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They look like the villains in an 80's teen sex comedy.

The counselors at Crystal Lake put up a better fight.

I believe the kids would say this is "savage af"

@bobholly138. Congratulations to your son who can skip ninth grade so if he chooses. @RazorbladeKiss87. I'm very sorry for your loss. Glad the gentlemen from the funeral home was a pro, that's what you need at the saddest of times. @BrianS81177. Sorry about your Granddad's Parkinson's. A horrible thing to have and to see what it does. My Grandad had it longer than anyone where I live, 27 years. Conggratulations, @Stefanie the Human. @Eivion, hope your Dad's feeling better. I find it a dilemma whether to tell people how I'm doing or not because I've good and bad experiences when I've done so and you don't want to be giving anguish to your loved ones. @MORELOCK, sorry to hear that you've lost two kind people in the space of two days. Condolences I send. Good to hear the Zoloft is working for you, @Super Ape!

I think the long and the short of it is the most of WWE mainstream programming is just bad TV. The only people left watching it are those that love wrestling, and the cool stuff wrestlers do is it. If there was a show on tv with as many terrible story lines and fake characters with horribly scripted lines as Raw that wasn't pro wrestling it would be cancelled in two minutes because nobody would watch it.

I find this to be overblown. The final season was an overwhelming drop in quality and people were dissatisfied, but the criticisms to the criticism are probably just as bad. It is OK to say something sucks, when it sucks, especially when you've invested years into that product. There are people who went overboard, but the vast majority of the criticisms of the final season of Game of Thrones are more than valid. They started their home run trot before the ball went of the fence and it showed. Onto @Burgundy LaRue's point. Caring about something either brings you great joy or great regret. Caring about wrestling hasn't brought me anything close to joy in a long time...but instead of letting it bring me down, I stopped caring. You are seeing what happens when something people care about deeply consistently disappoints. You can either admit that you're wasting time or lash out at everyone who points out the flaws in that thing you care about.

I wanna bring this back because ponytail Flair used to be my avatar. Then I was saying he could be the secret last boss on King of Fighters. Then I believe Bix had it as an avatar for a while. I mostly believe that ponytail Flair is awesome.

? ? very close to the angle I've wanted for years. I can die happy.

The "Nacho Libre" thing aside, there was a genuinely awesome plug during the USC game on FS1, as during a replay where they were discussing whether a tackle was actually an illegal slam, that announcer spontaneously transitioned with "and to find out what IS a legal slam, tune into WWE Smackdown on FOX, debuting Friday night October 4th!" It was delivered in a way where even his fellow announcer afterwards said "wow, that was good."

Come on guys, Nyla could have meant the troll's father blew him as an adult

I'm fine with someone not enjoying the same things as me. I don't think WWE is perfect. The problem is when I or others present another side, one that could be part of a wider discussion. It's dismissed because so many are jaded about the topic. It stops being fun talking about it. Why ask for another viewpoint, then brush off that POV when given? I can sometimes tell if someone and I aren't far off in our takes. We're just coming from different perspectives. But something gets lost during the conversation. Then we both end up angry. FYI to some folks: it doesn't help throwing personal accusations. I'm constantly amazed at how so many here don't want to be labeled, but have no problem doing it to someone else. That's always a JOY to read. ? The point of being members of this board is to belong to a larger community. To hopefully enjoy each other's company and talk about any number of things. Disagreements will happen, and that's okay. It just seems like there's a more productive way of doing it.

Or,you know, health insurance. ?

I'd rather pyro just be used on PPVs or the big 4 or 5 PPV shows. For as much as it sounded like the pyro cost every week, I'd rather that money be used for paying the wrestlers more or at least covering their transportation and room and board expenses.

We would not be true horror movie buffs if we did not include a pic of Sid from the Roger Corman schlock classic, Galaxy of Terror.

Somewhere from beyond the grave, you can hear Art Donovan asking how much dis guy weighs.

