Professional wrestling is a love story in many ways. Sometimes it’s a love story about a 6’6″ black otaku who fulfills a 9-year-old promise he made on a video game podcast to professional wrestling in an anime. AEW wrestler Mason Madden is a testament to how similar the two seemingly very different forms of entertainment actually are, and how harmonious the adoption of anime moves and characters in professional wrestling can be. To learn more about the fascinating crossover, My city chatted with Madden on Discord to share how his steely anime protagonist’s determination helped him get over his release from WWE and fulfill his dream.
Mason Madden, whose real name is Brennan Williams, started his career in wrestling, similar to Roman Reigns and The Rock. He was a former football player who felt called to sports entertainment. Williams was also an athlete who liked anime before it was cool for Athletes, to admit so muchand he hoped to combine the two forms of entertainment in the ring. As fate would have it, Williams got his chance after connecting with fellow Texan and WWE Hall of Famer Booker T in 2015.
“It happened pretty quickly,” Williams said. “I started training with Booker, within a year or so I had a tryout with WWE, and the rest is history.” Williams officially joined WWE in August 2016 and had his first match on the developmental brand NXT a month later.
Developing anime wrestling moves with subtle WWE gimmicks
While training for WWE, Williams stated that he would make wrestling more like anime, a medium he already felt suited to. Dragon Ball Z-Style Storytelling – incorporating cultural references into his moveset on the Rooster Teeth-affiliated Castle Super Beast podcast, formerly known as the Super Best Friends podcast. For example, various moves from his modified Swinging Neck Breaker, Cruel Angels Thesis; his driving football tackle, the Spear with initial D; and his high-leg kick, D4C; are not so subtle hints to Neon Genesis Evangelion, Initial letter DAnd JoJo’s Bizarre Adventurerespectively.
“The most famous was the Nico Nico Knee,” said Williams. Unlike his other moves, which he conceived after hearing a notable anime expression, Williams attributes the Nico Nico Knee to former SBFC member and current game developer Liam Allen-Miller. During Williams’ first appearance on the podcast, Miller suggested the Love life!– inspired name on a whim. Nine years later, the Nico Nico Knee is now a signature move in Williams’ repertoire.
On paper, getting WWE officials to delve into the specifics of Williams’ anime moves seems like an incredibly high hurdle, but Williams says it’s never been a problem as long as the commentator is informed in advance of what the move will be called. The only hurdle Williams has had to contend with is WWE management’s need for creative control over a wrestler’s on-screen character.
Outside of a short scuffle with Brock Lesnar on the screen and a turbulent run in the “Gimp” faction failed upon arrivalRetribution, Williams never had the chance to properly showcase his love of anime in the ring. Still, he made up for what time he did have by incorporating his influences in subtle ways. Even if that meant he would be a jobber on screen – the type who loses to established talent.
“In WWE, there are a handful of people who get to be cool and win. That was never my job in WWE. Usually I was given something and then I had to find my truth and figure out what spoke to me in that character,” Williams said. “Retribution wasn’t cool, but I would often hear, ‘Hey, you were cool in Retribution,’ and that was because I did my best as a tokusatsu villain.”
To put it simply, Williams put his self-proclaimed moniker of Great Black Otaku to the test by incorporating everything he did with his Retribution character Mace with elements of Japanese visual kei metal bands like You and GrayIn doing so, he gave his gimmick a tangible identity beyond the vague ideas of Vince McMahon.
Williams finally got the chance to be a cool anime wrestler in the evening months of McMahon’s WWE era in July 2022 when he joined a tag team with Mansoor as Zoolander-like two Maximum number of male models. In this new stable, Williams used the metrosexual gimmick, which was primarily intended for laughs, as an opportunity to be as campy as possible and to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Character “seriously”.
Build a post-WWE career with worldwide independent wrestling opportunities with Twitch
Unfortunately, Williams’ long-awaited anime dream was dashed in September 2023 when he and Mansoor were part of the WWE’s mass layoffs. While the news took her fledgling fan base by surprise, Williams said he felt the writing was on the wall.
“The thing with WWE, and this is nothing against WWE or anything, but any period of silence or doing nothing, you just wait for the call,” Williams said. “Almost every year there’s spring cleaning, and for a while there wasn’t, and you just dread it starting again. So when we got laid off from WWE, I was expecting it. We started seeing the layoffs on Twitter, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, today could be the day.’ And then I got the call from a number in Connecticut, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is it.'”
He continues, “In some ways, I was mentally prepared for it, and it kind of made it easier to just jump into the next thing, which is what I’ve always done. When I got injured playing football, I jumped right into wrestling. When I got released from WWE, we jumped right into, ‘Hey, what are we going to do during our 90 days? Are we going to stay together? Are we going to do this thing on the indies? What are our options here?’ Because now I have three daughters and they all have to be fed, so I don’t have a lot of time to think about that.”
Fortunately, the pair used the unique situation of their firing—they were the only tag team to be unceremoniously let go from the company—to their advantage, using their “shared brain cell” to agree to tackle the indies together and continue their run as a saucy tag team of male models. Williams also strategically used his Twitch channel InsideMxMto maintain an online presence and engage fans.
“We went on my Twitch stream, which has since been kind of converted to our Twitch stream, and that’s kind of kept us relevant, and that’s because those 90 days are there to get people to quiet down and forget about you while you wait for your time to come again,” Williams said. “It’s a very coordinated effort to make sure that everyone can continue to pay attention to us.”
The pair was repackaged as the MxM Collection and launched with what Williams called a Dragon Ball Z-like grand tour through the indie wrestling scene of the world. The duo thrilled the audience at Deadlock Pro Wrestling in the USA., Gleat in JapanAnd Wrestling on soft ground in Uganda. Williams says the team caught the eye of AEW President and CEO Tony Khan, who approached them with a plan to bring them into AEW “as soon as possible.”
The team officially signed a contract with AEW’s wrestling subsidiary, Ring of Honourand has wrestled on a handful of AEW shows so far. When Williams began his wrestling career, it was hard to imagine making it in a company outside of WWE, not least because The monopolization of wrestling territories by the WWE in the USA.
“At that point in my life, I already had one of my three daughters, so I needed to wrestle in a way that I could make money. Of course, WWE was the only place you could do that back then,” Williams said. “And thankfully, that’s no longer the case.”
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“They were very open to our ideas, letting us pitch things and implement our ideas, which is really cool. It’s very satisfying to see your brainchild appear somewhere, for people to see it and then respond positively to it, which is a completely foreign concept to us,” Williams said.
“It’s a big deal when people want to see you more often,” Williams continued. “Having a platform where we can showcase our art in any form that anyone can see anywhere in the world is a huge blessing for us because I think people are really starting to see what we can do.”
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Having fulfilled his lofty promise to make wrestling more like anime, Williams wants to continue his legacy in professional wrestling by continuing the tradition of performers who let their nerdy geek flag fly unashamedly, whether by portraying their love for Video games and anime through Ring Gear Cosplay of your favorite characters or by relying on gimmicks.
“Our goal has always been to have fun and be the most entertaining segment we can be. So if our legacy can be anything, it would be to bring fun and joy to wrestling in some form.”
If that fun means going even further by pitching and Dragon Ball Z Abbreviated co-creator Takahata 101’s Vtuber Personality as the manager of the MxM Collection at AEW (which Williams suggested during our chat), then so be it. They just need to figure out how to move him and his virtual bar around like fellow Twitch streamer Ironmouse.
