funkdoc

Age, i bet. My wrestling circles these days are basically all people in their 20s & 30s who mainly hang out on Discord, and almost every one of them loooooooooooves Danhausen. Virtually his entire audience is ~the demo~, to put it another way. His stuff really lands for the kind of people immersed in Twitch & similar subcultures, which i suspect doesn't describe a lot of the people on this board or their friends.

OK, time for a bit of an essay: There's this concept in anime & related subcultures called "gap moe" (pronounced "mo-ay"). Learned about it myself through vtubers where it's huge, and i think it's useful in this case. In short, the "gap" in the phrase refers to the contrast between a character's look/voice/etc. and their actual personality. "Moe" there roughly means "cute", "endearing", and so forth. The common example there is a deeper-voiced woman with a tomboy character design...who turns out to be really into doing her nails and cooking or something along those lines. i think Danhausen is probably wrestling's best example of gap moe. He has this Satanic look to him with a fitting voice, but deep down he's maybe the most wholesome character in the business. He never swears unless (he thinks) it's part of a wrestler's name, and he gets seriously unnerved at any cheating in wrestling. Honestly, "wholesome dork" in general is an extremely over archetype with the zoomers - that's a conversation much bigger than wrestling though! He has a talent for turning even the slightest bits into comedy & memes, which is critical in today's environment. His whole "Billy Ass and the Ass Boys" schtick is an obvious case there. He's also not afraid to go all the way with these things, such as when he sees rulebreaking in AEW and panic-tweets at Aubrey over it. That's the shortest version i could drum up, hth

Trying not to be too dismissive "OK, boomer" here, but this reminds me of how whenever the biggest hits of the year in music come up, everyone i know in their 40s or 50s will say they've never heard of Post Malone or Ariana Grande. It's easy to stay in a bubble with people closer to your age and have no idea what cultural presence looks like for people in their teens or 20s. NJPW does very well with social media, in addition to what El said above, and that's an area that especially ties into my point since it happens more on platforms that skew younger (e.g. Twitter) as opposed to Facebook.

eh, Lucha Bros title reign was going nowhere so i imagine the result was planned at least

Also he has possibly the greatest walk cycle in wrestling history - only other contenders i can think of are the Bushwhackers

a lot of the most active folks here seem not to like the outright gore; i've seen people praise Onita specifically *because* he didn't often deliver the level of violence that was promised. from that perspective it makes sense that a lot of deathmatch wrestling wouldn't get much play here

Danielson vs Ishii would be a perfect one-off. Okada is someone you’d want to save for a bit more long-term program.

If you consider the WON HOF to be about the WON’s own canon, Mistico absolutely should be in. He made Dave care more about lucha than he ever has since Los Gringos Locos.

TK fueling rumors of Okada & Ishii showing up…

yall ready for Tessa vs. Nia to headline WOW???

Darby is an awful live promo whenever i see him do one (he technically admitted he's an incel in this one lol), but they've done a tremendous job preventing that from killing his aura. It helps that he's actually good at those pre-taped segments and has motivated Sting with him. Plus MJF is the right kind of guy to feud with him since he can do the heavy lifting there.

The Abadon match actually did the best in all the key demos - highly unusual for that late at night. Think going the hardcore route over the comedy route was the right move for Halloween here, esp given that gimmick

That last match was a really good job at using the gimmick to get a lot out of an inexperienced worker. For those who don't know, Abadon's only had about 60 matches total in her career - a third of those coming after she joined AEW. Impressive how much they got the crowd into it considering she's never on TV.

Fair point, had forgotten about that =/ Though i was more trying to say "between that and the offending posts being many years ago, MAYBE things are different now". i kinda apply the old "statute of limitations on gimmick infringement" rule to these things, idk

Yall, the Briscoes work quite a bit with Effy (the indie wrestler who organizes shows literally called "Big Gay Brunch") these days, and his whole thing is uplifting the LGBTQ community in wrestling. They might have actually come to understand more since then? i get the skepticism but would be willing to wait & see on that. Danhausen is great if you're steeped in more modern nerd/meme culture, but this board never gets anyone who appeals to that set. Might as well be wrestlingclassics when that topic comes up. He would absolutely get over in AEW, and his stuff is consistently among the best sellers on prowrestlingtees. BTW, another big part of ROH's downfall that wasn't mentioned here: their response to losing the Elite was to groom Marty Scurll for the top spot and even give him the book. Then along came Speaking Out...

