What type of viewer / fan are you?

[Guest]

I was a wwf/e guy up until the mania that the streak ended, was the first since 8 I’d not watched live or the next day. I wasn’t enjoying watching and being on a few podcasts to talk about shows made me really think how much I wasn’t getting anything good from watching so stopped.

 

in it’s place I went to loads of uk shows, was averaging 50+ a year and then live podcasts etc on top of it. 2019 I started to fade away from it, had started going to football and that was taking a lotta time and money, but gave me my evenings back. As I scaled back lockdown started and I’ve been to one show since things opened up, and have no urge at all to see more. I think it’s a mix of affer the scene rightly cleared out a lot of characters left and that’s more my kinda wrestling than the current small children trying to do new Japan cosplay that I see advertised. 
 

another big part is the rise of AEW. A show I can easily watch and keep up with, I can watch shows with full attention or whilst doing other things and keep up with it. Don’t grudge 15 a quarter to get a ppv. Bar that I don’t watch anything, sometimes read raw results on the loo, but haven’t had the urge to watch any of their tv in years 

[Devon Malcolm]

2 hours ago, Ultimate Hitman said:

What a bizarre reason to stop watching something you enjoy.

Trump derangement syndrome.

I wish you well in 2024 when DJT finally returns to the White House & sorts out the absolute mess made by Biden & Obama & Clinton who are pulling that puppet of a president’s strings.

Bless your little cotton socks.

[RedRooster]

4 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

But there’s the rub. You’d still be a wrestling fan just not a fan of a company and their style of wrestling. A shit product isn’t entitled to your viewership if you think it’s shit. If the demand is there, a better show will replace it. If the demand isn’t, then it goes. Even if there was no wrestling on the telly, there would still be wrestling fans. 
 

Hate watching the only show in town is detrimental to the industry because they know they don’t need to improve their product. 

There’s an element of truth to some of this, but I don’t subscribe to the idea that many people ‘hate watch’. Wrestling is almost soap-like in the way it tells stories. There can be a lot of shit on a show, but as long as there’s enough good, a lot of people won’t want to switch off.

Wrestling storylines also reset suddenly, so what’s bad now might not even be a factor in a month’s time. So there’s often every reason to keep watching. Plus there’s an element of supporting, or wanting to see certain performers regardless of what they’re doing. 

That said, if a show is bad enough for long enough, people will switch off. I did that with WWE a long time ago. I’m not there with AEW yet, and I don’t particularly want to get there, but of course that could happen in time, or if they stop adjusting based on audience which, to be fair, they’ve been fairly good at throughout their existence.

[Keith Houchen]

2 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

I don’t subscribe to the idea that many people ‘hate watch

Yeah they don’t, certainly not casual fans. It’s more people like us and as you say, that reset button is never far away. 

 

4 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

That said, if a show is bad enough for long enough, people will switch off. I did that with WWE a long time ago. I’m not there with AEW yet

They’ve built up so much goodwill with their quality of product so they deserve the benefit of the doubt. I think it’s fair to say that their current form represents a blip as opposed to WWE where their form became their standard. 

[MVP RULZ]

Seems im very much in the minority as I watch Raw, NXT and  Smackdown in full every week

I have Tuesday and Wednesdays off work whilst my wife works those days so my routine is always take our Daughter to school for 8.45, 15 mins walk back home and put on Raw before doing the general housework or anything else that might crop up

Repeat for NXT on Wednesdays

And Saturdays I start work at 10 so get up at 7ish and watch it before showering and getting ready for work.

Watch all the PPVs live on Saturday/Sunday night 

I've been watching WWE since 1997 and have never suffered the same burnout over watching it that others seem to have developed at one stage or another

Ive been to 2 Wrestlemanias (2010 and this years) and already we are planning for next year, I always head to one of the shows on the UK tour and I've actually been to a Live WWE show every year since my 1st one in 2003 (Tour de Force tour at London arena as it was back then) 2020 excluded as they obviously didn't tour though we did have tickets for Wrestlemania that year.

