pol

I don't know where any of these guys that only watch WWE and NJPW get off claiming anything to be 'clearly best _____ of the year'. How can you make such statements when you don't even watch stuff from Mexico, one of the three biggest markets in the world, let alone indie stuff? Also Okada seems to only have one match in him. Same structure, same spots in the same order every time. He is very good at doing that match but it gets very old especially when you're seeing it so many times in such a short period.

Okada really needs to switch up his finishing stretch formula a bit. When the first Rainmaker attempt ALWAYS gets countered it kinda ceases to mean anything.

The Reigns talk ties in with something I've been thinking about a lot lately; I think match quality is more important to the average WWE fan than ever before, but I'm not sure if there's much to said average fan's understanding of "match quality" other than workrate + cool moves. So you end up with this weird dichotomy where Cena is hated by some 60% of the audience, gets loud "you can't wrestle" chants but is probably better at getting those same fans into his matches than almost anyone else on the roster. Meanwhile other guys, and Reigns is one of them, get a big reaction for their entrance but crickets during their matches with the exception of the inevitable "this is awesome" chants after they bust out a couple of cool spots. It's a strange dynamic and I'm not sure what it really means for the success or failure of Reigns as the future top guy.

I agree AJ should've won but I've mostly hated the booking of this tournament anyway. That's just how they book this thing though and I don't think anybody ever comes out of it looking particularly strong.

Right, but since he's not a heel why does he do it? Just seems weird.

Day 4 thoughts: Ishii/Honma was a great sprint with plenty of fun, brutal looking spots. I don't know about better than their first match though as I would've preferred something longer and less go-go-go. Still probably in my top 20 matches of the year though (I have their first match at #5 for reference). I hope we get to see these guys go at it many more times, as Ishii is clearly the best worker in the company right now and Honma is pretty damn high up there as well - at least top 5. Ishii is probably going to regret landing on his head so much in a few years. Nagata/Nakamura is getting talked up elsewhere, which I think is more a testament to how much a hot finishing stretch influences people's perceptions of a match than anything else. AJ/Naito was fun but I was expecting more. Thought it was really great early with AJ being a total asshole heel and reopening Naito's cut. Naito is a great bleeder and it's a shame he won't get many opportunities to take advantage of that. The early double count out tease felt unwarranted given AJ had been in control for most of the match. That derailed the match's momentum and they never really recovered. Shibata/Tanahashi had a big match feel to it. The bit with Tana dodging the PK and corner dropkick was maybe the best opening sequence this year as far as drawing you into a match. Tana's facials there did a lot to put over Shibata as a legitimate threat. Tanahashi is at his best working from underneath like this because a lot of his offense isn't so great (he needs to never do those shitty body punches ever again). I usually HATE no-selling of suplexes but it didn't bother me so much here as Shibata had taken very little offense in the match so far. The elbows Shibata was laying in towards the end sounded fucking brutal. Need to rewatch but could see this being a marginal MOTYC. Tanahashi's post-match promo was great.

Even without turning heel it would be nice for him to show some animosity towards the people that don't like him rather than doing this lame ass "if you boo me that's your choice and I respect that" thing. I guess that wouldn't fit with the whole "Rise Above Hate" thing though...

Would it even be wise for the WWE to take major risks with the wrestling product in the hope of introducing a new boom period? It seems like their approach for many years now has been to try to increase income by expanding every revenue stream outside of the core product; merchandising, sponsorships, movies, etc... with the WWE Network being the latest and biggest step in that strategy. They've made a significant move towards transforming their business into a Harlem Globetrotters-style brand/attraction rather than the traditional model of building major stars and putting them in big matches that can draw big gates and PPV buys. Their entire strategy seems geared towards strengthening the WWE brand and making it a business that can sustain itself regardless of the quality of the wrestling product. That's why they privilege things like merchandise sales and PR/good publicity over creating greater interest in the product itself. P.S. I feel terrible for saying "product" so much in this post but I think for once it was actually appropriate.

Day 3 was a pretty weak show overall but Okada vs. Makabe was the best match of the tournament so far and one of the best matches of the year. Tana/Kojima was also a good match and I enjoyed YTR/Naito. Naito deserves credit for how he adapted his selling after being accidentally busted open.

Night 2 was far better than it looks on paper. There should be a "Show That Exceeded Expectations of the Year Award" for this show.

Yeah exactly. A narrative doesn't have to be realistic but it does have to be consistent with itself. At the same time I think there is an artistic value to confounding the expectations your narrative has created (thinking of the ending to Magnolia, the one scene in Funny Games...) though I'm not sure where that fits into wrestling.

