eight percent. Out of fifty million people, that meant at least two hundred and fifty thousand of us were watching—just like me.
And yet the moment I told my friends I liked WWO, I got treated like some otaku shut-in warrior. Where the hell were my two hundred and fifty thousand comrades?
After I got into college, I asked around until I finally found a pro wrestling gym and started going every weekend. With my pathetic motor skills and physique, even a dropkick, a power slam, or a headscissors whip—moves comedians pulled off on TV—were beyond me.
But the army has a saying: even knowing origami can help you. Building on what little I'd learned, I scored a reward leave at the Christmas talent show.
That was me. I genuinely loved the show that unfolded inside a square 6.1 meters on a side.
If you wanted to call it a fixed game of Go-Stop, wasn't theater the same thing?
And me now?
I was deep into 2K27 WWO Superstars, a game that had come out two years earlier. The reason I was still clinging to a two-year-old title was the editor.
"Whoa! You really suck."
"Hey! You try it, then. See how easy it is to win the Noble Rumble starting at number one…"
The Noble Rumble. Two wrestlers start, and every ninety seconds another one enters, until thirty competitors have come through and only one is left standing.
Coming in in the twenties was one thing. Winning from the first ten was genuinely hard. In real life the script could hand the win to number one or two, but the game had no script—and stamina management was brutal.
Start as a big, strong powerhouse and your stamina dropped off a cliff. Set yourself up as a fast, agile technician or high flyer and you became lunch for the giants.
My old classmate watched me struggle. He worked at a security software company, the kind of guy with a gift for programming and hacking, and he finally opened his mouth.
"Dude, how old are you and you're still at this? Want this hyung to make you an editor?"
"Holy shit. For real?"
"Yeah. First call me hyung."
Hyung? What was hard about that?
"Hyung. Jeong-woo hyung-nim."
"Heh. You sneaky little bastard."
"It's not being sneaky. It's having good social skills."
"Social skills, my ass."
"Hey, can you really do it? I'll buy you samgyeopsal right now."
"Nothing too complicated, but a broken OP character? Easy enough."
"Can you make a female character too?"
"You kidding me? Give me two months, plenty of time."
"Yes. Yes. Hyung-nim."
Two months later, I got the editor from him.
With his help I built a character as pretty as any female avatar in an MMORPG, maxed out strength, agility, and stamina as a baseline, then pushed durability, recovery, flexibility, technique—everything that could be raised—to MAX. I checked every single trait on top of that.
A munchkin among munchkins was born.
"Done?"
"Yeah."
I bought him skirt meat and a round of soju, then fired up the game on the spot. My character Charina—reminiscent of some idol—greeted me.
"Hahaha! You're all dead!"
"Shall we try Story Mode first?"
The moment I hit START, the screen flashed—and my consciousness began to slip away.
And somewhere, faintly, I thought I heard the words cheater, thug, trash.
Technique explanations and the like will go into the Author's Notes.
If you can manage it, I'd recommend leaving them on.