Whilst I'm not someone who defends every single thing that happens and can certainly accept the shows have faults but I get enough enjoyment out of watching still and have never contemplated stopping If im honest

I guess im certainly what you could call a Hardcore WWE fan but I've invested so much of my time and Money in my life to the company that I don't think I'll ever stop tuning in.

I also watch all the shows spoiler free, I mean I read and see rumours etc tho try to avoid any of the "this is the plan for so so" news but I avoid Twitter and any notifications on my phone until I've watched a show on each given day which I really think helps towards enjoying it more and making shows more watchable 

Never understood the "i'll read the reports and if it sounds good I'll watch" as instanly your ceiling to enjoy it is lowered as its impossible to get the same out of anything when you know what is going to happen vs the surprise of experiencing it in the moment.

I just don't have time to watch AEW and mainly read about it through this place, i have it series linked on Sky but Inevitably I just end up deleting it as I never got round to watching it.

Watched New Japan from 2016ish until covid lockdown and went to Royal Quest but I've fallen out of the loop since then.

So in summary It seems I'm a rarity and a diehard WWE Fanboy if you like.

Edited June 11, 2022 by MVP RULZ

[westlondonmist]

I can't remember the last time I watched wrestling. I've seen loads of companies live such as FWA, IPW, WAW, ICW, Chikara/FCP alongside your IMPACT, WWE and WCW. I used to watch loads, look for old shows on top of seeing new stuff. Not that long ago I watched NJPW non stop. Now I just can't be bothered. I sometimes watch old stuff on YouTube but I don't think id be fussed if I never saw it again. Unless my son enjoys it when he gets older I don't see me watching. 

Despite that I'm strangely always interested in what is going on. I like seeing people I saw on the Indies get on WWE main roster, I still route for them on a personal level. Also I am not that concerned with celebrity news except with wrestling. The stories of wrestlers are often interesting sometimes in a funny way and sometimes in a morbid way. 

I think after 30 years I was just burnt out. The same happened to me with football where now i rarely watch something without Celtic or Scotland. 

[air_raid]

I don’t actually watch wrestling anymore. I read the results then come here to complain about certain booking tropes, or reminisce about past wrestling. Wrestling changed, I changed, there’s no room in my life for it right now.

[Loki]

I stopped watching wrestling completely after Benoit, and then TNA got me back into it.  Then fell out of interest again after I think AJ left.   I discovered NXT about the time Samoa Joe got signed there, and that drew me back here I think.  Drifted away from NXT during the Adam Cole era and now I watch maybe a bit of AEW each week and the main event of NXT.

Raw/Smackdown I've not watched a full episode of in years.  I will watch RR/Mania/Summerslam though.

Weirdly I think the thing I enjoy most is seeing the emerging stars, before the machine pounds them into a square peg.  So I like NXT and AEW Dark/Elevation to see if you can spot the next big thing.  Sometimes it's obvious - the moment Bron Breaker appeared you knew he'd be WWE Champion one day.  Other times someone is a bit of a dark horse, like Trick Williams who I think has serious potential.

 

[The Dart]

I watch NXT Lvl Up and the 2 weeks old Main Event on the Network most weeks.    Raw, NXT and Smackdown I will watch YouTube highlights most weeks, but not every week.   PPVs/NXT specials I will always attempt to watch live, but rarely manage it and will only go back and watch what I missed if it was something I was specifically looking forward to.   Mania and Rumble being exceptions where I will make the effort to watch the whole thing.   I think the last time I watched a full episode of Raw or Smackdown, outside of being in attendance, was 2015.

I watch AEW occasionally, certainly not every week and probably not even most weeks, but once a month maybe I'll watch an episode of Dynamite or Rampage.   I've ordered 1 or 2 PPVs.

I'll watch a bit of other promotions on YouTube once in a while - Impact, MLW, other indies.

Going live to shows though I'm still as into as I ever was, including WWE.   Luckily, via Wrestlemania week, I was able to attend GCW, Impact, New Japan, MLW and AAA shows (and others) live this year.   Hopefully seeing an AEW show live is something that will happen soon.

