To paraphrase from writer Max Landis, when pro wrestling is bad, it is horrendous. When fans gather on the internet to discuss the goings-on in the wrestling world, so much of our time feels spent complaining about things like the baffling writing decisions made by several wrestling companies to the brand-heavy, repetitive syntax used by WWE that wants to divorce itself from wrestling as heavily as possible. Even though things seem to be on the upshot, especially in terms of match quality, wrestling is still plagued with problems. So why stick around? Why keep watching something that seems to irritate its fans at almost every turn?

I definitely can’t speak for everyone, but I know why I continue to watch wrestling. Last July, WWE held an event called the Cruiserweight Classic, bringing in wrestlers from all around the world that weighed less than 205 pounds to compete for the newly-revamped WWE Cruiserweight Championship. The event gave us some of 2016’s best wrestling matches and made stars of people like Cedric Alexander, Rich Swann, and Jack Gallagher, while also introducing people who only watched WWE to some of the best wrestlers in the world from outside the company, like Kota Ibushi and Zack Sabre Jr. But the reason I’m talking about the Cruiserweight Classic is because of the man who won it; the inaugural Cruiserweight Champion, Filipino-American TJ Perkins.

Growing up, the fictional characters I idolized were pretty much always white; Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, and others. Any Asians I saw on TV, movies or video games were Japanese or Chinese (if I’m being honest, I’m still seeing this issue, but it’s getting better with time). Furthermore, the Asian characters I did see on TV or movies were, with rare exception, either the smartest person in the room or masters of martial arts; if they were women, they’d be fetishized for their culture. I never really saw anyone that looked like me, had the same background as me, or acted like me. I never really saw an Asian in media that acted like a normal guy. Then TJ Perkins comes along and, suddenly, here was a guy that I could relate to. Here’s a guy that looked like me, came from the same culture as me, shared the same interests as me, and otherwise was a regular Filipino guy who happened to be really good at wrestling. Seeing him win the Cruiserweight Championship was like getting to breathe the same air as everyone else and understanding what it felt like to empathize with someone’s successes on a level I had yet to feel up to that point. It clarified for me the reason why so many protagonists I saw were white; the audience member that was white would be able to connect themselves personally to them in a way that myself or anyone that was a person of color wouldn’t be able to. It felt good to be the one to experience that for once.

I’m not gonna lie and say that wrestling is perfect; far from it. Wrestling continues to be plagued with problems, especially when it comes to relying on tired tropes and stereotypes for making characters. Yes, I realize that I just said that wrestling is bad at representation, the thing I spent a paragraph lauding it for. But the reason I still tune in to watch is because of the times they get it right, the times that we get to see something fantastic happen. I’m indebted to wrestling because it showed me something that I’d never seen before: someone like me winning it all. Returning to Max Landis, when wrestling’s bad, it’s awful. But when it’s good, it’s nothing short of amazing.