So basically the only thing separating "believable" from "unbelievable" is one falls in line with what you're used to seeing while the other doesn't. Maybe? After thinking about it more I kind of stated it poorly there. Plenty of people have stated that it doesn't matter if a spot is unrealistic, physically, if it makes sense within a wrestling's established rules, and I think this is simply the flipside of that - it doesn't matter if a spot is physically realistic if it isn't consistent with the established rules.

Ishii/Naito from February is my current MOTY and I'm inclined to agree with Dave that Ishii is the best big match worker on the planet right now so it's not like I can't get down with NJPW. I think they have a ton of very talented guys, it's just the excesses of the style (endless strike exchanges, fighting spirit spots, one-kickouts) are all things that really grate on me. Many of the matches are good in spite of those things though.

I think this (very common) defense is kind of interesting. I think wrestling logic has to be in some ways more believable than real life - the fact that something could viably happen in reality is irrelevant to me if the spot just strikes me as unbelievable. If I have to give extra thought to how believable something is I'm already taken out of the match, even if I end up concluding that it makes sense.

I really didn't see much in that Okada/Styles match and sure don't know what the hell Dave is talking about. Styles dick heel mannerisms were fun (although I don't know how well they'd translate to non-English speakers) and he made Okada's offense look awesome with his bumping, but his uninspired heel offense made for a dull heat section. Crowd was pretty dead throughout Okada's comeback (which was poorly built to), then finally came unglued for the very cool cross body over the guard rail spot. Both guys had better matches on today's show, which is surprising given their opponents were fucking Toru Yano and Tenzan. I thought today's show was really fun and far, far better overall than Monday's vastly overrated one - the relative absence of tedious forearm trading and fighting spirit spots was a large part of that.

People who are bringing up spots that grate: why do you think those spots bother you while others, that you could argue are equally unbelievable, don't? That's kinda what I was trying to get at.

You watched the first day of the NJPW G1 Climax, didn't you? When that show was over, I was cussing up a storm about forearm trade-offs in the middle too. Every damn match had them. Yeah, though it was the fact that the last three matches all had no-sells of suplexes... I'm almost prepared to accept that as a spot that may have its place, but maybe once every 6 months to a year, not three times on one show.

Dave sounded incredulous about the whole thing on the latest Observer Radio to the point where I wasn't sure if he was implying that Russo acted intentionally.

Recently had an argument on another forum about my dislike of fighting spirit no sell spots - the standard argument, made by many people, seems to be that everyone has specific things in wrestling that rankle them and disrupt their suspension of disbelief, but that these are essentially arbitrary pet peeves - that there's nothing fundamentally worse about a no-sell spot than, say, an Irish whip. Since I always like to believe I'm objectively correct and my opinions have a stronger basis than mere preference () I started thinking about this. I think that a no-sell spot is a fundamentally different class of unbelievable than an Irish whip. An Irish whip is a move that's physically impossible in reality, but consistent with the exaggerated physics of pro wrestling. No-selling, on the other hand, is a disruption of the internal logic of pro wrestling - why can a guy who's been selling normally for the entire match suddenly pop right up after, say, a German suplex? I feel like spots that are physically unrealistic are far, far less egregious than spots that are logically inconsistent, and it's wrong to label having a problem with one class of 'unbelievable' spot and not the other as merely arbitrary preference. Another factor to consider is what role context plays in determining what we consider unbelievable. I think it's safe to assume if you put a modern day WWE match in front of a 1960s crowd they would shit on it for the lack of realism. How big of a role do the established generic conventions of pro wrestling play in what we accept as believable? Is, say, running the ropes only accepted because we've seen it as such a ubiquitous element of wrestling matches for so long? And in that case - how did it ever come to be accepted in the first place? Thoughts?

Hey guys. Used to lurk TheSmartMarks back in the day and from there found DVDVR and then this place when I started getting back into current WWE in January of this year. I got into wrestling in 1999 and pretty quickly became your generic smart mark fan, indie wrestling nerd you'll find in most places on the internet. Lost interest in WWE around 2003-4 but never totally tuned out. Finding this place and DVDVR has been somewhat of a revelation for my enjoyment of wrestling in terms of challenging prevailing smark dogmas and actively looking for things to enjoy in current wrestling rather than just watching to rip on it, which seems to be the attitude of most people on other forums. Currently working on broadening my horizons, exploring the history of Japanese and Mexican wrestling - still remain woefully ignorant on the territories but I'll hopefully get to that at some point too