[Accident Prone]

I've gone through so many phases of fandom, and I think right now it's at an upper-middle-lower ebb.

I half-watch AEW Dynamite on one of my monitors during work, half watch AEW Rampage on the TV whilst playing with the scamp on a Sunday morning (the taped shows are hardly essential), and I try to watch the AEW PPVs the very next day at work and on my break via my tablet. Although it's certainly cooled off since last year and despite all it's faults, AEW is still the best American weekly pro wrestling show right now by a country mile.

As you can see though, I'm not exactly watching AEW at it's most optimal presentation but that is the life of a new dad! The free time in my evenings is spent with other hobbies, and I don't want to ruin my wife's night by sticking wrestling on the living room telly. 

I used to watch a lot of modern puro too, and no summer would go by without watching the G1 every fucking day AND LOVING EVERY SECOND. That went out the window with the introduction of COVID safety measures in Japan, meaning fans aren't allowed to be vocal or react organically, and I just can't watch pro wrestling without that live crowd setting. It's so incredibly important and a total deal breaker, and anyone who says otherwise is a fraud.

Not that I'd be able to watch any of it anyway! New dad etc etc. But I am hoping that the safety measures gradually calm down in Japan so I can justify watching DragonGate and DDT again. New Japan is a bit pish now, and even if they scrapped the clap-crowd rules tomorrow I won't be immediately jumping back in until they sort their shit out.

As for WWE and the indies? They've both seen better days and I have little-to-no interest in any of them. It's easy to accidentally keep up with them due to the energy of Twitter, and they're clearly all a shadow of their former selves. Not for me, and that's mainly because they're all shit.

[Ironic Indie Lad]

Definitely goes in phases for me.

Early 90s

I was born in '86 but I have surprisingly vivid memories of WWF from my early years. It felt every bit as big as Ghostbusters, Turtles, Nintendo etc. to me in terms of things absolutely consuming my young mind. We grew up in a fairly modest flat in a working class family so there was absolutely no way my parents were forking out for Sky at the time. Instead I relied on my mums work colleague taping it for me. I probably still have a VHS of Survivor Series 1990 somewhere with regular adverts for Lethal Weapon on Sky Movies (Do you really wanna jump? DO YOU WANNA?!)

I did have a lot of figures though and one of my fondest memories is my Dad coming to get me from my Grans house one Saturday having bought me The Rockers double pack.

Mid 90s

Couldn't have given a bollocks. Was way more into Football reading comics, playing SNES and Mega Drive games etc. Nobody I knew in school was into wrestling at all at this time.

Late 90 to Mid 2000s

Similar to a lot of people my age, I noticed that WWF started becoming a cool thing that people were into again during my last year at Primary School (97/98). I was still not that bothered until I got a copy of the Breakdown : In Your House PPV on tape. I was once again utterly hooked and started getting my hands on everything I could. WCW/NWO Revenge on the N64 pretty much sent my interest level into the stratosphere and it only grew more when my local Global Video started stocking ECW tapes.

Full blown obsessed without interruption through to around 2005-ish including a trip to WrestleMania XX when I had barely turned 17.

Mid to Late 2000s

Stopped caring for large periods at a time. Eddy Guerrero died, the WWE product started to have less and less appeal to me, The Benoit tragedy and so on. A lot of things just sort of added up to me not being that bothered most of the time.

I started getting into UFC a bit in 2005, got really into UFC and Pride by 2006, started doing BJJ in 2007 and for the next several years I was grappling, running, lifting, going to tournaments etc. I didn't really have much time for wrestling then and it was unusual that I would see or hear about anything in wrestling I found interesting during this period - the big exception being when I went to WrestleMania 25 on the assumption that it would be amazing (25th one, huge stadium in Texas etc). It wasn't but at least I got to see Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker in a classic. 