Honestly dude, enough. Every post is just "blah blah blah eeeeeeeeevil smarks blah blah blah." Did a smark run over your dog or something? You legit blame some mythical strawman version of smart fans -- which you have completely made up in your mind -- for all that's wrong with wrestling today. You generalize the thoughts, motivations, wants, etc of a whole group of fans, and treat it as some monolithic entity that is somehow ruining the business. Nothing personal, man, but god damn. It gets so tiresome when every argument of yours boils down to "these people (whom I've never met and have pretty much made up) are harming wrestling because they want something that I don't." I mean are you kidding me with this shit? "Storytelling is even worse. WWE is bad at storytelling, but it is impossible for WWE to be GOOD at storytelling when the modern fanbase made it clear: They rejected WWE's reality and substituted their own." Really? Really? WWE can choose to write anything they want and the fans can take it or leave it. WWE's "reality" happens to be hot garbage. And it's not because some mythical "smart mark" demands it be bad. It's mostly because everyone there writes to the ever-changing whims of a crazy old man who changes the whole show 20 minutes before belltime. I don't block anybody on here because it's pretty rude but fuck, man. Fuck. Also, demonizing "smarts" while being an active member of a wrestling message board is a study in cognitive dissonance. Yeah, this. As a fan of wrestling who doesn't like WWE, I don't demand they change it to my whims. I just watch something else. I seriously doubt there's this massive, monolithic group of fans, in misery over WWE's awful product, still watching it just to complain.

He also told a guy in a wheelchair at a Q and A LOOK AT WHAT I CAN DO and stood up

He DID flip off that handicapped dude a few weeks back.......

In truth, I'm having a bit of a lark, and of course one major problem is WWE booking over the last, oh, fifteen(?), years. That said, I also think excess and escalation (especially as it pertains to choreography) are issues, sure. But I'm not totally facetious here. There are genres in this world that get broken by history or developments. I really like ERB's John Carter of Mars pulps, but part of what made them operate was scientific ignorance and what we've learned since prevents new iterations of that sort of Sci Fi. I'm not going to 100% say that it was 100% "hard" sci fi in 1912, but it was driven very much by what the public did not know about science and what they could simply imagine. You could write something similar today but the perception would be so different that you'd almost certain be doing a pastiche or parody or something to be winked at instead of something more earnest and genuine. Most likely, you just wouldn't write something that takes so much for granted and as matter-of-fact. That genre, in its initial form, is impossible and unreachable a hundred years later. Part of me really thinks that there are primal, necessary elements of pro wrestling that just can't exist anymore in 2019. Wrestling is a medium and not a genre (as we elaborated on at length in the beloved AEW thread) but so much of it is now inward looking and navel-gazing. Some of that is by design (that's WWE for you) and some of it is by the sheer fact that almost anyone who gets into the wrestling business in this day and age is a fan, and increasingly so, a fan of people who themselves were fans. You see it in other mediums/genres as well (you almost can't write a superhero comic that isn't about the entire history of superhero comics right now), but I think wrestling, more so than a lot of other mediums (except for maybe the circus and stage magic?) relied upon a distance between spectator and creator. With that so thoroughly bridged, something innate and primal is broken.

It's really quite sad. If you had told me 5 years ago that there would be a promotion that had Ricochet, Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Daniel Bryan, Shinsuke Nakamura, Cedric Alexander, Rey Mistero, Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens and Cesaro all in it and that I would be completely bored with and uninterested in it I would have told you that you were nuts because how could anyone not put on a red hot show with that much talent. But here we are.

And to reply to @RIPPA's post...

Weird time to start patting ourselves on the back for civility, since it immediately followed a couple of pages of personal attacks on SK. Maybe y'all are just talking about civility among the dozens of people here with "crazy old billionaire fuck this company" hot takes.

I'd say season 8 is worse by far, but the show started down a terrible path when they got further than the books. The entire Dorne plot, Barriston Selmy, and the Sansa/Ramsay marriage were all signs of things to come.

