funkdoc

if you include me in that group, i've actually listened to all of titans and am going through WTBBP now - real nice for getting through work. i enjoy a lot of your stuff and dig when there's real back-and-forth involved on here - i've just developed really high expectations for this board so i'm more likely to voice my frustrations when things fall short. loss: the issue is that a medium like podcasts or live streaming inherently makes it more about the messenger. really, even something like social-justice twitter has suffered the same fate, where the major voices have essentially become competing brands with their own hordes of loyalists. that's where i have concerns over how heavily this forum has become invested in podcasts, even if i realize it's the future (well, the present).

yea this is one of those cases where one was the bigger deal bc time & place, but the other was better on p. much every level sunny's SMW gimmick would get nuclear heat today if tweaked a bit for the times, i maintain

i'm not entirely comfortable with protecting posters because of their podcasts, which is what some people in here seem to be indirectly suggesting. my main beef here is that parv in his worst moments has been guilty of some of the same behavior that rovert was apparently banned for - i.e. just getting his shit in and not being so interested in followup arguments. i don't feel quite the same way as bill because there's also plenty of times where he does engage, but at times i wonder if there isn't a bit of a double standard with this forum

eh, the sheamus hate isn't *that* hard to understand: his gimmick sucked until the last heel turn, and he was getting the roman reigns push for a while there. also his main in-ring strengths are the sorts of things most fans don't notice, so he doesn't have a great rep with them. matt: i guess '93 WCW was his window where he likely would've made it work. i think promoters always just assumed he was a more natural fit as a heel, though, so you got wacky things like not keeping him face after survivor series '96. and you would think as over as he was, he would keep getting cheers as a main-event heel yet that didn't happen? i wonder if part of the issue wasn't him having such weak/bland offense that made his character look silly, as that obviously gets exposed a lot more with him working heel.

sid's one of the weirdest guys to me in the way he could keep organically getting over yet never sustain that when given a true main-event push

since i've been commenting on parv with this stuff, i'd like to add that i feel kinda similarly about matt d with japanese wrestling. "working hard beats working smart" is a big cultural concept there, which is why things like the modern NJPW strike exchanges get over; to that audience, the scariest guy is the one who begs his opponent to hit him and comes back harder in response. you see stuff like that in action anime/manga all the time too ("Genius of Hard Work", anyone?), and it's no coincidence that the biggest modern NJPW fans in the west tend to be the anime nerds. so yea, matt not letting go of "brains should matter" isn't really any different in spirit from parv thinking "heels don't do armdrags". i see all of this as inadvertently bringing in the biases from one (sub)culture to judge others with completely opposite values and histories. i can respect not having the time to unlearn all of these things since this is just a silly hobby when you get down to it, though.

from my limited viewing 3MB didn't really throw themselves into the act the way, saw, darsow did with the repo man. that's a p. big deal imo

yea, seeing the american style as the default is one of the big core issues here. i've seen it before, like when parv said an armdrag is a babyface move and he couldn't get over rudos using them. i find that with understanding anything at a really high level, letting go of those "shoulds" is a key step

seriously, in my experience of showing wrestling to non-fans, the irish whip is the #1 thing that gets you clowned on

MIA sucked bc of the dumb russo names and the booker t thing, tho i guess the major stash story karmically offsets all that

obligatory "oliver humperdink + anyone" post

wow, thanks =) personally, i consider this to mean moments that caused large numbers of fans to abandon a promotion. think of papa shango being the last nail in the coffin for 80s fans, katie vick doing the same for the attitude era crowd, or justin credible winning the ECW title and holding onto it forever. you could interpret it to mean your own personal jump the shark moment, but i'm more interested in the above...

death bump, associated w/ lucha underground which is the Good Lucha to your more typical smart fan also cien caras is the mexican JYD in terms of how he was always portrayed in the WON, so that's an uphill battle

i really don't mind brock as much as some here probably do, but that's mainly because i'm assuming he'll have a few more years like he's had. agree w/ dylan on perrito & the NJPW crew tho. will mexico ever clear out the logjam of great candidates?

glad someone brought up the dr. v thing because that stuff puts me on lifetilt and i didnt wanna shit up the forum with my rants on it i'm closer to bill on this one prob, but i was a huge simmons fan back in the boston sports guy days so his schtick got extra tired to me and i couldn't avoid how many trends of his writing were common in the rest of the site. the pop-culture stuff, which doesn't suit guys like barnwell...the writer self-insertion into potentially fascinating pieces (the precise undoing of the dr. v article, among other examples)...etc. i'm just not the target audience for that kind of site though, and i get why ppl dug it EDIT: oh yeah, gonna dispute the barnwell comment a bit. it's funny, back when he was on FO i thought he was their clear weak link, but holy shit that site has been scraping the bottom of the barrel ever since he left. a bunch of #HotTakes hacks there now, and the singularly awful scott kacsmar - far cry from the mid-late 2000s when they had the best stable of football writers anywhere.

that's no less cult-like than a lot of silicon valley these days, fwiw witness the recent new york times story on amazon

jushin muta liger's post ties into a wider sports phenomenon today. time for a bit of a history lesson... outside of american football, weightlifting was never fully accepted in the big team sports until the 90s. and at that time, most of the top strength coaches came from a bodybuilding-related background. in that world, the conventional wisdom of that time favored an ultra-high-protein & ultra-low-fat diet, and assumed that extreme muscularity and leanness should be top priority. things have changed since then, of course. the low-fat meme has been strongly debunked now, with non-saturated fats gaining a lot of favor over the past decade or so. there's an increasing amount of debate over how much protein a person really needs. more and more coaches are saying that six-pack abs don't really do anything for you athletically, although the fitness culture of social media has made that one an uphill battle. but in elite pro sports nowadays you're seeing guys who aren't as massive as your mark mcgwires & albert belles, or below 10% bodyfat...but who are better all-around athletes than the generation before them. i think that's what HHH has been getting at when talking about this transition in wrestling. fitness & athletic training have broken out of the bodybuilding bubble and wrestling's gotta catch up there!