2011 Onwards

2011 was kind of the start of my current fandom. One of the guys I was hanging out with at the time watched WWE religiously. Through him, a group of us got together for WrestleMania 27 and made quite a big day/night of it. Some people have come and gone in that time but there's a core group of us who still get together for most Royal Rumbles, WrestleMania's and, more recently, AEW PPV's.

Right now I can go months and months without seeing anything. If it stops interesting me, I just don't watch.

 

[air_raid]

1 hour ago, Accident Prone said:

I've gone through so many phases of fandom, and I think right now it's at an upper-middle-lower ebb.

Christ, that's up there with Meltzer deciding whether to award 6 1/2 or 6 3/4 stars out of 5.

[Accident Prone]

2 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Christ, that's up there with Meltzer deciding whether to award 6 1/2 or 6 3/4 stars out of 5.

Haha! It's a Simpsons line that appears in the episode where Marge becomes a cop, and it's also a pseudo-catchphrase used in a handful of their comics whenever Homer ends up with some slight luxury in life. It's always just stuck with me as a quotable annoying thing to say whenever the wife buys the 'Taste The Difference' brand instead of the generic 'By Sainsburys' stuff.

Yes, it's *gulps* another boring Simpsons reference on the UKFF.

[BomberPat]

For a similar breakdown;

Mid-90s
Parents got Sky, and this is around the time I'd have first seen wrestling. Around the same time, I found a massive Legion of Doom pin badge at a jumble sale and insisted on buying it even though I had no idea who they were, they just looked amazing. I watched, fairly haphazardly, probably from around '93 to '97. The extent to which I liked wrestling wasn't particularly in line with how much I actually watched - me and my brother would invent characters (usually just rip offs of WWF wrestlers, or of Mortal Kombat and Streets of Rage characters) then play at wrestling as them. Put a stop to that after I got shoulder tackled off the top of the bunkbed and landed on top of the spaceship from M.A.S.K. 
My parents and older brothers hated wrestling, so I only ever caught snippets of highlight shows on the rare occasions when I had control of the TV. Favourites at the time were Bret, Diesel, Razor Ramon, and, for some reason, Duke The Dumpster Droese.
Though at some point early in this first wave of fandom, I was apparently a massive fan of a certain tag team - and while they fit my general rule of "I was a fan of any wrestlers who looked like a baddy in Streets of Rage 2", I have no memory of this one - as a few months ago my brother unearthed a typed summary of an exercise we had to complete in primary school about our favourite things, where I had written (and somebody else, presumably, had typed up) the phrase, "I like WWF wrestling because of the nasty boys", the lack of capitalisation giving it an even more sordid air.

Late '90s
I have a childhood memory of Shawn Michaels superkicking Bret Hart in a wheelchair, but nothing really beyond that from this run - the pressures of my parents, and probably more my older brother, and kids at school doing the "you know it's fake" thing finally convinced me to give up on this wrestling nonsense, and I didn't give it another thought for a few years. 

Early 2000s
Moved to Jersey, started at a new school, practically everyone seemed to be into wrestling. I didn't get it. I was mostly just into video games. That turned out to be the gateway drug - played the demo of Smackdown on the PS1, loved it. A mate got the full game, and I spent all my time round their place playing it, until I got my own copy. Started watching wrestling again in mid-2000, shortly after King of the Ring - was disappointed that none of my favourites in the game seemed to really be around on TV at all, instead there were a load of people I'd never heard of like this Kurt Angle clown. Initially didn't believe that The Undertaker, in biker gimmick, was the same guy that I watched as a kid, just assumed it must be a new one.
Recorded Summerslam 2000 off the telly, and pretty soon was watching Smackdown every Saturday, and within a year (at the most) was recorded RAW every Friday and PPVs every month, and absolutely hooked, it was all we talked about at school. The coolest kids among us nerds were those who seemed to have some kind of inside knowledge, and always knew what was going to happen every week on RAW. As it transpired, they weren't even reading newz websites or anything like that, they were literally just going on WWF.com on a Tuesday morning and reading what happened on RAW, which wouldn't air here until Friday. In spite of that, one of them still repeatedly insisted that Ken Shamrock was definitely coming back this week.
I try and consume every bit of wrestling media I can my hands on - friends lend me old videos to get me up to speed, I buy whatever wrestling magazines the local shop gets in each month, every book that has anything to do with wrestling, every video game, and try and blag my way into buying ECW VHS at HMV when I look nothing like the required 18 years old. I read Mick Foley's first book cover to cover a few times, which introduces me to Japanese wrestling, and just the idea of there being more wrestling out there outside of what's on TV. I get into games like TNM7, Extreme Warfare 9000, and e-feds, and all that nonsense, and spend ages online trying to download short grainy clips of Japanese deathmatches. 
 

