funkdoc

interesting case where both guys strike me as more interesting candidates for the singles list. i guess that's not all that uncommon with tag teams though i probably dig shinzaki more than close to anyone here - huge sucker for quiet japanese monk characters

japan cred counted for a *lot* with the WON crowd. was one of the only ways for hosses to get any respect from them. they were also a symbol of bill watts's efforts to bring back 80s southern territory wrestling. they represented ~HOPE~ to people at the time, i think and yea, to add to what others said, my big problem with them is how much of their matches they guzzle up with bland restholds and work that just doesn't go anywhere

Am I anti-art for thinking that sounds like a boring rip-off? maybe, maybe not. you can't really tell just from one opinion! what this *does* tell me, though, is that you aren't the intended audience for the game. i know plenty of queer people who have said this game hit them on a level that virtually no other video game, and few other creative works, ever have. a lot of modern indie games are speaking to audiences that have been ignored for ages by popular media. gone home is actually *less* overt about this than some of the other notable games that it gets grouped with; look up dys4ia sometime and you should see what i mean. BTW The Man In Blak, you aren't "a man in black" of anti-gater fame, right? anyway, great post - it's rad as heck to see someone in that field on here!

how do you think you can objectively define "quality"? this is the issue people like jimmy redman and myself have. i flat-out don't think it's possible. the issue is that seeing merit in anything requires you to buy into a surrounding value system that prizes the qualities you think are "objectively" important. and that value system itself may not necessarily have any objective arguments in its favor, or have strong arguments against it. for instance, i could easily picture someone not rating any 90s AJPW ***+ because of the long-term effects of the style. they would basically be saying "celebrating these matches is implicitly celebrating brain damage, and that's such an important issue to me that it overrides anything the matches themselves have to offer". and i think that would be a perfectly reasonable viewpoint as long as it's applied to other culpable wrestling out there. i don't see any concrete case for "the art and the personal are separate" being inherently more valid than "the art and the personal are linked". or imagine someone who doesn't get much out of even the most celebrated wrestling stories, like magnum-tully. this person has also been desensitized to highspot wrestling. so they end up seeing the corniness/weirdness as the creative heart & soul of wrestling, and could consider a lot of 80s WWF straight-up better than the stuff i've mentioned in this post. if they can explain why they've ended up turning the smart-fan value system on its head, how can you say their opinion is any less relevant than anyone else's?

personally i'd like to see more of a move away from ratings in general video games are currently going through the whole "is it art?" debate, and part of that involves the way games have traditionally been evaluated. magazines or other major outlets would always give numerical or star ratings to different components of a game (graphics, sound, controls, replay value, etc.) and give it a total score based on that. there's been an increasing amount of people arguing that this amounts to judging a game as a consumer product rather than as a creative work, and there's an emerging indie scene making games that defy this whole system. to give an example of where you get a divide here, let's look at one of those indie games - Gone Home. this is a simple, low-tech, highly story-driven game featuring a lesbian relationship as a major part of the plot. it won a bunch of awards from IGN and other mainstream outlets, the most success an indie game has had in that regard thus far. it's also $20 and extremely short for a video game (you can finish it in an hour or so), and there isn't a lot of "action" in the conventional sense (the entire game is looking at objects in a house to piece together the story). thus, the anti-art crowd in games will often argue that all the praise & awards for this game mean that the media is in cahoots with the political correctness nazis or whatever, and they cite reviews not mentioning the price or length of the game as proof of "corruption in games journalism". rather than, you know, a statement that those things can be irrelevant if you create a strong enough experience. this kind of absurdity is the logical end result of any hard rating system, in my view. true, wrestling doesn't have as much that's as outside the box as my example above, but there already is some. i would point to the Lawler-Snowman matches, for one - they wouldn't do well in any conventional rating system, but the Snowman's many "weaknesses" as a performer are actually strengths here. that's a case where you WANT someone who can't wrestle and who stumbles over his words in interviews, because that's more realistic and realism was the point of this feud. i think we're eventually going to see a wave of this stuff in wrestling, probably some years from now. given where comic books and video games (two very good comps because of the similar audience) are at right now, it seems inevitable to me. wrestling is always behind the times, but it also usually gets there eventually...

that's still not as good as football commentators saying someone's "out with a knee" in place of "knee injury"

yea parv, kobashi as the best worker of 93 has long been common consensus. it's definitely a matter of consistency, though, because the people who watched the '93 yearbook didn't get that impression from him either. the point made in response to that was that his week-in-week-out performances on AJPW's TV were what made him stand out, with virtually no duds - he was the best possible arn anderson as a worker, basically.

yeah dylan, you were the main guy i thought of who did something akin to what i mean. great to see you posting in here! also that's a real interesting argument parv, and one i could see people going either way on without a clear answer. sort of like the peak vs. career preference in sports, to continue the parallel. i have to head for work now but will try and think of something else to say here later!