that main event was the right kind of stupid imo pretty w/e show aside from Shida-Deeb and that, well Cody segment was fine

Aside from all this, i wonder if WALTER having a bit chunkier body type would also be a concern for the main roster if they're serious about going back to ~Ruthless Aggression Era~ ways

Feels like a future trainer to me

This is what i was getting at with my post re: loving 2010s NJPW. The people who worship that style do so in large part BECAUSE of those strike exchanges. Here's my quick & dirty interpretation of why: Many fans in this era were into anime/manga before they discovered wrestling. i don't watch anime or read manga myself, but in a lot of my friend circles i'm pretty much the only one who doesn't...so i've learned a fair amount through osmosis over the years. And one thing i think is relevant here is how intelligence is valued vs. toughness in this sort of media. Basically, in shonen (more or less "action") anime & manga, the protagonists tend to make Sting look like Bockwinkel in the brains department. The common trope there is the protagonist's much smarter best friend forever being doomed to second-banana status. These stories focus on the main character having heart, "guts" (Japan uses this as a sort of slang term for what we'd call "clutch" performance), and extreme resilience. Combine this with the trend of wrestling fandom & wrestlers themselves getting nerdier over time, and you can see where i'm going with this. That's absolutely been a thing in Japan too; Tanahashi's a huge geek for the Kamen Rider live-action superhero series and even got an acting role in one of the franchise's movies. The strike exchanges of the modern era are quite reminiscent of what you tend to see in anime fight scenes, and they work in storytelling terms to highlight those qualities i mentioned above. "Who's tougher"/"Who has MORE heart" are very important questions to resolve in shonen works, and this is how that's been adapted to wrestling. So you have generations watching & reading this stuff as kids in Japan, then becoming wrestlers and (be it consciously or subconsciously) bringing some of that spirit into the squared circle. The difference now compared to, say, the 80s is that anime/manga has become one of the biggest nerd fandoms throughout the English-speaking world as well. So it's not *just* Japanese kids growing up on this stuff anymore, it's American adults getting into it as well...and i think that contributes a lot to those kinds of Twitter reactions you saw. Like, my wrestling Discord hangouts (which have deep anime/gaming roots) were all blown away with Bryan/Suzuki and had some even calling it possibly the best AEW match ever. Basically, the way many posters here value intelligence in their wrestling characters is very much out of vogue. We expect wrestlers to be dumbass meatheads slapping meat nowadays. And in a way i get where the modern sentiment comes from, even looking at it in the kayfabe sense - if you wanted to avoid taking damage, why the hell would you fight for a living in the first place? You have to be a particular kind of fucked-up to get into this world at all...the kind of fucked-up that has you BEGGING Murder Grandpa to elbow you in the face. welp that's my story hop u enjoyed~

Agreed! Bunny's been stepping it up this year.

Yeah i can stay for some more of Punk as Cool Uncle

If you're a fan of that 2010s NJPW style, Danielson-Suzuki might be the best AEW match ever for you. This board has historically not been fans of that style on the whole...

if Omega were a WON HOF candidate he would probably still count more in the Japan category than North America even now, to put it that way. not for too much longer at the rate things are going but yeah

This right here sums up one of the biggest cultural divides between PWO and the rest of wrestling fandom, i find. This is the only place i've ever seen with people who actively want wrestling to be slower. Among my other friends who watch, the reaction to this match was more along the lines of "I'm glad the Acclaimed are getting opportunities like this, because they can keep up with teams like the Lucha Bros but can't hit that level on their own yet." That's not meant as a criticism, mind you - stuff like this is part of why i find your writeups so interesting!

Eh, it's already "crapped" on even by the fans who love it. i had a conversation with some friends today about selling, and these are people who keep up a lot with modern wrestling. You know what they said ~exposes the business~ far more than blowing off 15 minutes of limb work in your comeback? Escaping an armbar. When someone puts one on in MMA and fully extends the arm, that shit is an INSTANT tapout, period. Wrestling already looks like a joke when they routinely do that, if you look at it from that perspective. i've put it this way in another post here before, but nowadays people know that even the biggest scrub in UFC would wipe the floor with almost any pro wrestler; that has nothing to do with why they watch wrestling in the first place. Just like younger generations don't watch football for the violence anymore, they don't watch wrestling to see badasses. i get the critique, i just think it's not one the core audience cares about. The problem my friends have with the Lambert stuff is how it's mainly involved wrestlers they don't like (Jericho/Hager/Ethan Page), if anything.