Vamp

1 hour ago, TheBurningRed said:

Cocaine strength. 

On the whole showing the footage, it is a bad time to be doing it. But it makes me laugh how peoples view on it have changed. When it came out what happened, people on twitter and the like were saying “release the footage. We need to see it” etc. Now it’s allegedly being shown, the same people are saying it’s petty and shouldn’t happen.

To be fair, it's 8 months later. Why would those same people still care? The relationships over, move on.

Personally, I find it hard to divorce her views from her Enid Blyton approach to teenagers, the lazy antisemitic tropes in her world building and the suggestion that longer and duller equals more adult. 

I do also think that she just went too far down the wrong rabbit hole and didn't want to lose face by climbing out of it so just keeps on digging. But then  when you've had that much smoke blown up your arse you either develop one hell of an ego or lung cancer. 

I seem to remember that being a being "smarky" crowd with signs for Super Dragon and things. 

Having the same problem. Gave up in the end. 

I know wrestling is always behind popular culture but naming the current era after the Renaissance seems a tad insulting. 

1 hour ago, JLM said:

 

They also know full well that they will see how a person presents and make the call on whether they think they’re a man or woman without asking to see their genitals or carrying out any tests, so there is clearly more to it than chromosomes. 

I dunno, telling a transphobe you can't know what gender they are till you've had a quick gander at their genitals seems like a good way of getting out of some circular arguments. 

I feel like Tajiri would have had a good run in either AEW or WWE if he came along now. I think I prefer the reality we got though as he was a fun midcard act. 

7 hours ago, 2Xtreme_lives said:

I think it as people have said above exposure and relevancy is everything.

As noted take a Bossman, Earthquake etc I think that golden era of large characters and gimmicks is what killed these guys careers longevity 

There's a few 'indy' guys who I considered the future of wrestling now like Kenny Omega, Finn Balor who yes have been around some time but not seen by the masses

Then you get Bryan Danielson had a tough/lon career, hard hitting style and stopping full time this year ar 42 and seen an icon and AJ Styles who is 47 still believes in flat earth but seems to have been on national TV forever 

No gimmicks just doing what they do

 

AJ's had loads of gimmicks. He's been flippy floppy, Russo's bestie, mini Ric Flair, Sting without the makeup, an adulterer and a soccer mum.

Finn Balor had "little man having it large" in NJPW, cosplayer, demon and goth who likes purple. 

You wait till he turns heel and cuts  promo saying he always was the American Nightmare. 

It's just one of those examples where a wrestler gets a cool nickname and the cool gimmick that could have been attached to it evaporates. Like how we could have had a wrestling architect but now we can't because it's associated with Seth Rollins. 

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

I'm sure the obsession with numbers and ratings and success exists in other media, but never to the extent that it does in wrestling, and I'm convinced it comes from two places - an obsession with the "Monday Night War", and people thinking that wrestling's default state is two rival promotions trying to outdo each other by metrics that largely don't make sense any more, and wrestling fans needing to be seen as "smart". Too many fans still seem absolutely terrified of just admitting that they like wrestling, or that they want to see their favourite wrestler win more matches, because to do so suggests that they're just a mark, and there's nothing worse to be than that - so they have to wrap it all up in arguments that sound business-y and insider instead. You can't just want your favourite wrestler to win, you have to argue about how the creative direction is better if they win, and how if they don't win, it's because someone in the office is holding them down. You can't just say that this promotion, or this style of wrestling, is your favourite, you have to argue that it's the best on some kind of quantifiable business ground - that this company's ratings are better, that this wrestler is a bigger draw, or that this style of wrestling "turns off casual fans", as if the barrier to your enjoyment of a bit of telly should be whether an imaginary other person is enjoying it or not!

I think it depends which corner of fandoms you're in. There's definitely corners of the Doctor Who fandom, for instance, who obsess over ratings, whether it's worrying that ratings are too low or using them as arguments to say one writer/doctor was better than the other. 

I think it's natural to be a fan of something and then become interesting in how bits of it works. 

Plus wrestling doesn't provide the same statistical fix that other athletic endeavours do. People can't obsess over how many completed passes someone has made in a season so they talk about how much wrestling time there was on a show or what the TV ratings are. They want some numbers. 

Wasn't Booker there that time Punk tried to pull his "I'm a locker room leader, look at my big boy pants" the last time Punk was in the WWE?