alright yall, this is a thread idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while now... so usually when you see people debate various wrestlers' effectiveness as draws, there tends to just be a focus on the amount of money in itself and how much people worked on top in promotions that did well. this approach always felt funny to me, but i really got motivated once i saw parv discuss dominic denucci vs. mick foley and how they might be equal as draws. i immediately thought "wait, was denucci EVER one of the 10 biggest wrestling stars worldwide? because foley definitely was at one point. alright, this is kinda silly and i need to talk about it." the idea that it was a gajillion times easier to be a legitimate draw in the territory days isn't exactly news, yes. but usually i see people just acknowledge it then judge the results anyway. this rubs me the wrong way because i've long been into sabermetrics (the advanced statistical analysis of sports), and they take the opposite approach. it seems like even on a forum such as this one, people take the numbers to mean that today's wrestlers just don't have the ability that the ones from the past did. in sports, what we've found is that major generational differences in output aren't a result of the players getting better or worse - they're a result of the changing conditions of the game. many baseball writers in the 60s thought the hitters of that decade were a bunch of bums since pitching was *extremely* dominant - turned out that the real issues were things like MLB not enforcing certain rules, such that it massively helped out pitching. over the years, sports statisticians have developed various methods of what we call "era adjustments", i.e. looking at how impressive a player's raw numbers are within his own era. i am very much of the opinion that doing the same in wrestling would lead to fairer evaluations of the performers...but is that what we should even be trying here? would like to hear your thoughts on this =)

i'll grant that (don't remember what else she said/did besides taking rantsylvania down out of the blue), just sayin the other shit still pops up. also what matt d said is def true. social media & smartphones have changed the game for good, and some have to be dragged kicking & screaming into accepting this.

honestly, you'd be surprised how many people i know who still remember & reference la parka. people who haven't watched in forever and aren't really "smart", either. just a memorable gimmick a la koko b. ware or any number of other examples one might remember from their childhood. that said, i do think promotions wouldn't have known how to make a man in a skeleton costume a main-eventer. he could work the style for sure, but that and not speaking english would be hurdles i doubt anyone would overcome. also i actually have to side with parv re: the 1998-2006 point. the big change there was that once the fad audience had left wrestling, the people left included a far higher percentage of latinos. wrestling had actually spread more to some countries that it didn't during the attitude era, too. EDIT: sorry grimmas, but i think you're stuck a bit too deep in the wrestling bubble on this one. there is a massive difference between "old man desperately trying to be cool" (which played into hogan's heel character anyway) and "grown-ass man wearing a children's halloween costume".

holy shit cena as early 80s bruno confirmed

i just remembered something that would fit perfectly here... anyone remember the former sean shannon, from rantsylvania? the general online reaction to her coming out as a transgender woman was pretty goddamn awful. and you can't give the excuse that this was years ago, because people mostly still go "hahahaha what a nut" today when it gets brought up

oh yeah, missed the points about demographics on different corners of the internet. jesse ewiak is on the money there, great post really in general, forums are largely seen as dated anymore - the only ones that still have a lot of "internet cultural relevance" are reddit & 4chan. blogs & social media are where it's at these days, for younger generations. and to back up jesse further...this has been studied some and from what we know, out of your major internet platforms, tumblr & twitter have by far the greatest proportion of young people, women, people of color, and transgender/nonbinary people. for this discussion to really go places, we'd need some folks here who are involved with the wrestling communities there. some of my politics buddies on twitter are "smart fans" but not to the degree you see here - i think a lot of these people are likely to have a different primary interest and feel like there's a better use of their time than watching dick murdoch matches.

well that *was* the role dr. death was supposed to get before brawl for all bodied him, so i could see it

dkookypunk, your mindset is a very common one for younger fans. think we've all been there at some point! one big thing you'll find on this forum is that people tend to enjoy matches more for the stories they tell than for the cool moves. and i don't mean the modern WWE style of forcing dialogue or specific poses in the middle of a match - i mean laying out the matches in such a way that the story emerges organically to the observant fan. it's misawa being the champion not because he was the biggest or strongest or fastest, but because he always thought 2 steps ahead of his opponents in the clutch. it's magnum TA & tully blanchard having an all-out war over sheer masculinity. and so on and so on. i think as you get older, you'll just naturally find that you've seen it all and the cool moves stop being cool to you. that's when most of us found other, longer-lasting reasons to enjoy it! and when you get there, that is when you can appreciate older wrestling without feeling like you have to.

yea i was about to say, creating more variety in your storytelling would be huge. i was even going to bring up the HHH/steph/angle thing but yall on point i see women in most societies are not socialized to enjoy competition for its own sake or draw all these grand conclusions from being the alpha dog. your magnum-tully type of story is just not going to resonate in that case, at all. tying the competition to issues that your audience faces in real life, though? then you might have something...

it was wrestlecrap, i distinctly remember this somehow also if anything tenta got LESS hate back in the day than most fat guys, though still a lot obv. i think the japan cred helped him with a small section of the smart fanbase

lol

yea i'm p. much with pol et al. on this the effects are really obvious if, for instance, you watch anything on the /wooo/ stream. AFAIK you can't disable chat there, so you have to see a hundred people spamming the "BOTCH" image macro throughout any women's match even if there aren't real botches going on that said, maffew's work is a hell of a lot better than OSW review. shit is hosted by movez marks who constantly slag tito & valentine, and they act like TV doesn't exist and just draw all their conclusions from the PPVs.

reminder that this term was created by white supremacists between that and the 4chan associations it has now, i'd be glad never to see it again

shoutouts to the yukon lumberjacks

nope, because the WWF never had much of a relationship with AJPW. all i can think of offhand is omori appearing in the royal rumble

heck yea gimme summa dat summaslam

vince has always had his humane moments see the mick foley story about terry funk telling him "sometimes vince just likes to be nice" in reference to hiring older guys who don't bring much to the table. that one was specifically about terry gordy but you can also look at tony atlas in 1990, killer khan in 1987, iron sheik on multiple occasions...