Red Is For Love (Io Shirai X Male OC)

The Process of Creating Kai "Ren" Hosako

Now that you've read the entirety of "Red Is For Love", you're about to see the background and why I would make an OC like Kai, so here are some of the things that makes him different than some of the OCs I've created:

1. The Name

With a name like "Kai Hosako", you might be thinking that I shortened "Kairi" to "Kai" just to make it sound cool, but it's not the reason why I named him Kai is because when it comes to kids who are autistic, they usually have cute and adorable names.

"Kai" is an example because I wanted to make his name sound adorable while his ring name is the sound of a warrior inside the ring. "Ren" is a samurai's name and since Kai is trained by Suzuki, which we'll get to later on, I thought that ring name is perfect for him.

The nickname I gave Kai, "The Prodigy" is something that I want to explain: nowadays, the art of catch style wrestling is lost and with Kai being endorsed by Antonio Inoki, the godfather of Strong Style wrestling, I thought it was spot on.

With everything from his real name, ring name, and his nickname, I think I thought it out really well.

2. His Wrestling Style

Kai is a shoot style wrestler with an MMA-esque repertoire and a unique charismatic character that got the fans from around the world invested in his style of wrestling.

From my research, Catch Style Wrestling was first invented in the late 1800s, but the type of Catch Wrestling Kai does is the MMA style of Catch Wrestling, invented by legendary catch wrestlers and students of Billy Riley's Snake Pit from Wigan, England, Billy Robinson and Karl Gotch.

There's no doubt that Gotch taught this style of wrestling to Japanese wrestlers like Antonio Inoki, rest in peace, Tatsumi Fujinami, Hiro Matsuda, Osamu Kido, the legendary Tiger Mask (Satoru Sayama), the innovator of the Fujiwara Armbar Yoshiaki Fujiwara, and The King Minoru Suzuki.

Suzuki and some of his fellow catch wrestlers founded Pancrase, a Japanese wrestling promotion in the early 90s to cater this style of pro wrestling to the Japanese audience, but Suzuki's style is much different than what you see from technical wrestlers you see today. When you read Kai's match against Bobby Fish, he does one of his mentor's holds: digging an underhook on one of Bobby's arms to pull his opponent towards him.

That move is an example on how Kai is able to be flexible in this style of wrestling, which seems hard to do, but when you watch matches like Kai's, it's actually easy to learn and see how it's done.

I wanted Kai to have a wrestling style that's easy enough to understand and be able to have great chemistry with many wrestlers he faced in both Japan and WWE. I thought this style of wrestling is underrated and I wanted to bring it into the story while sharing some of its history.

3. The Music

The songs Kai used in NXT are "Midnight Hallelujah" by Ayumi Nakamura, "The Rumbling" by SIM, "Tsubasa No Oreta Angel" by Ayumi Nakamura, and "Rise" by Origa during his Championship entrance at NXT Takeover: Tampa Bay.

I really wanted to make Kai unique with not just his wrestling style, but the music as well. A lot of it had to do with the mood of the music, rather than just lyrics. You see, a lot of people use different songs that might sound very good, but I don't think a lot of them pay attention to the lyrics.

Here's why, Kai's music had to do with how he's perceived by his facial expressions. He's known to smile every once in a while, but it has to do with how he treats his opponents inside the ring. The smiling has to do with the fact that he wants to kill them as it would be known later on in the story. I wanted Kai to be a babyface at first and try to be a sweet human being towards his peers and then, once Takeover: New York comes around, he becomes a giant asshole heel, kinda like the Mayor off of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, if you know what I'm talking about.