Cobra Kai Showrunners Break Down The Top 6 Picks For Sekai Taikai

The following contains spoilers for Cobra Kai season 6, part 1

Cobra Kai season 6 showrunners Hayden Schlossberg and Josh Heald break down Miyagi-do’s top six picks for the Sekai Taikai tournament.

Speaking exclusively to Screen Rant, Schlolssberg and Heald discussed the process behind determining Miyagi-do's six representatives in the Sekai Taikai tournament, explaining how they chose which characters would go to Barcelona for the competition, why four of the choices were obvious and two were not, and how the process made them feel like sports GMs. Check out their remarks below:

Hayden Schlossberg: There were a lot of discussions in the writers room about how many people should go to the Sekai Taikai and which characters? In a way, it's kind of like you're in the front office of a sports team, figuring out who's going to make the cut. That was intentionally what the story was for Johnny and Daniel. We wanted them to butt heads over the fifth and sixth people. It felt obvious that, Miguel, Robby, Sam and Tory would make the cut if there were six people.

But you start to question, 'Okay, who would that number six be?' You see the characters doing it on the show, but yeah, in the writers room, we had these spirited discussions and I think, at the end of the day, as important as who is making the team, it's equally important what is the story for the character, and sometimes not making the team is the story and more interesting for the character. Those were the things that we talked about in determining who made the cut.

Josh Heald: You saw that Robby is the captain of the team and Miguel is not the captain of the team. In this spirit of discussions for episode 4, there was a contingent at one point that was advocating for Miguel not even to make it in the top six. There was a version of that going on there and you end up working with every permutation of, 'Well, if Miguel doesn't make it in the top six, you're gonna want him to be there in Barcelona, so he's going to be the one who's getting the spot when Tory leaves.'

But then what are the fights there? You're thinking of the fight in episode 5, in that scenario, maybe it would have been Hawk versus Robbie, or Demetri versus Robbie or somebody else versus Robby, in a way that we felt as a group had less juice to us, and less interest, less complicated elements going forward with them because of their relationship with one another, and, with Johnny. There's a lot that goes into it, but the thing you bring up [with] loving episode 4, we love episode 4, too. One of the things that was really fun about that was that between Kenny, Devin, Anthony, Demetri, and Hawk, [there's] all these different characters that aren't always the focus - it's usually Miguel, Robby, Sam, and Tory. All of those characters have their moments to shine and moments to focus on what's important to them, and the choices that they're making. It was just a really fun dynamic episode in general.