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FEBRUARY 2019 WRESTLING DISCUSSION.


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I guess the next question would be: Given that audiences have always enjoyed fiction depicting either aspirational figures and/or stand-ins, why pretend there’s anything unique—maybe even wrong—about wrestling and its fans in this context? There’s no psychological breakthrough here; it’s the history of stories and their consumption. 

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4 hours ago, JohnnyJ said:

Thinking about some of the topics discussed the last few days (and having recently binge-watched The Good Place), it is important to recognize that the classic wrestling storyline is David v. Goliath.

Babyface uses foreign object to beat heel. 

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Paranoia is just egotism for the unsuccessful. People who think the world is out to get them are just arrogant, self centered and refusing to accept personal responsibility for their own failures. That random guy walking down the street, I'm not part of some giant conspiracy to keep him down. I really don't give much of a shit what happens to him either way.

And I don't think that the majority of human beings on the planet have these psychological issues @SorceressKnight is describing. A small but noisy minority, yeah. It's a big thing on social media because people who aren't like that find people who are like that exasperating.

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5 minutes ago, Beech27 said:

I guess the next question would be: Given that audiences have always enjoyed fiction depicting either aspirational figures and/or stand-ins, why pretend there’s anything unique—maybe even wrong—about wrestling and its fans in this context? There’s no psychological breakthrough here; it’s the history of stories and their consumption. 

Honestly, that's the other side of this: There's nothing inherently wrong with fiction based on aspirational figures or standins. 

Heck, you can make the argument that was one of WWE's biggest misfires in the 2010s: They spent 30 years telling their fanbase that they were nerds, idiots, and losers for liking WWE television, and then in the 2010s, they started booking people who were lifelong fans of the WWE, and booked them like the nerds, idiots, and losers that they were...and then suddenly were blindsided when the fanbase identified with them and said "this is OUR guy. He's a nerd like me, she's a loser like me, they're idiots like me- I want THEM to succeed because if THEY can succeed, maybe there's a chance for ME to succeed." 

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1 hour ago, SorceressKnight said:

Virtually every human being in the world right now seem to truly believe that the entire world is out to get THEM, PERSONALLY, and to a lesser extent everyone else who is [insert the aspect of their life that they believe defines them], as part of a worldwide plot to make sure that they, personally, don't get to live the life that they see on luxury reality television. 

That's not true. Those are just egotistical individuals. It's not all about them and the world isn't plotting against their success. They're not Emma.

Edit: And if you'd like a more detailed answer, just read @AxB's post:

6 minutes ago, AxB said:

Paranoia is just egotism for the unsuccessful. People who think the world is out to get them are just arrogant, self centered and refusing to accept personal responsibility for their own failures. That random guy walking down the street, I'm not part of some giant conspiracy to keep him down. I really don't give much of a shit what happens to him either way.

And I don't think that the majority of human beings on the planet have these psychological issues @SorceressKnightis describing. A small but noisy minority, yeah. It's a big thing on social media because people who aren't like that find people who are like that exasperating.

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17 minutes ago, SorceressKnight said:

There's nothing i believe in this world more than that literally every human being in the world, and I include myself in that group, thinks like that. 

That's such an over the top cynical viewpoint that I still can't tell if you're joking.

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6 hours ago, OSJ said:

I made many trips to Portland to watch the wrestling... Great, great stuff, arguably the last bastion of the territories, even if ECW and Smokey Mountain came along later. The one question that has remained unanswered all these years concerns Dutch Savage and his fondness for "Coal Miner's Glove" matches. How would someone in the Pacific Northwest even know what a coal miner's glove was, let alone where to get one? We have lots of things in the Northwest, but coal ain't one of 'em.

Bruh, they tapped the hill that I'm currently living on for all its coal up here in suburban Seattle. We definitely had coal deposits.

On another note, if I'm living here when the big one hits, you'll be able to find me in an abandoned mineshaft somewhere underneath my apartment. 

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6 hours ago, OSJ said:

I made many trips to Portland to watch the wrestling... Great, great stuff, arguably the last bastion of the territories, even if ECW and Smokey Mountain came along later. The one question that has remained unanswered all these years concerns Dutch Savage and his fondness for "Coal Miner's Glove" matches. How would someone in the Pacific Northwest even know what a coal miner's glove was, let alone where to get one? We have lots of things in the Northwest, but coal ain't one of 'em.

Dutch was from Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was once a coal mining town.

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Bryan and Balor (and also Backlund & (babyface) Michaels) are also physically smaller wrestlers who use smarts, techniques and heart to win, and thus underdogs. Why do you think Hogan wanted big monsters to work? As was stated, David versus Goliath is a timeless world-wide mythological archetype of conflict/combat/battle/competition. Simple. It is harder to book a giant face champ - the DvG scenario is limited.

- RAF

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Hogan didn't suffer a clean pin from 1984 until 1990, at least on television. He was rarely booked as an underdog the way Shawn or Bàlor or whoever, or even Cena. They booked him as "the most powerful force in the universe" during his money run.

The only match they ever really positioned him as a clear underdog was Andre. 

