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Given that KeMonito is himself a meme, does he have any good meme matches?

Where do I read the narrative that you speak of? Have you tried contacting the authors to see if they would change it?

In case it wasn't clear from my post, I didn't think that it was actually objective, just that the people who fooled themselves into thinking the GWE would somehow produce an objective list of the greatest wrestlers ever worked themselves into a shoot this way. If someone doesn't think that Flair is that great of a wrestler, why should they put him in their top 10 greatest wrestlers ever? I agree that the best way to judge a wrestler's work is by comparison with his peers. From that perspective it doesn't really make sense to ask the whether Ric Flair was the greatest wrestler ever in any objective fashion. You can judge drawing power, compare him to his peers and the house style in his home promotions, judge how well he adapted to the style of other promotions and wrestlers while touring, etc. while comparing him to others who did the same. But if you have a luchador (for example's sake) that stands out amongst his peers and never intersected with Flair in any meaningful way, the question of whether Ric Flair is the better wrestler just boils down to personal preference of styles and promotions.

Clearly that's the real reason for HHH's heat with Del Rio.

I think people who viewed the GWE as being more of an objective enterprise were likely to rate Flair high on their lists, regardless of their personal feelings towards him, because of his prominence in North American wrestling during the era where footage starts appearing en masse. He also has some "hidden gem" matches that show up in footage outside of his home territory, which encourages people that dive into a lot of old footage to view him highly. Of course, the most objective factors in wrestling history are economic, and I doubt there were too many voters with lists approximating the top draws during the same time period.

Didn't a lot of the people who got into puro in the 90s get introduced via the J-Cup and other juniors events? I know that was my own experience, and El-P made a similar assertion earlier in the thread.

It's also easier to just not use somebody on NXT if they're not being pushed, whereas due to the amount of content that needs to be produced on the main roster, people who aren't pushed are quickly devalued. I've always thought it would be interesting to analyze booking purely based on the statistical distribution of wins and losses. I don't know if there's an easily digestible data set to do the analysis, though.

That's probably a better way of putting it. I think the absurd deathmatch stuff was definitely an appeal to 90s teens. I remember hearing about some of these Onita matches that may or may not have ever happened, e.g. an exploding ring match on an island, and being intrigued.

Isn't lucha more hypermasculine than puro? I can't claim to be an expert, but most of the explanations of lucha I have seen speak in terms of "machismo" and other masculine notions. Japan has just as much absurd pro wrestling as anywhere else. Maybe they just do a better job of segregating it from the serious stuff?

Ironically, this might be the grossest statement of outgroup homogeneity in the thread. Also, in the 80s when Japanese tape-trading started (well before my time), wasn't there a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment in America during the Japanese economic boom? An essentially identical argument shows that Japanese music is more popular in the US than black music, which is laughably false. If your proposed explanation for why puro is more popular than lucha can't separate true conclusions from false ones, I'm not sure how useful it really is.

Hunter did an interview with ESPN about NXT: http://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/18337386/triple-h-future-nxt-standing-wwe-universe. The choice quote: I assume that he actually does understand the difference, and if he doesn't he probably isn't fit to run the company from a fiscal perspective after Vince is gone.

To establish the claim that lucha is less popular than puro because of racism, at some point you have to actually point out someone being racist, rather than just softly and broadly appealing to racism in the surrounding culture, which doesn't predict one way or the other whether someone will like or dislike lucha. And who are you talking about with the "overall coverage"? PWO is such a small cross-section of total wrestling fandom, yet you are asking personal questions of people posting in this thread.

That raises a good question: why weren't there more racist "evil Mexican" characters in Texas wrestling? Wrestling certainly wasn't progressive when it came to Japan and the Middle East. Maybe there were and I just don't know of them?

I remember seeing lucha (which was probably CMLL) on TV when I was a kid, but I didn't enjoy it at all. I got into puro later when I was in my teens, largely because of New Japan juniors.

I think it is possible in theory, but I admit I haven't seen a great example of it on this board. The arguments have way too little detail and tend to fail when you realize that they also apply to other contexts where the conclusions are false. Also, it's probably much easier to analyze the motivations of biases of someone like Meltzer who has decades of published material than random message board posters who you know nothing about.

The simple racism argument doesn't have much explanatory power because it doesn't predict the things about Mexican culture that are enjoyed by wider American society. I'm a foreigner who's been living in California for about 10 years now. I find that the white people I know love Mexican food (and go out of their way to find 'authentic' Mexican food) but have no love for Mexican music at all. There might be an explanation for both of these things in terms of racism, but the same boilerplate argument of "racism, therefore…" clearly can't explain both opposite opinions about Mexican culture.

Yeah, there are a lot of wrestling storylines that can be made to seem ridiculous by simply describing them, but the nuances of the individual performance actually determine whether it works in the moment.

Why does watching pro wrestling have to be about the narrative? From reading posts and listening to podcasts it seems that some people are more into the discussion of wrestling than wrestling itself. Maybe this just has to do with what I do for a living, but for me, wrestling is something I come home and watch when I want a break from the sort of things I ordinarily do during the day. I tend to focus on what viscerally pulls me in the most, which is coincidentally why I haven't invested that much time into lucha. The discussions on this board and the podcasts I listen to help me express why I enjoy what I do, and how to find other wrestling that is likely to be similar in that regard. In the GWE podcasts (at least the ones I listened to, I admit I got burned out and tapped out on a few), it seemed that the people that talked the most about how they were evading the "narrative" were also the most constrained by it.

It does sort of raise the question about why Noam Dar thinks that winning matches will make a woman who is not interested in him suddenly interested in him. But in a world with Enzo/Lana, that's a progressive relationship storyline.

Given that this is the second straight feud where Rusev has been booked like this, you have to think that they're making him a face on purpose. But then again, it's WWE.

It's always refreshing when they carry kayfabe injuries through from PPV matches to TV. I guess it's easier in the WWE mentality because Sasha lost the match and doesn't have to look invincible.

The Enzo sensitivity training segment was pretty bad too, but I feel like Enzo tried to make the best of a terrible storyline whereas JeriKO flubbed a pretty basic wrestling angle.

Big companies do like to stamp out new products from a template, but I'm not sure how good of an idea this would be. Since both of the main shows already have women's titles, what would separate the women on the separate show from the women on Raw and Smackdown. I would like to see more women's feuds, especially on Raw, but I don't know if making a separate universe is the way to do it.

That might be the best hardway we've seen in a long time.