DavidB6937 Posted March 4 Posted March 4 It's really not needed. Sometimes you just want to lose yourself in wrestling. Enjoy the big characters. Watch them smash the shit out of each other. Who looks at Jade and Rhea and thinks "oh I'm not that bothered unless there's some angry tweets"? Quote
Awards Moderator HarmonicGenerator Posted March 4 Awards Moderator Posted March 4 When was WWE's first "they real life don't like each other" angle? Was it the sly digs Bret and Shawn used to get in at each other? Quote
d-d-d-dAz Posted March 4 Posted March 4 2 minutes ago, HarmonicGenerator said: When was WWE's first "they real life don't like each other" angle? Was it the sly digs Bret and Shawn used to get in at each other? I think there was a time though, when they were feeling it out where it was additive. It might not be to everyone's taste, but Shawn Michaels saying to Bret 'you're the good guy? Mate, you're shagging half the women's roster' or whatever isn't a complete wall break; it's a peak behind the curtain, but a controlled one where everyone could still feasibly be their character. 'You're only where you are because of creative' is the other side of nonsense. It'd be like in the next Avengers film, if Tom Holland quickly whipped off the Spiderman mask and said to Dr Doom 'you're only here because you're Robert Downey Jr and the studio like you, y'know'. It's somehow both obvious, inane and completely obliterates the point of what you're watching. Quote
Paid Members BomberPat Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 1 hour ago, LaGoosh said: You don't watch an action film and wonder if the actors playing the bad guy and the good guy get along in real life. The characters don't reference the actors personal lives. I will say that, unfortunately, this sort of thing does happen. There are always rumours about, say, whether The Rock and Vin Diesel can stand to work together or not, and I'm sure 90% of that is planted stories designed to get the fact that they're making another Fast and The Furious movie into the headlines. And you do get the odd little shots at personal lives in action movies - Tango & Cash has Sly saying "I hate Danish", as a gag about him getting divorced from Brigitte Nielsen. I'm sure the Deadpool movies are probably full of it too. Though, crucially, it's never made a movie better. Fourth wall stuff works when it accents the story, not when it supercedes it. The pipebomb worked because under all the shoot promo stuff, it was still the character of CM Punk taking umbrage with the character of John Cena, leading into a PPV World Title match, and Punk didn't lose sight of that. Quote
Paid Members Supremo Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 I did like that they started those weird rumours about Vin Diesel and The Rock having backstage heat and then the once invincible Fast and the Furious franchise drove into a brick wall. The last one failed to make the expected profits and it was touch and go on whether they’d even make the final instalment, to pay off the cliffhanger they left it on. Go worked shoot, become moot. Quote
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 (edited) 1 hour ago, waters44 said: t's just a bit of genuine animosity in a feud isn't it? That's all. You've still got all the above but with an added dash of something a little extra. Not really. Why does any wrestling story need genuine animosity when you know they're not fighting for real anyway? Just tell a proper fictional story with fictional characters. It takes away from any fictional story being told because it just highlights that this is all fictional except that bit where he made a "shoot" comment and no one pays any attention to anything else. Also just having wrestlers stand around slagging each other off is the most boring way to tell a wrestling story possible. Does someone bringing up Charlotte Flair's divorces make me want to see the match more than I did before?! Bret vs Austin didn't have any of that shit and that's the benchmark for all wrestling stories in my opinion. They were great mates behind the scenes but you watch any segment or match and you immediately 100% believe that these two characters hate each other and want to kill one another. Edited March 4 by LaGoosh Quote
Awards Moderator HarmonicGenerator Posted March 4 Awards Moderator Posted March 4 41 minutes ago, d-d-d-dAz said: It'd be like in the next Avengers film, if Tom Holland quickly whipped off the Spiderman mask and said to Dr Doom 'you're only here because you're Robert Downey Jr and the studio like you, y'know'. I don't know if you saw the She-Hulk show but at one point she climbs out of the Disney+ menu and goes into her own writers' room to ask what they're doing. With that sort of thing, plus Deadpool potentially now being part of it, this wouldn't actually be so surprising! Quote
