First, we must acknowledge the Inaugural Class of the Violent People Hall of Fame, who did not receive a post for various reasons that aren’t interesting to read about: Yuki Ishikawa, DEAN~!!!, Jun Kasai, Antonio Inoki, John Cena, Necro Butcher, Atsushi Onita, Jay Briscoe, Genichiro Tenryu, and Terry Funk.

This round of Hall of Fame voting received 35 ballots, fewer than the first. To those who voted, and who spread the ballot around to different places or RTed it: thank you, continue doing that. To those who did not: what the fuck.

But first, the losers

The following nominees for the Hall of Fame failed to clear the 60% threshold. As a result, they are ineligible for being nominated again in the next Hall of Fame voting cycle.

20. (tie) Brock Lesnar (5 votes, 14.3%)
21. (tie) Hayabusa (5 votes, 14.3%)
22. (tie) Mr. Gannosuke (5 votes, 14.3%)
23. (tie) El Dandy (6 votes, 17.1%)
24. (tie) Tracy Smothers (6 votes, 17.1%)
25. Carlos Colón (7 votes, 20%)
26. George Hackenschmidt (8 votes, 22.9%)
27. The Sandman (9 votes, 25.7%)
28. Tarzan Goto (12 votes, 34.3%)
29. El Hijo del Santo (13 votes, 37.1%)
30. (tie) Daisuke Ikeda (15 votes, 42.9%)
31. (tie) Homicide (15 votes, 42.9%)
32. Eddie Guerrero (16 votes, 45.7%)
33. CM Punk (18 votes, 51.4%)
34. Mick Foley (20 votes, 57.1%)

5. Low Ki (21 votes, 60%)

What would Ring of Honor had been without Low Ki? The early years of that promotion were spoiled for riches: young and hungry future stars like AJ Styles and Bryan Danielson; reliable indie mainstays like Steve Corino and Homicide; and Xavier, who was also there. Even with so many peaks, Low Ki stood alone. Most of us can’t imagine what it’s like to have a brain like Ki’s. “Driven” seems like a hand-waffly understatement. He seems genuinely unable to take his foot off of the gas pedal, whether he’s blasting his opponents with kicks, throwing himself into new gimmicks without asking for permission from the promotion, accusing Disney workers of being pedophiles on X, or being the NXT dojo “young boy” of Michelle McCool. Like every inductee in this class of the Hall of Fame, Low Ki is an individual, and just like his wrestling, he can’t help but push that to its extreme.

4. Sabu (22 votes, 62.9%)

Imagine being young in the 1990s. If you were an ardent WCW watcher, you’d probably seen a fair few wild brawls, maybe even a guy getting donked on the head with a shovel. If you were a WWF head, you’d been watching a new generation of smaller, speedier wrestlers start to crack through the upper echelon that had previously been reserved for charismatic but kind of lumbering steroid freaks. Neither of those would have prepared you for seeing someone like Sabu. Schoolkids would repeat rumors with adamant conviction that while WWF and WCW were fake and fixed, ECW was actually real. Want to know why they thought that? Watch any Sabu match from the glory days. See the way he throws himself into everything with zero regard for the consequences to his own body. It’s untutored and wild, bordering on desperate. A new language of guttural screams, torn biceps, thrown chairs, suicidal triple-jump plummets. No one spoke it like Sabu. To this day, no one can speak it like Sabu.

3. Samoa Joe (26 votes, 74.3%)

The greatest ideas are the ones rooted in simplicity. “What if this was that?” “What if, instead of x, y?” Most of wrestling is a performance highly rooted in formalist structure. Look at any time Matt D from Segunda Caida breaks down a match, calmly and elegantly highlighting the little things wrestlers do to run a match through the shine, the cutoff the heat, the hope spots, the comeback, and finally the finish. The best wrestlers are the ones who understand this formula so thoroughly that they can break its rules without throwing away a match’s vital rhythm. They can make the fans think that they’re seeing something that, by all the rules they’ve unwittingly had encoded into their brains by years of watching wrestling, shouldn’t work, and yet does. All of that is to say that Samoa Joe‘s spot of turning and walking away from a top rope dive, rather than catching it, is a masterstroke. It takes one of the best to ever do it in order to come up with something that’s so simple, yet so perfect.

2. Vader (27 votes, 77.1%)

What do you even say to the man who put his own popped-out eyeball back into his head and continued the match? How can you talk about preordained title wins or storylines booked by some dweeb backstage when confronted with the raw reality of a moment like that? How do you scold someone for not “selling the leg” or “showing enough psychology” after seeing it? Vader was a giant among men and a beast in the ring. He didn’t need to roll around clutching his knee to show us that he was vulnerable. We could all see with our own eyes the amount of sheer punishment his body absorbed. What set him apart is that when he pushed past it, whether it was a dislocated eyeball or just the train wreck impact of a missed Vader Bomb, he didn’t come across like he was ignoring the pain, or like he forgot to play-act that it hurt. He made us believe that he was too big, too mean, too angry, and too fucking determined to kill the other guy to let a little thing like pain slow him down. That’s what Vader Time was all about.

1. Aja Kong (29 votes, 82.9%)

Nowadays, Aja Kong can’t quite move like she used to. Her knees are probably ground beef. Years of little injuries have probably become persistent, nagging pains. It happens to everyone, and every wrestler deals with it differently. Watch a modern-day Aja Kong match, and see the way that the younger talent sell for her. Even an errant swing of her arm is like a full-grown bear trying to swat away a fly, and hits these poor girls like an I-beam swinging free in an industrial accident. That’s the kind of respect she still carries, the kind of buy-in that forty years of brutal violence gets you. Aja Kong doesn’t need to move like she did in her AJW years to get across the point. She’s beaten the piss out of the wrestlers that inspired the current generation to start training, the ones whose moves they try to homage and whose personas they try to Xerox. She might not be able to put on the spectacles of cruelty that made her a star to begin with, but she can make you believe that this instinct for cruelty never left her: she just doesn’t have to work as hard to access it anymore. That’s almost scarier.

Congratulations to the new inductees, and may their careers and/or deranged social media behavior continue to entertain, inspire, and amaze us!