YMMV / World Wonder Ring ST★RDOM

• Base-Breaking Character
  • STARDOM decided to ignore fan polls, which favored familiar faces or more high flying rookies in favor of pushing Utami Hayashishita into the main event with the stated goal of winning every company belt in her first year, which naturally upset fans who felt like their votes were for nothing. It also drew accusations that she was being pushed for her height, even though Hayashishita wasn't the tallest rookie around. What was surprising is that a vocal lot came to her defense, praising STARDOM for trying something different and suggesting Hayashishita might bring in new fans. Still, STARDOM did slow down her push a bit, keeping Momo Watanabe as the Queen's Quest leader, keeping the World Of belt on Iwatani and giving the Wonder Of to Arisa Hoshiki. Was that good booking, or needlessly caving to the core?
  • Bea Priestley is hated by everyone, with just as much right heat as wrong heat. She's a subscription killer for using moves without permission, causing injuries through botches and being related to Will Ospreay while she's also a subscription bringer for doing moves no one else will, having an inflated ego that's just begging to be popped, and being related to Will Ospreay. Basically Priestley must lose versus Priestly must never be seen again.
  • Mercedes Mone (AKA Sasha Banks) split the base heavily during her run with the promotion; while most would at least admit she made sense business wise, whether she was up to the standard of the rest of the roster or was a case of trying to invoke Just Here for Godzilla at the expense of the regular roster can be a contentious subject.
• Comedy Ghetto: The Artist Of Stardom is the least respected of the promotion's original four title belt sets because matches where it is the focus in any way pretty much always have a comedy spot somewhere in them, and are occasionally silly from bell to bell. There were some people who thumbed their noses at STARDOM as whole, counting it among the sillier joshi feds of the 2010s, but it also was the most violent joshi fed aside from perhaps Oz Academy or LLPW, so the promotion as a whole gets more of a pass on this front.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Act Yasukawa had a sheltered upbringing that lead to her being mercilessly bullied as a child. She had a degenerative disease that robbed her of sight in one eye and eventually broke down her thyroid. She put a potentially successful career in film on hold to try professional wrestling and came down with another illness that made it impossible unless she took a medication that made her sterile, which it did. All of this makes her a sympathetic underdog. She patterns herself after several renowned samurai with her sheathed swords, Facial Markings, eye patch and rum bottles, which made her "cool", and despite being functionally blind in one eye she was pretty good in the sport of kendo, which made her legit. She hung around the company working merchandise sales and maintaining the ring while sick or injured, which made her familiar. She put up a lot of youtube videos about how evil she was, but there were also a lot of videos on the website with her face washed taking care of her pet bunny, which made her adorable. Factor in that she wrestled exclusively for STARDOM, which made her "loyal", and you now know why fans refused to see her as anything but a baby face, no matter what she tried to do to convince them otherwise.
• Fashion-Victim Villain
  • Agua Puro praised the actions La Rosa Negra took while antagonizing Io Shirai and Mayu Iwatani for Hudson Envy. They were a lot less kind to what she wore while doing so.
  • Hana Kimura's entrance gear and ring gear as a "pure" heel and "pure" baby face were all around praised. The clothing and paint she wore as the Anti-Villain leader of Tokyo Cyber Squad was panned for taking "the sexy but dangerous" gimmick too far however.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Hana Kimura's theme was Knife Party's "Internet Friends", which includes the line "You blocked me on Facebook, and now you're going to die". In 2020, she committed suicide due to cyberbullying.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Like you would really have Dark Angel win what is supposed to be her last match in Japan, against Io Shirai of all people, while the World Of Stardom is on the line.
• Ron the Death Eater: Yoshiko's gang shifting their focus from eliminating the older wrestlers of STARDOM to humbling the arrogant Act Yasukawa was supposed to be a Heel–Face Turn, and it was for everyone but Yoshiko herself, who was the one personally humiliating Yasukawa in exchange for a World Of Stardom title shot. Forget that Yasukawa's Face–Heel Turn was also Yoshiko's Start of Darkness to begin with. Yoshiko was a stout, delinquent gaijin imitator with barely visible eyebrows who rarely smiled and had "death" in her name. She was always a face by default to most of the audience and a "violence gorilla" to a particularly vocal segment of it. And forget Yasukawa ever having a heel turn, because to a large portion of the audience she was just a baby face who attracted a gang of heels and was awesome for keeping them under control. Plus she was so much smaller than big, mean Yoshiko.

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