When did you stop caring?

[LaGoosh]

48 minutes ago, Supremo said:

The best characters are the wrestler’s real personalities turned up to eleven,” is the type of self-fulfilling, self-congratulatory bollocks typical of the pro-wrestling industry

I absolutely hate this saying and how widely it's been adopted by lazy, shit wrestlers. However I love the inverse of it that Eddie Kingston said where his character isn't him turned up to 11 but is just him when he was 15 years old when he was wild mood swings, over emotional, bouncing off the walls, no filter and getting into fights for dumb reasons all the time.

Edited May 13 by LaGoosh

[Arch Stanton]

I guess it might have been Austin that coined that phrase in the first place? If it wasn't him, he's definitely used it in plenty of interviews and it absolutely makes sense for his personality and the career he had. You can see why so many would therefore see that as a blueprint for success and parrot the line.

The problem is that, Austin's personality dialled back from an 11 to a 2 would still outshine almost anyone on the current roster of either major promotion. 

[DavidB6937]

40 minutes ago, Arch Stanton said:

I guess it might have been Austin that coined that phrase in the first place? If it wasn't him, he's definitely used it in plenty of interviews and it absolutely makes sense for his personality and the career he had. You can see why so many would therefore see that as a blueprint for success and parrot the line.

The problem is that, Austin's personality dialled back from an 11 to a 2 would still outshine almost anyone on the current roster of either major promotion. 

And that's absolutely the problem. They all think they're interesting enough to make people care and most of them really aren't. And sure, finding the right fit for Austin's personality was a great move, but it wasn't the only thing to take into consideration when it comes to the overall success. Lightning rarely strikes twice for many reasons, but it's often because people utterly fail to see the bigger picture and take everything in. They just take a basic view of something, copy and paste, and then wonder why it didn't work.

[tiger_rick]

I think the thing with that viewpoint is it comes from a time when wrestling had moved away from ridiculous "characters" like clowns, dustmen, truck drivers, etc and an era where everyone had to have some sort of gimmick or second job into a boom era off the back of "characters" that were all some extension of the real life person, like The Rock, Kurt Angle, Kevin Nash, or took elements of the wrestling gimmick that person had for years to the point, they just felt real versions of themselves, like Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan, Shawn Michaels, Scott Hall, Randy Savage, Mick Foley, etc.

I don't think there's particularly anything wrong with that approach. You could argue that plenty of top guys these days are just themselves amped up, and it works well for the most part. Kenny Omega, CM Punk, Mox, Cody Rhodes, etc. They've all developed through the years and settled into something that feels pretty real for them (dammit). 

The issue isn't that, IMO, it's that all these shit writers or ChatWWE prompters want to have their cake and eat it all the time. They want to take all the credit when fans decide that Cody Rhodes is the guy and get behind him to an incredible degree, while also showing how brilliant they are by having Cody cut fucking idiotic promos or having other people throw barbs at Cody. Always about Dusty or something equally tedious. MJF feuds are culpable too.

It's not that you can never use reality. But if it's not common knowledge or in cannon, what's the point?

[DavidB6937]

6 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

It's not that you can never use reality. But if it's not common knowledge or in cannon, what's the point?

Yeah I think they operate as if everyone knows everything sometimes. So when Ricky Starks debuts on SmackDown to talk with Cody Rhodes they're expecting a big 'wow!' moment but actually most people don't even know who Ricky Starks is, let alone that he's mates with Cody Rhodes. And a lot of people just don't care. You're not operating at WWF/WCW cross over big wow jump moment levels anymore. Not consistently anyway.

[BomberPat]

The thing with "your personality turned up to eleven" is that you need to know which bits of your personality to turn up. You don't get Stone Cold without Stunning Steve Austin, Superstar Steve Austin, without The Ringmaster, without years of him learning how to work and learning what audiences to respond to, and eventually figuring out which bits of his personality are the parts that audiences are going to resonate with. And even then, the original concept for the Stone Cold gimmick was of a heartless, emotionless killer, he was studying interviews with serial killers to try and grasp the right delivery and tone for that, it was never a case of a lightbulb clicking and him becoming Stone Cold, it took a career's worth of happy accidents to get there. 

"Turned up to eleven" just being go-to default advice is missing the wood for the trees, I hear it applied to young wrestlers and said at training schools and seminars to kids who don't even know what their personality is yet, don't know who they are yet, yet alone which bits of their personality make for a good wrestling character, or who they should be as a wrestler.

[garynysmon]

Its ridiculous that I'm typing this on a wrestling forum I'm still contributing to in 2026, but I'd say that 2001/02 was a real turning point for me.

