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What happened to wrestling?


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Yeah, I'm not saying this is directly Cornette's fault, but we've seen similar people winding others up to a frenzy in comics, games and politics. The Alex Jones's, Donald Trump's, Milo Yiannapolous's, Fox News... I think spotting the pattern and suggesting a correlation between the harassment those led to and the more recent toxic elements in fandom is fair.

It would just be a bad time for him to double down and insist that wasn't real violence, etc. 

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Cornette pokes the bear of the undersexed unhappy middle age man who’s life is shit and needs to blame something for why they aren’t happy. It’s mini MAGA to give him relevance when no company will touch him. Dont think iv ever seen a female fan who shared his views 

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1 hour ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

I think there is some correlation. Cornette is like Trump, whipping his audience up with shitty takes an opinions. He’s not telling people to jump the rails, but Trump didn’t tell people to break into the Capital building

I don't think the two are the same. Trump was always calling people to action, either directly or indirectly. As far as I have seen, Cornette hasn't done anything of the sort when it comes to AEW or any other wrestling promotion that's he's pretending is raising his hackles this week so some more people will listen to his podcast and buy his #CultOfCornette goodie bag.

I also feel uncomfortable making any sort of comparison between the two. Because it's wrestling.

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If this guy had been doing what Cornette told him to do regarding AEW he wouldn't have been there in the first place. 

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I can't disagree that Cornette has been whipping up a frenzy for years now, it quite tragic.

That said, not sure that a fan begging for some attention and climbing into a ring ala any pitch invader at a football game, can be compared to an armed attack on the US Capitol.

The 'sanctity' of the ring is a load of cobblers in this post-kayfabe era. You can't have it both ways.

Edited by garynysmon
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8 minutes ago, garynysmon said:

The 'sanctity' of the ring is a load of cobblers in this post-kayfabe era. You can't have it both ways.

if anything, "post-kayfabe" is an even stronger reason to not stand for fans jumping in the ring. If you expect the fans to believe everything that's happening, them jumping in to try and save a wounded babyface or attack a dastardly heel is perversely justifiable. Plenty of promotions had wrestlers debut by being "fans" who jumped the rail - and if you believe it's all real, then a wannabe tough guy could easily think that doing the same thing would get them noticed by promoters. 

In a "post-kayfabe era" where you can just say it's all a show, there's more reason than ever to say "for fuck's sake, don't get in the ring, it ruins the show, and you'll get hurt". 

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3 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

In a "post-kayfabe era" where you can just say it's all a show, there's more reason than ever to say "for fuck's sake, don't get in the ring, it ruins the show, and you'll get hurt". 

I get what you're saying, but surely any tosser that jumps into the ring now is going to be an attention seeking saddo rather than a real threat to any of the participants.

That said, that Bret Hart jump at the Hall of Fame was an exception...

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1 minute ago, garynysmon said:

I get what you're saying, but surely any tosser that jumps into the ring now is going to be an attention seeking saddo rather than a real threat to any of the participants.

That said, that Bret Hart jump at the Hall of Fame was an exception...

bear in mind there's situations like Dimebag Darrell's murder to consider as well - sometimes people are just unhinged and will "jump the rail" as a genuine threat in any live event. And while the majority probably are desperate saddos, particularly in certain parts of America you can't write off the possibility that desperate saddos could be heavily armed or otherwise dangerous.

Cornette I think is playing a dangerous game - he's been riling people up against the kind of wrestling he hates for years, and calling his fans a cult. Seeing people simper and mark out over Brian Last, a complete non-entity to literally anybody but listeners to Cornette's podcast, is bizarre to me, but it happens, as does all the snitch-tagging, the fan accounts, the people with "#CultOfCornette" in their Twitter bios as if it's part of their whole identity. 

Now, anyone who knows anything about Cornette's views could have guessed that he was going to say that fans jumping the guardrail aren't condoned and he doesn't support their actions. But he couldn't even really do that without cutting a promo on the Young Bucks. Even when he and Omega agreed with one another, he still had to do a "well, in my day any fans jumping the rail would have been really violent, not like this nerd" - and to anyone as unhinged as the first fan jumping the rail, how easy is it to read that as a call to arms? Seeing it as Cornette wanting real violence, because that was his criticism of the last attention-seeking prick. 

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I read a book recently called "The True Believer" - an incredible look at nationalist and radical movements and the psychology behind them and how they work, and was not only drawing obvious comparisons to stuff like MAGA and Brexit, but to sports tribalism, right on through to the anti-AEW WWE fans and the Cornette followers. One of the things that applies to all of them is that the people most likely to get swept up in the movement are also the ones whose mindset is so binary that they can pick and choose the parts they want to hear, and apply it to justify whatever opinion or behaviour they already have rationalised themselves. The problem becomes that by introducing such a strong negative attitude to something and shock-jocking it to the extreme, you are of course going to attract the lunatic fringe and the disaffected, because they are the ones who feel they don't belong to anything. When they finally cling to something, it's almost always something negative because they hold a natural bitterness for being outcasts, and they don't do it by half measures.

And once those fuckers are paying attention, they can read Cornette's comments and take it as liberally as they please. Look at that fucking idiot's public call for positive attention from Jim, the guy he thought would pat him on the back. The language used is such that he's trying to be an equal to Cornette, talking like they're two guys at a tailgating party ripping on the New England Patriots. Cornette's response about real violence was just another comment, but one that some other moron can misinterpret in future. That's where people making the Trump comparisons come in, fairly or not. It doesn't have to be on the same scale, the perception that there is a disregard for the potential consequences of introducing bile into the public discourse is the same in any movement.

 

Edited by Liam O'Rourke
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2 hours ago, Tamura said:

If fans today, in particular ones at live events, really do buy into the heel/face dynamic then why do they chant "this is awesome" when the heel kicks out of the babyface's finisher(s)?

That isn't uniformly true, though - the best wrestlers are the ones who can still elicit strong heel/face reactions above and beyond stuff like "this is awesome" and "fight forever" chants. This forum is full of people rooting for Hangman Page as a babyface - not just talking about how good the booking has been, but genuinely willing him to win and talking about how happy it will make them when he does. 

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I thought Young Bucks vs. Moxley and Kingston was awesome. I was still crushed when those two little shits won.

Also on topic, this weekend’s UFC reminded me of this chap.

Standing moonsault? Bloody idiot. No sense of psychology whatsoever. Would never happen in a real fight.

 

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