Austin (and later Cena) were generally booked as guys that would always win a fair fight, but they were often not given a fair fight. Roman mostly got the same booking.

The problem is they have lost any sense of how to book a babyface. All they know how to do is get hear, stack odds, overcome (or don't overcome often for Reigns) but never the part where the face is an ass kicker. Hogan and especially Austin got the better of the heels a lot. They out smarted Heenan and Vince, they won fair fight and not fair fight. They were booked as being the best.

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A lot of this is just about resume prior to working for WWE.   Cena and Reigns made their name in WWE developmental.   Bryan and Punk were former ROH champions,  I hate the "indy darling" term but I guess it fits.  

WWE is in a position now where most fans are "smart" or somewhat wise to Wrestling Twitter or they pass the news on to their more casual friends. Guys who made their name elsewhere don't often suffer any type of backlash and a lot of fans always view them as the underdog because they don't believe WWE will get them a fair chance at being the top guys over their pet development projects. 

With the rise of NXT that's changing..   Punk and Bryan had "street cred" in 2011.   Now everyone is a former indy talent.  Seth Rollins is absolutely a WWE creative favorite,  a Vince favorite,  a Hunter favorite but he also has the indy background so there is no backlash with him,  it's all "BURN IT DOWN"..   He's been almost as protected as Reigns, maybe more protected than Reigns but Roman don't got the cred. 

I witnessed this is real time on Twitter with the Lars Sullivan ordeal. His tweets were racist bullshit and Wrestling Twitter let him have it.  I don't know if his anxiety or whatever has a connection to that,  the timeline fits though.  He was about to be called up,  the tweets aired him out and then all of a sudden he has anxiety. Anyway,  I believe if Lars Sullivan had some indy cred those old tweets would have still surfaced but some within the wrestle bubble would have been quicker to forgive. AJ Styles' unfortunate comments come to mind. 

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Crowd reactions we better for Punk and Bryan, but the booking still had huge problems. Punk's long reign mostly sucked until he turned heel. Bryan stayed over, and was great, but I firmly believe they would've done significantly better business in 2013 if they didn't beat him down every single week.

This company is so fucking bad at booking a face chasing a champion. The most fundamental main event format in wrestling has never been WWWF/WWF/WWE's forte. Their success is always around a dominant babyface but they won't let a face be the overwhelming asskicker that is what has always worked for them, from Bruno to Austin 

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18 hours ago, LoneWolf&Subs said:

Did anybody have a moment in there life where they didn’t tell their friends, and family that they watched professional wrestling? I know when I was 8(I know that’s really fucking young) that happened. I knew that wrestling was fake as shit, and anytime my sister channel surfed when she landed on the same channel, I switched immediately to another program fast while I was in my room with the door closed. For some reason anytime you watched the same channel as somebody else, the sound of both TV’s synced in such a way that you can hear the same channel clearly in another room. When that happened I’d always get a “What are you watching!?”. Sometimes when I was in the same room with a family member that changed to a channel with wrestling on I’d say stuff like “Who’d watch this dumb shit!?”. Deep down I was like “Me, that’s who”.

I've been a part of the "defend it awkwardly" - camp. I was also aware of the show-aspect of it, but always pointed out how athletic these people were and how everything was great entertainment. I started to become a true fan right around King Mabel's big Moment in the sun, so yeah...it was an uphill struggle. I had seen wrestling before, late Hulk Hogan years and such, but my parents prohibited me from watching for as long as they could. 

I'd start to talk really fast and my ears turned Red whenever the talk turned to my hobby. I remember one particularly weird dialogue with an uncle I really only ever saw on Christmas Day, who knew I was a fan and who had seen Bret Hart inside cradling Diesel for the World Title at Survivor Series recently (the shows came with three to Four week delays over here back then.

And he even managed to ruin it for me in hindsight: I perceived Bret winning as an against all odds thing and was a huge fan of his. I had seen his title win at WM X on tape, but this was "my" title win. And when he started talking about the match he'd seen, my cousin joined the conversation asking who had won. My uncle didn't even pause, he went: "Bret Hart, of course!!!"

I felt shocked and tried to argue against this. Diesel had been champion for a year, was taller and heavier and even knowing it was a predetermined outcome I believed Bret only had minor chance to win his belt back. In my mind, at 12 years old, my suspension of disbelief was poisoned that day and died a slow death. It took a while until I got to read spoilers and such online, but that instance really made me feel gutted. 

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I've honestly only ever been embarrassed to be a wrestling fan on a couple occasions where I've met someone who is a very stereotypical wrestling fan. Who constantly then would bring it up around me when he learned I was a fan and would never shut up about it.

Otherwise, fuck it, that's one thing I've never been self conscious about. Maybe the only thing. Wrestling is part of who I am, and something that has brought me great joy and at times significantly improved my mental health. So I've never been embarrassed. It helps I always had at least one friend who was also into it, and that I got in during the tail end of the Hogan boom and did highschool during the nWo/Attitude era boom, so there were a lot of fans around.

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2 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

Bryan stayed over, and was great, but I firmly believe they would've done significantly better business in 2013 if they didn't beat him down every single week. 

If I recall correctly the beat downs were Bryan's idea.

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