I've said countless times that my school mates all went home for the summer holidays of 1993 as massive WWF fans and essentially came back to school in September thinking it was old hat.

Yet I still watched religiously through 94, 95 etc and also catching whatever WCW I could between the German sexline adverts on DSF.

So its not like I was a snob when it came to quality. Yet when I went off to uni in 2002, it was never the same after that.

(Its mad to think that I'm essentially saying that the entire 'WWE' era has been a massive downgrade).

The closure of WCW really didn't help either and as the Attitude Era started to wane, the WWF's storylines started to come across as more and more desperate yet the product didn't have any of the charm of 1997/98.

We didn't have Sky at our halls so access was non-existent really, but contrary to most people then (and certainly popular opinion now), reading online I was fucking horrified that 'midgets' like Eddy Guerrero, Benoit etc were now being given world title pushes, and that bum midcarders like Bradshaw and Edge were suddenly in the main event picture.

(See, I was always the polar opposite to the popularity of ROH style at the time)

Honestly I thought it was all an aberration, and with star power falling off a cliff I never really got back into it in the same way. Where had all the proper stars gone?

It took TNA starting on Challenge for me to start watching again, really due to it being on terrestrial TV and something I could watch in my room. Having so many familiar faces like Nash, Sting, etc made it so much more palatable, as well as being a relatively easy watch.

Then the TNA's financial issues started to become apparent, and I found the ongoing shenanigans to be utterly fascinating.

So when Scott D'amore and Callis took over it was the ultimate underdog story wasn't it?  And I was utterly invested in that incremental growth.

Yet now that TNA's lost its autonomy, to a degree at least, the attachment isn't there any more.

I've never been able to warm to AEW at all. At the beginning there were aspects that should appeal, having Schiavone and Ross on comms etc, but still it doesn't do it for me.

The honest answer is I can't get over how much of an utter berk I think Tony Khan is... I can't stand the bloke. The 'daddy's a billionaire' and 'I can buy all my favourite action figures' act genuinely grates me, being the cynical twat that I am.

Thank god for WWE Vault.

Edited May 14 by garynysmon

[AshC]

I heard something on a podcast this week that argued "everything since WrestleMania 17 is essentially fan fiction". 😬 

[LaGoosh]

3 hours ago, garynysmon said:

The honest answer is I can't get over how much of an utter berk I think Tony Khan is... I can't stand the bloke. The 'daddy's a billionaire' and 'I can buy all my favourite action figures' act genuinely grates me, being the cynical twat that I am

As a big TNA fan how did you feel about Dixie Carter?

[garynysmon]

I was younger and less cynical back then!

[BarryOVega]

I’d never actually noticed that I’d stopped caring about wrestling but I suppose it’d be around Mania 31, Bryan being fucked physically and the shittiest elimination ever from the shittiest Rumble ever a few months before started putting me off bothering watching regularly 

The same show having the NWO helping Sting which was just a blatant excuse to get them and DX fighting even though it made absolutely no sense started making me think WWE was now just a tribute to it’s own glory days, which stopped me caring about who actually won and lost matches 

Kept up with results online and started watching regularly again when Punk came back but as far as watching wrestling it’s just NXT regularly, Vault stuff and if I’m bored in the afternoon of a day off then some PPV on Netflix from ‘88 to ‘91

[The Reverend]

I still care, because I still want wrestling to succeed. But in a way I'm stuck in my own little time machine, on a rotation. These days, with the joys of Netflix and Youtube I basically indulge myself with all of the stuff I had / wanted to have when I first became a fan, This basically means 80's/90's WWF/NWA/WCW  and territories. Having a bit of a disposable income I buy vintage mags, retro figures, bits of merchandise and books - basically all the stuff I wanted as a kid. 

Netflix has made it easier to dip into the latest product - as I subscribe anyway there's no real cost, and I can watch as and when I like. I don't really follow the storylines (it seems to be too time consuming) or watch the weekly TV shows - I just tune into the big events to see what's going on. If there's something I should know about each match, I know a quick glance on the internet will tell me. I don't care about spoilers as I don't really have a vested interested in any of the stars anymore, and I'm not sure there is anything such as a big surprise in wrestling these days. 

If I do see a bit of hype around a TV match then I might give it a watch whilst ironing or eating dinner - again the beauty of Netflix. 

Perhaps what I enjoy more is the other side of the business that we get to see now - I really liked Dark Side of the Ring, the cheesy but good fun show they did where the WWE went and bought up lost historical items and stuff like that. Basically anything that doesn't have a match - which perhaps sounds a bit odd.

So although I'm not too fussed about the current product I do like to see it do well, but for me if I'm going to watch anything it's what made me a fan in the first place.