Paid Members waters44 Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 15 minutes ago, LaGoosh said: Not really. Why does any wrestling story need genuine animosity when you know they're not fighting for real anyway? I've never said it needs it. Twice now I've just said its a little bit extra on top, and that's all. 37 minutes ago, LaGoosh said: Does someone bringing up Charlotte Flair's divorces make me want to see the match more than I did before?! Yes 😆 Does it make you want to see the match less? 38 minutes ago, LaGoosh said: Bret vs Austin didn't have any of that shit and that's the benchmark for all wrestling stories in my opinion. They were great mates behind the scenes but you watch any segment or match and you immediately 100% believe that these two characters hate each other and want to kill one another. I would love to live in your dream world where this can happen on a regular basis. The industry is different now. Genuine question, do you go into matches thinking the wrestlers really dislike each other and want to fight? I am insanely jealous of you if that's the case. I can think of a handful of matches over the last thirty years where they have whipped me up enough to think that, and what a joy. But these days I think I'm watching out of nostalgia, habit, to see the athleticism, to enjoy the craft and how the competitors work together, what new and interesting stuff they can come up with, how they work the crowd and how the crowd reacts, and also in some ways think about how clever (or not) the booking and production is. Quote
organizedkaos Posted March 4 Posted March 4 (edited) 1 hour ago, BomberPat said: Though, crucially, it's never made a movie better. Yeah the best example I could think of are films where they play up the potential romance/real chemistry between the romantic leads. I'm not sure if that actually make a film any better but film studios clearly think there's something you can sell when the lines between a fictional story and the people conveying the story are blurred. Don't look now sex scene being "real", Last Tango in Paris butter scene, Blair Witch Project (both the kayfabe mythology and the genuine way they made that film), deaths of animals in Cannibal Holocaust, the Eraserhead baby, half of what Von Trier or Hitchhock did (yes I realise a lot of these stories are extremely problematic but they've gone from "wow can you believe they did that" when I was younger to, again quite righty, "fuck that was terrible"). There's plenty examples of films with these real life stories adding to the mythology/publicity of a film. Not saying any of these things made a film better but there's certainly some facination around the space where fiction and reality blur into each other. Oh and Tom Cruise doing his own stunts, that's genuinely used as an example of reality making a film better - I'm stretching the premise here but I think it helps illustrate this idea permeates media way further than wrestling. Wrestling is, obviously, weirder because those things blur much much more but that's kinda how wrestling works anyways. It's natural that the same "these people actually kind of want to fuck in real life" energy that's used to sell a rom-com might become this "these people actually want to hurt each other in real life" thing in wrestling. It can get in the bin. I find it very stressful worrying that the performers might have an actual fight, it's not fun Edited March 4 by organizedkaos Zsa Zsa Laboum – Something Scary (Avalon Emerson Cybernetic Edit) Quote
DavidB6937 Posted March 4 Posted March 4 (edited) 6 minutes ago, waters44 said: I would love to live in your dream world where this can happen on a regular basis. The industry is different now. Genuine question, do you go into matches thinking the wrestlers really dislike each other and want to fight? I am insanely jealous of you if that's the case. I can think of a handful of matches over the last thirty years where they have whipped me up enough to think that, and what a joy. But these days I think I'm watching out of nostalgia, habit, to see the athleticism, to enjoy the craft and how the competitors work together, what new and interesting stuff they can come up with, how they work the crowd and how the crowd reacts, and also in some ways think about how clever (or not) the booking and production is. It's a suspension of disbelief thing, isn't it? Like with movies or TV shows. We all know they're actors. They generally don't hate each other. But if they're good enough, they'll make you invested enough to forget you're watching acting. Same with wrestling. If they're good enough they'll make you buy into it. I'd hate to have a brain where I'm watching something and the only thing I can think of is "enjoying the craft". Edited March 4 by DavidB6937 Quote
Paid Members waters44 Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 1 minute ago, DavidB6937 said: It's a disbelief thing, isn't it? Like with movies or TV shows. We all know they're actors. They generally don't hate each other. But if they're good enough, they'll make you invested enough to forget you're watching acting. Same with wrestling. If they're good enough they'll make you buy into it. I'd hate to have a brain where I'm watching something and the only thing I can think of is "enjoying the craft". Well I've given you multiple reasons there, but yeah sometimes I am able to suspend my disbelief enough to buy into the competition and the pinfall. But its quite rare. Its more often the case I'm into the pinfalls because of what will happen after the result though eg title change or booking plans or whatever. Why are you watching wrestling? What exactly are you buying into? This is interesting, maybe I'm in the minority here. Quote