More accurate replicas.

Oh man, way too much King Reina going on there. This is a good thing. Other image of her also in pink camo in a spoiler tag due to size. Still waiting on Reina to do pro wrestling. Hana's match with Momo was good but I'm not as high on Momo as most seem to be. I'm glad they pulled the trigger on pushing Hana now that she's under a proper contract though.

You do realize that the blamelessness and sense of justification is a human being thing, rather than a wrestling fan thing, right? Thieves don't steal because they're evil, they steal because it's not fair that other people get to gave things. Thugs don't hit people because they're violent by nature, they hit people who provoke them and therefore deserve a beating. Et cetera.

Dammit - they are going to make me watch this stupid show now

Sid was a legend. A great character actor, a star in blaxploitation films, television (he played 8 different villains on Mission Impossible!), Roger Corman movies, and even a Bond movie. He was a favorite of both Tarantino and Rob Zombie (Sid once said he would sign on for any movie either of them did, without even asking what the role was) He was one of the all-time great heavies in film and tv. A large man with a booming voice, dripping with charisma, able to switch from genial to menacing instantly, sometimes in the middle of a line. I knew this was coming from what I heard last week, but I'm still devastated.

1998. Bubba Ray Dudley.

Now we know who has Craig H blocked. ? I switched cable providers in July. The channel that airs Raw and Smackdown is no longer part of my package, and they wanted an extra 10 dollars a month for it. The channel shows pretty nothing else worth watching, so I took a pass. I haven't watched Raw or Smackdown in over two months. I catch clips of stuff I want to see on WWE's youtube page. If you don't like a show, it's very easy to just not watch it.

Apparently the Originals DLC names leaked. No Man's Land, Empire of Tomorrow, and..... SOUTHPAW REGIONAL WRESTLING

It's all wrestling fans you're just not around enough fans of other stuff too

Man I loved Bill Irwin's kick.

Sounds like they got the mix right first time out, that's terrific! I was going to say be very careful as there's a commonly prescribed blood pressure drug that has a really nasty side effect if the subject has any sort of kidney problems; basically it causes full-on renal shut-down. Been there, done that, saw the movie, was not fun... It's funny that one of the main indicators that you aren't getting enough serotonin in your system is physical pain, but at least that's hard to ignore. Energy is a very useful indicator of where you're at, I'm not saying that you need to be bouncing off the walls like an over-caffinated version of Bobcat Goldthwait, but if you find yourself stringing a bunch of days together where you pretty much do nothing more taxing than turning the tv on, then chances are good that you're under-medicated. Sounds like things are all moving in the right directions! Good on ya, hope things continue to go well.

It's playing out almost exactly how I figured it would, right down to SorceressKnight's TL;DR posts.

I actually agree with Niners on this. You really don't have to look hard at recent history to find examples of the same fans who are being blamed for pushing pro wres toward exhibition instead of catharsis proving themselves perfectly willing and able to "play along" and get deeply invested into storylines. Cody/Dustin, the early days of the Gargano/Ciampa feud before the booking fucked it up, the Golden Lovers reunion, just to name a few. Give the people something to sink their teeth into, and they will. If not, all they're left with is to appreciate the ringwork, ******, etc.

I would like to declare that I will, also, not play in the NFL anymore.

I mean Cody’s recent big singles matches are essentially that, and the fans are on the babyfaces side for the story, as well as reacting positively to the matches. So to say you can’t get fans to react to that is wrong. You just got to set the chess pieces correctly on the board to earn it. You want to blame somebody? Blame Vince’s storytelling style that leaves gaps for fans to be able to side with the heels. A style of storytelling he’s loved to use for years. It’s now more obvious with wrestlers chasing after seven star matches, and implementing a million finisher kick outs, with guys acting out “Oh my god, he kicked out” reactions.

The God of wrestlers in jean shorts:

@The Natural Saw this and I thought of you. Saw this and I thought of everyone.