I imagine nearly every match at WrestleMania nowadays is rehearsed ad nauseum. Which, to be fair, it worked for Savage and Steamboat. 

Rousey is tremendous in that match though, and they must have thought they struck gold. 

Bad Bunny and Logan Paul have kind if ruined this discussion because they came in and looked good from the start. Again, they were protected in tag matches, but still. 

6 hours ago, Version1.0 said:

WWE missed making a star out of Kenny Dykstra.

I've always seen Dykstra as the poster child for boring mid-00s OVW graduate who was lucky to get the zany gimmick that he did even though everybody at the time was fantasy booking him to drop the gimmick and become a serious wrestler. 

Why do you think he could have been a star? Genuinely interested. 

It's interesting to think about what would have happened with any of the NBT if WCW had survived. I don't think they're missed opportunities so much as they missed opportunities. 

TNA could have done more with Monty Brown than they did. They had a homegrown star with real momentum and didn't have the nerve to run with it. Then they turned him heel and aligned him with Jarrett. 

I still think Ryback should have beaten Punk for the title in the cell. It would have established him as a guy who can win the big one, and then it's super easy to screw him over in a TLC match the next month. I don't really buy that it would have damaged Punk before his match with Rock. His greatest attribute is that people believe what he says, he could have easily talked people into wanting to see him against The Rock. 

And, just for balance, AEW not capitalising on that Thunder Rosa/Britt Baker match was a missed opportunity for all parties. 

Am I the only one that uses the create a wrestler slots for bad facsimiles of legends and random gimmicky losers? You know, the way it's meant to be used?

I already have a Lord Humungus. I normally create a fairly small woman who's a bit too much of a Kane fan, complete with a red and black dress and a Kane mask. 

I want a WCW 2000 reunion. Give me Jung Dragons/3 Count, Norman Smiley, Disco Inferno, Tank Abbott, Crowbar, David Flair and whoever else is left. Fuck it, go wild and let Foley in for a hardcore match with Smiley and Knobbs. He can get hit with a rubber chicken, gently mind. 

Interesting that they highlighted GM mode as a mode thats been left to fester when that's actually had quite a few updates. I'm guessing they meant universe mode. 

10 hours ago, wordsfromlee said:

Who do you reckon would book this match? I know most wrestling promotors are still carny as fuck and will book pretty much anything if it'll make them a buck but I can't see WWE/AEW/TNA touching this with a barge pole. 

WWE is never going to happen.

TNA couldn't afford it.

AEW? Genuinely wouldn't shock me as much as it should. 

Maybe we need to go back to the days when wrestlers had to pass a physical from a state doctor. 

It'd be one thing if it was Foley dishing out the violence on somebody else but you just know he's going to take some unprotected chair shots to the head or a bump on the concrete or something. 

Wonder if Tony Khan might be interested in bringing Foley in. 

I really love Kevin Nash's 2003 WWE theme which sounds like a more epic version of his Diesel theme. 

I think it's important to remember that a lot of people will have childhood memories of watching WWE, maybe memories of watching it with loved ones, or memories of watching it when going through the usual pains of growing up, and so people might find comfort in it still. That doesn't dismiss the horrible things that people involved in that company have done, but if watching WWE or being a fan of it helps someone get through the day then I'd find it hard to begrudge anyone that. 

I've signed up to the WWE Network and I've been watching more WWE lately than I have in ages because I'm trying to cope with a death and for whatever reason watching some WWE has brought me a little escapism (I suspect its just the comfort of retreating into something that reminds me of more innocent times) but that doesn't mean that I don't find the recent revelations troubling. And maybe that's selfish of me, when the company has brought harm to other people, but its distracted me from some pretty harmful thoughts, and while I might not believe that I'm worth much at the moment, if it's done the same to others than I'd find it hard to think any less of them. 

I sometimes wonder if HHH deliberately made Steiner look shite as revenge for Ric Flair. Which is embarrassing school yard shit but...

How would you even go about structuring Reigns/Rock vs. Cody/Austin? Presumably you'd have to have Cody as the babyface in peril making the hot tag to Austin and that just feels counter productive. Seth makes more sense because they can "re-injure" him and get the heat on him.

Its not like you can have one of those "moves, moves, moves" tag matches with those 4 guys. 

In the moments when I don't think Rollins is just a bit shite, I wonder if he just lacks self confidence. The endless nicknames and gimmicks, his moveset approach to wrestling, the obnoxious clothes and the over the top acting just makes me think he has 0 belief in himself as a performer.