Paid Members BomberPat Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 20 minutes ago, organizedkaos said: Yeah the best example I could think of are films where they play up the potential romance/real chemistry between the romantic leads. I'm not sure if that actually make a film any better but film studios clearly think there's something you can sell when the lines between a fictional story and the people conveying the story are blurred. Yeah, romance is a genre that does this all the time, great point. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor made eleven films together, all but one of them had them cast because of the public interest in and preconceptions about their relationship - and the only one in which they weren't cast for that reason was Cleopatra, which started the whole mess in the first place, and their relationship is 90% of the reason anyone still cares about that movie! I think MCU movies are a really instructive way to understand how there are things we think of as unique to wrestling, in terms of how you're always watching with half an eye outside of the text - you're not just invested because you want to know who's going to win, but because of what that win tells you about the plans for the booking of Wrestlemania next month, or how X wrestler is going to be booked knowing their contract is up for renewal and they haven't re-signed yet - is actually commonplace in other media. If you watch an Avengers movie and they kill off one of the heroes, but you know that the actor playing that hero is still contracted for two more films, you're not getting invested in that story in the same way, and the inverse is true; there are character deaths in the MCU that feel bigger not because the narrative makes them so, but because you know it's the actor leaving the franchise. How different is watching an episode of Doctor Who knowing that the current Doctor is on the way out and they'll be announcing their replacement next week to watching an AJ Styles match knowing he said he was retiring this year? In all of those cases, there are ways it can overshadow the fiction, and ways it can heighten it. I don't want wrestling to be constantly bringing up real-life issues that contradict what we see on screen, and that's the problem with most worked shoot angles, they're not an effort to add believability to an existing story, they're a way to undermine that story for the short-term gain of getting a Saved By The Bell "oooooooh!" reaction from the crowd. But if AEW had ever got to the point where they had convinced CM Punk and The Elite to work together, it would be weird to do a match between Punk and Hangman Page or Kenny Omega and pretend that it was just about them trying to win some matches to earn a championship when everybody watching knew that there was real life animosity there - that's where bringing in little bits of reality can add to the tension in a match, rather than detracting from it. It's about respecting the audience's intelligence rather than insulting it. Quote
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 (edited) 40 minutes ago, waters44 said: I would love to live in your dream world where this can happen on a regular basis. The industry is different now. Genuine question, do you go into matches thinking the wrestlers really dislike each other and want to fight? I am insanely jealous of you if that's the case. I can think of a handful of matches over the last thirty years where they have whipped me up enough to think that, and what a joy. But these days I think I'm watching out of nostalgia, habit, to see the athleticism, to enjoy the craft and how the competitors work together, what new and interesting stuff they can come up with, how they work the crowd and how the crowd reacts, and also in some ways think about how clever (or not) the booking and production is. This just sounds like a you problem. No, I don't go into wrestling thinking they genuinely hate eachother, you absolute weirdo. Nor do I watch a film, read a book or engage with any art form literally. It's just being engaged with fictional stories. It's not a "dream world". It's how people have reacted to stories for all human history. My whole point is that good wrestling engages and emotionally involves viewers without breaking the fourth wall. Is the industry different now? I can think of multiple great wrestling stories of the past few years that were brilliant without all that shoot comment shite. I'm baffled that you don't seem to be able to comprehend that or understand how someone could watch wrestling that way. Edited March 4 by LaGoosh Quote
Paid Members Callum1993 Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 It does seem to be a common theme for the big Women’s matches in WWE whether a shoot or a work. You’ve had this, Charlotte/Tiffany last year, Becky/Charlotte a couple of years ago and I’m sure there were similar comments made in the build to Becky/Rousey. None of these feuds needed it. Quote
Paid Members air_raid Posted March 4 Paid Members Posted March 4 1 hour ago, DavidB6937 said: I'd hate to have a brain where I'm watching something and the only thing I can think of is "enjoying the craft". Sadly that’s been most of my fandom for the last 20 years. Quote
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