Garage punk violence, wrestling nostalgia, and a code that still matters...
I grew up on blood and body slams.
Horror movies. Sci-fi. Action films. Anime. And professional wrestling in its loud neon '80s glory and its grittier '90s chaos. I loved all of it—the spectacle, the pageantry, the violence as theater. I never bought the idea that liking violent art makes you violent. That is lazy thinking. Violence in art is confrontation. It is rehearsal. It is mythology played out in sweat and noise.
Now I am a Quaker, which means I take peace seriously—not as a brand, but as a testimony. I oppose war. I oppose systems that turn violence into policy. I oppose domination as a structure. But I do not believe in passivity in the face of harm. I believe in defense. I believe in drawing a line. I believe that intent and fairness matter. That is why Letterkenny works for me in a way that surprises people.
The fights in Letterkenny are not chaotic. They are ritual.
Slow motion. Shoulders loosening. Knuckles flexing. Eye contact. The music kicks in, and it is angular garage punk. It sounds like it belongs in a basement show where the floor is sticky and the amps are too loud. When the punches land, it feels less like a bar fight and more like a mosh pit. If you have ever been in a real pit, you know there is a code. You collide hard but you do not cheap shot. Someone falls, you pick them up. The aggression is real, but it is contained. It ends when the song ends.
That is what Jared Keeso understands. Violence without a code is chaos. Violence with a code is conflict with boundaries. And those boundaries are everything. Before fists fly, mouths do. Letterkenny is built on chirping. Surgical trash talk. Weaponized wit. It is what Marc Maron once described as punching with your mouth—words that sting, test pride, and escalate.
But even that has rules. It is performance. It is ritualized confrontation. When someone crosses into dishonor, the show makes that clear. Which brings me to wrestling. I grew up in the Golden Era of '80s wrestling—big characters, clear heroes and villains. It was a morality play in spandex. The violence was exaggerated but symbolic. A wrong was committed. A babyface stood up. A villain cheated and got what was coming to him. There was a code even in the spectacle.
But as wrestling moved into the '90s Attitude Era, something shifted. The conflict stopped being about honor and started being about shock. It was often about humiliation, about dominance, about bigger men brutalizing smaller people, about violence against women played for heat, about degradation for ratings. It was entertaining. It was chaotic. It was fun in a reckless way, but it did not always age well.
The Attitude Era leaned into spectacle without restraint. It sometimes forgot the code. It confused escalation with storytelling. It chased shock instead of resolution. That is where it parts ways with Letterkenny and Shoresy. In Keeso’s world, masculinity is not about domination. It is about conviction. It is about standing up when something is wrong. It is about being willing to fight but not needing to.
Wayne does not fight because he enjoys hurting people. He fights because someone crossed a line. Shoresy chirps like a menace, but he plays hard and protects his team. They do not target the weak. They do not escalate endlessly. They do not glorify cruelty. If someone breaks the code, they are treated as cowardly.
That is ethical masculinity.
It is not chest beating. It is not about being the biggest guy in the room. It is about consistency. About backing up your words. About protecting people who cannot protect themselves. About knowing when to walk away. From a punk scene perspective, that makes sense. Hardcore taught me that aggression without community rots fast. Strength without compassion turns authoritarian quickly. Conviction without humility becomes fascism in a leather jacket.
The slow motion in Letterkenny matters because it shows you the ritual. It slows everything down so you see the consent. You see the mutual recognition. You see that this is not random cruelty. It is pride meeting pride and resolving.
It looks like violence. It feels like a mosh pit. But it ends with respect.
Wrestling at its best understood that too. When it forgot that and leaned into humiliation and degradation, it became something else—something louder but emptier.
As a Quaker punk with a soft spot for piledrivers and power chords, I can hold all of that at once.
Violence in art can be meaningful.
Masculinity can have a code.
Conflict can end.
Respect can follow.
The difference between ritual and rot is boundaries. And boundaries are everything.