ok, this is where you're way off i'd say. awareness is a tradition, yes, but it's not a positive kind. the donald trump campaign is evidence, but it goes way back - a huge reason marijuana was so heavily demonized here was because it was The Mexican Drug. "Mexican" here brings up associations with poverty, drugs, laziness/incompetence, etc. that's a largely US-centric point, but that makes up a pretty freakin large portion of the fanbase so hey! i will say that your comments re: japan are EXACTLY what i mean, as a fellow lifelong gamer. i think part of why i've gravitated toward euro boardgames as of late is that i've just gotten sick of the japan fanboy mentality that utterly dominates video games, even as we have more and more good stuff emerge from elsewhere over time. so yes, i don't think it's that you have something out for mexico specifically, but that you do give more leeway to cultures you feel a kinship with. that's easily the most common reason for this phenomenon, i've observed. but you seem to be keeping on and people here seem willing to help you out, so hopefully some good comes out of all this~

yea that ties into something pol's talked about before. he said the modern "ESTE ES LUCHA" chants don't bug him like "THIS IS WRESTLING" does because they strike him more as an expression of cultural pride, which i thought was interesting. also i do think there is something to what si's said, and it's hard for me to be nice about this sort of stuff as well...but i'll try. in short, the popular culture of first-world countries tends to get a benefit of the doubt that the rest of the world doesn't - notice how most internet fandoms focus on the US + japan + the UK and not much else? in the case of the former, people are more likely to learn the culture/history and try to understand the unique quirks in a country's form of entertainment; in the case of the latter, people are more likely to write it off as them just sucking at it because they're a "small pond" or what have you. it's a trend that holds true across so many different subcultures that i am convinced there is something there. to any experienced sociocultural critic or follower of them, it's hard not to have alarm bells going off in your head when you see the "lucha is too hard to understand" line that's so common in our world. i'm not saying this is anything overt or intentional, mind you. just subtle psychological biases going on here...

the issue was that wyatt was the focal point of the entire first half of the match, eliminating a ton of guys bryan coming out when he did was perfectly logical since that would be a great matchup to begin the second half of the match, so it was dumb to have both of them be eliminated with no fanfare and barely a mention from the commentators.

i think another part of it is meltzer's hatred of hulkamania WWF, where JYD was pretty high-profile and legitimately as awful as dave says he was it's like he became one of the symbols of The Death of Wrestling in that era for the WON crowd, and his time in mid-south was inadvertently retconned to be a sort of harbinger of all that

Could've swore Junkyard Dog and Don Muraco were supposed to be in 1988 as well, both got fired for drug busts IIRC. I think Casey replaced one of the Killer Bees who was replacing one of the two of them. oh i didn't know that part, imagine one of them had to be slotted for the main event in the spot koko got then

weren't injuries the reason for koko & the red rooster getting into the main event of the 88 one? EDIT: and scott casey making it onto the show

people who've watched the 98 yearbook tend to think otherwise a common sentiment i noticed there was "holy crap sting SUCKED as champion!" a lot of comments on how he lost all emotion & good matches with the crow gimmick, and people even saying hogan was working hard in the ring but being held down by him. just FWIW...

this is where we split, i think. i know plenty of big music heads who wouldn't have the beatles in their top 1000 and it ain't no thang in that world i've actually held up this forum as a more mature brand of criticism than anything i've seen in video games, precisely because of people like matt d. but i'll use one of the few examples from gaming to illustrate my point... one critic/indie game designer described one particular level in a famous classic game, more or less as follows: "this level is full of mazes and confusing as hell, it hides the key behind an arbitrary secret door with no clues, and it's just not fun at all. and that's precisely what makes it great." her point here was that this particular level was meant to shake you out of your comfort zone that you'd have fallen into at that point in the game, and turn all your expectations on their head. other elements of it (e.g. the visuals) lend support to this idea. the bad stuff i mentioned is pretty much all considered Objectively Bad Game Design by your typical critics, and most players hate this level since they couldn't figure out where to go and couldn't find the secret door i mentioned. i find it fascinating that someone can make a convincing argument that all of this is a positive, and i frankly think that's less "shallow" than accepting the standard narrative. what i'm trying to say is that the qualities of greatness aren't always great, and stuff that we think is always awful may in fact be the best choice for a particular work. i could imagine a wrestling character where you'd want their strikes to miss by a foot, for instance. this is why i don't believe an objective definition of "greatness" is possible, period. the situation matters & varies too much for that, and personal interpretation will also vary. it seems like trying to argue otherwise is tantamount to saying "the masses are right", except in this case it's the masses of critics. one final point specific to wrestling: i think our weaker critical tradition relative to art forms that have been around longer is another major point against the arguments you & parv make. i mean, think about this...our foremost reporter, historian, and critic are all the same person. one person having that much power over the consensus has greatly distorted our view of "established greatness", i would argue - in fields like literature and music, it's at least based on some range of opinions (if still a limited one). i really don't think you can overstate the importance of that.