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AUGUST WRESTLING DISCUSSION THREAD


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A bit late but the punk far fan thing struck me more as a wrestler beat up to hell from the night before and in general snapping on someone trying to be cute who had never been in the ring and didn't seem to show consideration. Maybe read too much into but I dug it.

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Is Dustin wrestling anywhere anymore?

 

Dakota, for the last porkchop on the table at his efficiency apartment during his visitations.

 

(I think I made myself sick with that one ... might delete later ...)

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That Dusty picture screams "Cocaine is a hell of a drug!"

 

As some comedian whose name escapes me said about David Crosby: "I don't trust anyone who does cocaine and is fat."

 

 

That sounds like Carlin ... I've heard that too, and now I'm curious as well ...

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I think the thought process that went into choosing the cover photo would be more interesting to hear about, rather than the actual list.

 

Posted Image

"Can we get a photo of him making a weird face/pose?  Now, it would be even better if he had something like dust or chalk on his chin!  Perfect! Print it!"

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WWE have been on fire this year & have been great in the last couple of months in particular. Do I love everything? No, of course not...but I never will. But we're half way through the eighth month of the year & I would already put 2013 above the last several years.

 

I'm on the other side of this, as WWE has finally gotten me to stop watching after over 25 years.

 

 

I watch matches out of context, but I don't honestly find the storytelling to be consistently very good, though Greggulator's assessment of Daniel Bryan as a character was really excellent, and as someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest and appreciates our weird little hippie-ish culture that D-Bry embodies, it's good to see a Granola Guy get to the top of the Wal-Mart of professional wrestling. If this story does end with him going over HHH/HHH's Corporate Champ at WM, that will be an amazing thing. 

 

I think back to late-'80s/early-'90s WWF storytelling, which was targeted toward the same audience, and I just think the narratives have better arcs. That could be me being charitable to something that I liked very much as a child, but if you look at something like the Mega-Powers arc, that had a definitive beginning, middle, and ending that I think a lot of big angles in the WWE don't have. They just seem to peter out most of the time in this era, like the Nexus storyline as one big example.

 

The middles are also squishy. For example, the Shield came in and seemed to be mixed up with Heyman and Punk. Then they sort of disattached from that storyline and broke up Team Hell No, but after that, they have just floated around the midcard lately. What happened to their story with Heyman and Punk? I know that we can interpret an ending based on what happened, but logically, they should have been somehow involved in Lesnar/Punk, which I have not seen (so if they were, I take this back).

 

Characters tend to drift in and out of narratives in their middles in current WWE, which is one issue that I have with the shows.

 

The other issue that I have with long-term storylines is that they are not backed up with proper booking too often. For example, the "Cena has lost his fastball" storyline should probably have him lose to The Rock, lose to Brock Lesnar so badly that he is kayfabe-injured, and then leave television for months before having to "prove" himself by beating Brock in a return match at Summerslam or Survivor Series, winning the Rumble, and winning the belt back at WM. Instead, Cena stayed on TV and looked pretty good, beat Brock in a great match that just wasn't booked to fit the storyline, and never really seemed like he'd lost anything at all. Instead, he just looked like a dude that screwed around and lost to The Rock but that otherwise probably would have won if he'd kept his head on straight.

 

That isn't to say anything bad about the matches. Cena is consistenly awesome and that Cena/Brock match is just fantastic in its brutality. But where's the storyline? I got why Macho Man thought Hulk Hogan was hitting on his woman and why he ended up getting driven to attack him on SNME. I wasn't getting why Cena thought he needed to prove anything to either himself or The Rock, however. The dude was money. He did something The Rock never did - beat Brock Lesnar - the month after losing to The Rock at WM. 

 

This is long and rambling, and I apologize very much for that, but I have read other people say that the WWE knows how to start a hell of a story, but not how to finish it. I agree broadly with this, and I also think that the WWE has a hard time with the middle of the story too. The booking too often does not match up with the narrative that they appear to want to tell. 

 

EDIT: And while I enjoy matches out of context, as do many of the posters here, what compels me to watch each week is to see everybody have great matches while also carrying out some basic, compelling narrative. This is why, even though '95 WCW is not as consistently good with the in-ring product as '13 WWE, I much, much, much would prefer to watch a 1995 Nitro over a 2013 RAW. 

