Professional wrestling, in many ways, is a love story. Sometimes, it’s a love story about a 6’6″ black otaku making good on a 9-year-old promise he made on a video game podcast to make professional wrestling into an anime. AEW wrestler Mason Madden is a testament to how the two seemingly very different forms of entertainment are actually quite similar, and how harmonious adopting anime moves and characters in professional wrestling can be. To learn more about the fascinating crossover, Kotaku chatted with Madden via Discord to chronicle how his steely anime protagonist’s resolve helped him overcome being laid off from WWE to fulfill his dream.
Mason Madden, whose real name is Brennan Williams, got his start in wrestling much like Roman Reigns and the Rock; he was a former football player who felt a calling to sports entertainment. Williams was also a jock who liked anime before it was cool for athletes to admit as much, and he hoped to marry the two forms of entertainment inside the squared circle. As fate would have it, Williams would get his chance after making contact with fellow Texan and WWE Hall of Famer Booker T in 2015.
“It kind of happened pretty quickly,” Williams said. “I started training with Booker, I had a tryout with WWE lined up within like a year or so, and the rest was history.” Williams officially joined WWE in August 2016 and had his first match in the developmental brand, NXT, a month later.
Developing anime wrestling moves with tenuous WWE gimmicks
While training for the WWE, Williams declared that he would make wrestling more like anime—a medium he already felt lent itself to Dragon Ball Z-style storytelling— by incorporating cultural touchstones into his moveset on the Rooster Teeth-networked Castle Super Beast podcast, formerly known as the Super Best Friends podcast. For example, various moves of his modified swinging neck breaker, Cruel Angel’s Thesis; his drifting football tackle, the Initial D spear; and his high-leg kick, D4C; are not-so-subtle references to Neon Genesis Evangelion, Initial D, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, respectively.
“The most famous one was the Nico Nico Knee,” Williams said. Unlike his other moves, which he conceptualized after hearing a remarkable anime phrase, Williams credits the Nico Nico Knee to former SBFC member-turned-game developer Liam Allen-Miller. During Williams’ first appearance on the podcast, Miller suggested the Love Live!– inspired name on a lark. Nine years later, the Nico Nico Knee is now a signature move in Williams’ repertoire.
On paper, it would seem like an incredibly high hurdle to climb to get WWE officials to read up on the minutiae of Williams’ anime moves, but Williams says it was never a concern as long as the commentator was told what the move was called ahead of time. The only hurdle Williams struggled with was WWE management’s need for creative control over a wrestler’s on-screen character.
Outside of a brief on-screen scuffle with Brock Lesnar and a tumultuous run in the failed-upon-arrival “gimp” faction, Retribution, Williams never got an opportunity to properly show off his anime love in the ring. Still, he did make up for the time he had by integrating his influences in subtle ways. Even if it meant he would be a jobber—the guy who loses to well-established talent—on screen.
“In WWE, there’s a handful of people that get to be cool and get to win. That was never my job in WWE. I was usually given something, and then I had to find my truth and what resonated with me in that character,” Williams said. ‘Retribution wasn’t cool, but one thing I often got was, ‘Hey, you were cool in Retribution,’ and that’s because I was doing my best tokusatsu villain.”
In layman’s terms, Williams put his self-ascribed Great Black Otaku moniker to the test by stamping everything he did with his Retribution character, Mace, with elements taken from visual kei Japanese metal bands like Dir en Grey. In the process, he gave his gimmick a tangible identity beyond Vince McMahon’s vague musings.
Williams finally got an opportunity to be a cool anime wrestler in the twilight months of McMahon’s WWE era in July 2022 when he joined a tag team with Mansoor as the Zoolander-esque duo Maximum Male Models. In this new stable, Williams took the metrosexual gimmick primarily played for laughs as an opportunity to be as camp as possible and embody a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure character “for real.”
Using Twitch to navigate a post-WWE career with global independent wrestling opportunities
Unfortunately, William’s long-awaited anime dream would be cut short in September 2023 when he and Mansoor were a part of WWE’s wave of mass layoffs. While the news blindsided their fledgling fanbase, Williams said he felt the writing was on the wall.
“The thing with WWE, and this is nothing against WWE or anything like that, but every period of quiet or where you’re not doing anything, you’re just waiting for the call.” Williams said. “There’s spring cleaning almost every year, and for a while, there wasn’t one, and you were just dreading for it to come back. So by the time we were let go from WWE, I was expecting it. We started seeing the releases on Twitter, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, today might be the day. And then I got the call from a Connecticut number, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is it.’”
He continues: “In a way, I was mentally ready for it, and it kind of made it easier to just dive into the next thing, which is always what I’ve done. When I got hurt playing football, I dove directly into wrestling. When I got let go from WWE, we dove directly into, ‘Hey, what are we going to do during our 90 days? Are we going to stick 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 need to be fed, so I don’t have a lot of time to dwell.”
Fortunately, the pair used the unique situation of their layoff—being that they were the only tag team unceremoniously cut from the company—to their advantage by mutually agreeing with their “shared brain cell” to tackle the indies together and continue their run as the zesty male model tag team. Williams also strategically used his Twitch channel, InsideMxM, to maintain an online presence and keep fans engaged.
“We went on my Twitch stream, which has kind of been repurposed into just our Twitch stream, and it’s kind of what kept us relevant, and that’s because that’s what those 90 days are for, is to kind of make people quiet down and forget about you while you’re waiting for your time to come back up,” Williams said. “It’s a very coordinated effort to make sure that everybody can still pay attention to us.”
Repackaged as MxM Collection, the pair hit the ground running in what Williams likened to a Dragon Ball GT-esque grand tour across the world’s indie wrestling scene. The duo captivated audiences at Deadlock Pro Wrestling in the U.S., Gleat in Japan, and Soft Ground Wrestling in Uganda. Williams says the team caught the eye of AEW president and CEO Tony Khan, who reached out to them with plans to bring them into AEW “as soon as possible.”
The team officially signed with AEW’s subsidiary wrestling company, Ring of Honor, and have thus far wrestled on a handful of AEW shows. When Williams started his wrestling career, it was hard to envision making it at any company outside of WWE thanks in no small part to WWE’s monopolization of wrestling territories across the U.S.
“At that point in my life, I had already had one of my three daughters, so I needed to wrestle in a way that could make me money. Obviously, WWE was the only place where you could do that at the time,” Williams said. “And thankfully, that’s no longer the case.”
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“They’ve been very open to our ideas, allowing us to pitch stuff and making our ideas work, which is really cool. It’s very gratifying to see your brainchild show up somewhere, have people be able to see it, and then have people react well to it, which is a completely foreign concept to us,” Williams said.
“It’s a great problem to have people want to see you more,” Williams continued. “Having a platform where we can showcase our art in any capacity that anybody can see anywhere in the world has been a great boon to us because I think people are really starting to be able to see what we can do.”
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Having fulfilled his lofty promise to make wrestling more like anime, Williams wants his legacy in professional wrestling to continue the tradition of performers unabashedly letting their nerdy freak flag fly, whether it’s by showing their love for video games and anime through ring gear cosplay of their favorite characters or by leaning into gimmicks.
“Our thing has always been to have fun and be the most entertaining segment we can be. So if our legacy can be anything, it’d be bringing fun and joy to wrestling in some capacity.”
If that fun means going further beyond by pitching bringing in Dragon Ball Z Abridged co-creator Takahata 101’s Vtuber persona as MxM Collection’s manager in AEW (which Wiliams suggested during our chat), then so be it. All they’ll have to do is figure out how to scoot him and his virtual bar around like fellow Twitch streamer Ironmouse.