Mid-2000s
A low ebb, but never goes away. I start college, start having a bit more of an actual social life, and none of my new friends care about wrestling, and my brother's stopped caring, so it becomes a bit of a solitary endeavour for me keeping up with it all, mostly online. I develop other interests that take up more of my time, wrestling remains a bit of a minority thing. Benoit and Guerrero die - Benoit had been my brother's favourite wrestler, so we watched the tribute show together, the first time he'd watched wrestling in a few years. Didn't turn out well. Misawa dies, which freaks me out and makes me give wrestling a wide berth for a short time.

Late 2000s/early 2010s
A real resurgence of interest, thanks to indie stuff becoming a bit more readily available. Starting in 2008, but really kicking into gear in 2010/11, I get into CHIKARA, who open my eyes to a ton of wrestling from all over the world, and various independent scenes, and I follow them religiously for a few years, buying every event on DVD as they're released. My girlfriend at the time gets into wrestling, so it becomes something we watch together, which means I'm actually watching weekly WWE TV for the first time in years. A guy I was at uni with has a brother who becomes a wrestler and, because Jersey's super small, I know two or three of the other guys he's going to be wrestling with in his upstart new promotion. I hang out with them a bit, talk about helping them put on a show (at this point I'm promoting gigs and whatnot), and take some photos at their training sessions. In 2013, they start running shows, and I get talked into refereeing them - and here we are. For a few years there, I'm watching more wrestling than I've ever watched.

Late 2010s-to-Present
The focus changes here, really - partly because myself and many of my friends are more "in the business" than before, but also because I have more disposable income, I'm single for a few years, and end up pissing away most of my money attending shows, so my interest in wrestling ends up much more focused on live indie shows than on watching it on TV. That goes further until I end up where I'm at now, where I tend to work ring crew for more shows than I actually watch; I'm at least one, usually two, shows a month in some capacity, but rarely ever watch any wrestling on TV. I mostly keep up with stuff by following clips and conversations online - I haven't watched RAW or Smackdown in years, skip most WWE PPVs, and drifted out of the habit of AEW being appointment viewing a while back, and don't watch NXT or NXT UK. I don't keep up with many other promotions either - we still watch every AEW PPV, and I'm aiming to watch all three AAA Triplemanias this year, but - aside from a brief period of following NOAH - don't keep up with Japanese promotions any more, just have a cursory idea of what's going on elsewhere. If an interesting US indie show pops up - Bloodsport, a fun Wrestlemania weekend show, or something like the GCW Hammerstein Ballroom show - I'll watch it, but it takes more and more for a card to pique my interest now; it feels like a lot of the same people popping up everywhere, and a lot of combinations that don't do anything for me. Quite often I'll bookmark stuff to watch later, and never get around to it, and forget why it interested me in the first place. 

[Carbomb]

I'm a sober wrestleholic.

Haven't watched WWE since the Shield/Wyatt Family Elimination Chamber (which was awesome, to be fair), but I have fallen off the wagon a couple of times - went to see NJPW at the Copper Box in London, and Kaiju Big Battel at Alexandra Palace. Seen a few episodes of AEW, watched most of the NWA Powerrrr free seasons on Youtube. 

Other than that, though, am a bit indifferent. I don't know why, and I don't want to be, as the stuff that's been going on in AEW sounds like it's been amazing, but I just can't muster the energy. I think it's possibly because it's yet another thing amongst a whole host of things to keep up with.