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I think back to late-'80s/early-'90s WWF storytelling, which was targeted toward the same audience, and I just think the narratives have better arcs. That could be me being charitable to something that I liked very much as a child, but if you look at something like the Mega-Powers arc, that had a definitive beginning, middle, and ending that I think a lot of big angles in the WWE don't have. They just seem to peter out most of the time in this era, like the Nexus storyline as one big example.

The Nexus storyline didn't peter out. It ended when Cena beat Barrett at TLC.

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Darren's Twitter avatar is him on a box of Cocoa Pebbles.

 

I wish people would stop comparing things to the Nexus angle. That angle wasn't so much botched or blown as it was completely cursed from the beginning. Everything went to shit after the debut, guys got injured, Bryan got fired, they almost killed Steamboat.

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I think back to late-'80s/early-'90s WWF storytelling, which was targeted toward the same audience, and I just think the narratives have better arcs. That could be me being charitable to something that I liked very much as a child, but if you look at something like the Mega-Powers arc, that had a definitive beginning, middle, and ending that I think a lot of big angles in the WWE don't have. They just seem to peter out most of the time in this era, like the Nexus storyline as one big example.

The Nexus storyline didn't peter out. It ended when Cena beat Barrett at TLC.

 

 

This is a fair point; I was not as precise as I could have been with my wording.

 

The Nexus storyline started out as this group of NXT upstarts making a statement by taking out John Cena, Edge, Justin Roberts, and a referee and declaring war against the whole WWE. This is a pretty wide-spanning narrative, potentially, that sets up to have the Nexus take out the whole WWE and declare themselves as the leaders of the company. They attacked multiple wrestlers, not just Cena, after all. The simplest way to capitalize is to have guys try to take Nexus on alone because they don't trust one another, and then when that fails, reluctantly band together to take out Nexus. 

 

Then, it was scaled down to Cena vs. Nexus, complete with a "John Cena is fired" angle that didn't even lead to a Midnight Rider-like angle where Cena shows up under a hood and the Nexus tries to un-mask him. It did have an ending, but it certainly was not what it probably could have or should have been. They went from crashing WWE title matches and group mugging WWE guys backstage to the WWE effectively beating NXT in a group match like two months later at Summerslam to Cena finishing off the group entirely by beating Barrett at TLC. 

 

I guess that's what I mean by "petered out." We had a nWo-lite angle that began by spanning the whole company and ended up concluding on a B-PPV. Maybe this is what the WWE planned all along, but man, they missed lots of narrative opportunities along the way.

 

I hope that better explains what I mean. 

 

 

I wish people would stop comparing things to the Nexus angle. That angle wasn't so much botched or blown as it was completely cursed from the beginning. Everything went to shit after the debut, guys got injured, Bryan got fired, they almost killed Steamboat.

 

 

This is also a fair point, but even so, they had a chance at recovery after that merely by bringing Daniel Bryan back at Summerslam on the side of Nexus (and having Nexus win as a result) or, at the very least, milking the "John Cena is fired" angle for all it was worth. 

 

Anyway, I don't want to get caught up on this specific example of an angle except to say that my point is that, even with some of the stuff that happened during the angle, the WWE never booked the NXT guys the way that was needed to spur the narrative along in an interesting way. Cena never felt in any danger past that first night on RAW where Nexus took him out, for example. Even when he lost and was forced to be in NXT (and then fired), he didn't have to sacrifice anything or do something daring to get reinstated and to finish off Barrett. 

 

I think that this juxtaposition between the booking and the narrative direction doesn't help the WWE tell satisfying narratives at this point, and if (like me), you are a narrative-driven watcher, it's quite possible that these things make watching the weekly show not very satisfying as well. 

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People are always saying how different modern wrestling vis a vis wrestling from the thirties...but was watching this Willie Whopper cartoon from 1934 and it felt like you could show it on cartoon network today and pass it off as a contemporary piece.Yes, it has a ton of racist stereotypes but I imagine if you were doing a cartoon about 21st Century wrestling it would also involve a bunch of racist stereotypes.

http://youtu.be/h2ea5AL5_to 

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