Cobra Kai Why Johnnys Dojo Was Doomed To Fail (Before Daniel & Kreese)

Cobra Kai: Why Johnny’s Dojo Was Doomed To Fail (Before Daniel & Kreese)

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Even before Kreese started sabotaging his hold on Cobra Kai, Johnny’s dojo was headed toward an inevitable collapse due to his own poor planning.

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Cobra Kai Why Johnnys Dojo Was Doomed To Fail (Before Daniel & Kreese)

By the end of Cobra Kai season 2, Johnny Lawrence has lost control of his karate dojo to his former sensei John Kreese – however, even if Kreese had not taken over Cobra Kai, the dojo would have likely still failed. Johnny’s own flippant attitude, disregard for rules, and clear ignorance of many financial realities set his business up for failure from the start.

Johnny’s actual process of opening the dojo is largely glossed over in the first season. A brief montage shows him getting the interior ready and pasting on the slogan, but it all seems to happen almost instantly. Johnny goes from an unemployed alcoholic who borrows money from his stepfather to small business owner seemingly overnight. While that’s not technically impossible, it does create some serious questions right from the start about Cobra Kai’s foundation, longevity, and likelihood of success.

Even after Johnny starts the dojo, it’s a long time before he has more than one or two students at a time. There’s a whole plotline in season 1 about Daniel pulling a scheme to get Johnny’s rent raised, but it’s unclear how Johnny has managed to pay the rent even before that point. Eventually, he attracts enough attention to gather a full roster of students and fill multiple classes a day, but by that point he must be nearly out of whatever funds he was previously relying on, and his expenses only go up. In essence, there are a lot of holes in Johnny’s business plan, and they likely would have caught up to him one way or another.

Johnny Is Terrible With Money

Cobra Kai Why Johnnys Dojo Was Doomed To Fail (Before Daniel & Kreese)

At the beginning of Cobra Kai Johnny is shown in about the most pitiful light imaginable. He lives in a dumpy apartment, drinks himself to bed every night, and goes to work hungover as a two-bit handyman. It’s clear that he has a history of needing money, which he apparently borrows frequently from his emotionally abusive stepfather. However, after being fired from his job, he refuses a new loan, choosing pride rather than accepting the reality of his financial situation.

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Presumably, the Cobra Kai dojo is started by a business loan of some kind. It’s unclear how Johnny would have qualified for such a thing, but as he has no job and no apparent resources of note when he begins, he’s likely still borrowing the money from somewhere. Despite that, Johnny has no clear plan for the dojo through which to pay that money back. He reestablishes Cobra Kai mostly as an ego boost during a particularly bad midlife crisis, and it’s only by sheer luck and Miguel’s efforts that any new students even sign up.

While Johnny’s skin-of-his teeth approach to being a dojo owner in Cobra Kai gets him further than it maybe should, his luck would certainly have run out eventually with or without Kreese. It’s hard to say exactly how dangerous his lack of a strategy was without understanding more details about his financial situation, but it seems safe to say that Johnny’s not exactly a guru when it comes to funds. Everything from the dojo’s spacious and extensively decorated interior to the custom karate gis showed a man who was bad at planning ahead and focused more on the superficial than the pragmatic.

Johnny Never Learned How To Lose

Cobra Kai Why Johnnys Dojo Was Doomed To Fail (Before Daniel & Kreese)

Johnny’s fiscal incompetence isn’t the only reason his Cobra Kai dojo was doomed to fail. His entire persona is built around an inability to acknowledge defeat, failure, or wrongness in his thinking. Yes, he works towards overcoming those issues as the show progresses, but in his business decisions he remains very stubborn.

Essentially, Johnny was never taught how to lose. Even without the interferences of Daniel and Kreese, Cobra Kai would have surely faced unforeseen challenges and pitfalls along the way. Being a small business owner in any industry requires a balance of standing by your brand and being willing to quickly adapt, but Johnny only knows how to do the first one of those. His students make the dojo’s ads, spread the word, and push him towards a teaching style that’s more widely appealing. That works for a while, but at some point Johnny would have needed to be proactive rather than reactive in his adjustments.

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Is it possible Johnny’s personal growth in Cobra Kai would have prepared him for those situations? Yes. But it would have been hard. The fact is that Johnny was raised by two different father figures to believe that failure was met with punishment, not adaptation. Whether it was more rent raises, dwindling class signups, or some other issue, he doesn’t start the series with the emotional resources needed to deal with adversity, any more so than he does the necessary financial resources.

Johnny Is Self-Sabotaging

Through both his business ventures and his personal life, Johnny Lawrence shows himself to be a deeply self-destructive individual. It’s the emotional crux of the show in many ways – watching a man who’s run his life into the ground find redemption in recognizing all the ways he’s screwed up. He grows, learns, and (very) slowly changes, but his pattern of self-sabotage would have likely run his initial tenure with Cobra Kai into the ground.

In many ways, Johnny’s willingness to trust Kreese and welcome him back into the fold is an example of that self-sabotaging. He knew how abusive and untrustworthy Kreese was, but a combination of nostalgia, pity and misplaced affection convinced him to let his old sensei back. Did Johnny know how malicious Kreese’s intentions were? Maybe not, but he certainly knew what kind of man he was. Perhaps he let Kreese stay because he still believed he deserved the abusive presence – not actively or consciously, but in the back of his head. Ultimately Johnny realized that wasn’t the case, and that he had grown beyond Kreese, but by then it was too late.

Despite all that, Johnny’s best days may yet be ahead of him. Now expelled from a Cobra Kai that was poorly planned from the beginning, he now has a chance to restart from ground zero. A much more considered, emotionally intelligent and clearheaded person than he was when the show started, Johnny’s second chance can finally establish a dojo that can last and be respected. As Johnny’s story continues in Cobra Kai season 3, it should be interesting to see how Johnny takes his past failures as lessons to build his next steps.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/cobra-kai-johnny-dojo-fail-doomed-daniel-kreese-why/

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