S.L.L.

I was genuinely surprised that Loss liked the booking of the show given his complaints about the poor treatment of the titles, though reading his thoughts, I think he's just looking at this from a different angle than I am. He's looking at this and seeing them making the WWE Title important again because the champion is feuding with The Rock. I'm looking at this and seeing them officially declaring the WWE Title doesn't matter because the only important thing is that The Rock will challenge for it. You know, if he can make some time for it in his schedule. We wouldn't want something as trivial as the company's top belt interfering with the shooting of The Fast and the Furious 6. Maybe Loss found a way around it, and I'm happy for the man if he did, but for me, there's really no way around the fact that they're hyping a title match for the Rumble where the title itself is - at best - a very, very distant second in terms of what makes the match important. A little while ago, I wrote that because of the brand split's death, we had a situation where the World Title was the Intercontinental Title, the Intercontinental Title was the TV Title, and the US Title was the Western States Heritage Title. Now we don't even have that. Now it's like New Japan between the sealing of the NWF Title and the IWGP becoming an actual belt, where the biggest title in the company was just being Antonio Inoki...if Inoki only actually showed up three or four times a year...and only wrestled once. So now being the Rock is the WWE Title, and the WWE Title is the Intercontinental Title, and the World Title is the TV Title, and the Intercontinental Title is the Western States Heritage Title, and the US Title is...oh, God, I don't even know what the US Title is anymore. The Million Dollar Belt? The ICW/ICWA Texarkana Television Championship? That "Mighty Moon" belt Marlon Brando got on the set of The Godfather? I don't even know! And speaking of things I've bitched about before, I've said before that I didn't think turning Cena heel was a good idea, or at the very least, that it wasn't a useful idea. But turning Punk heel seems a thousand times worse right now, and that's in spite of the fact that I have way more faith in Punk's ability to work an entertaining heel character than I do Cena's, that I have way more faith in Punk's ability to work compelling matches as a heel than I do Cena's, that I don't think Punk's position as a top face has been as important to the company as Cena's position as a top face, and that after the initial brilliance of the Summer of Punk, I don't think Punk's face character has been exceptionally compelling. Despite all of that, I don't see turning him heel as an even remotely useful option for them, because at least a Cena heel turn would probably stick with the fans. Seriously, we're supposed to boo Punk now? Why? I guess we'll find out next week, but I've been thinking it over, and the only reason I can come up with for why he did this is because he's spent the last thus-and-such many years busting his ass night in and night out to earn the top prize in all of wrestling, and Rock sat things out for seven years (ten and counting as a full-time competitor), wrestled all of two matches since then, had a small handful of appearances, and now he's being handed a title shot because he needs something to keep him occupied until Arabian Nights starts shooting, and that pissed him off, so he beat him up. And if that is the rationale for his heel turn, he's absolutely fucking right, and I can't possibly accept him as a heel. And as much as I love The Rock, I somehow find it unlikely that he's gonna make himself seem all that sympathetic in this situation. I know a lot of Rocky's face act is built around him being a dick to other people, but he's awesome enough that I usually can look the other way at it. But not always. The Cena feud, for example, was something I struggled to find him likeable during. It's one thing when you're joking about Kevin Kelly being a hermaphrodite. It's another when you hand the win to the heel in the main event at WrestleMania because the face's brightly-colored clothing offends your sensibilities. It's also something that The Rock was offended by someone else having tacky fashion sense, but I'm getting away from the point. Point is that I didn't get why Rock wasn't clearly the heel against Cena, but I at least understood that Cena is a divisive figure, not to mention the match was happening in Rocky's backyard, so there were more than enough people out there who would want to cheer Rock and boo Cena, even if I wasn't one of them. But Punk? Everybody loves Punk! The guys, the girls, the kids, the adults, the smarks, the marks, the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads...they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude. And if my guess is correct (and if it's not, I don't know what they're going to pull out of their asses to make this not look like a Russo-esque SWERVE~! for RATINGZ, BAY-BEE~!, in which case all of this is still a problem), I don't know that they're going to be able to sell people on the idea that they're not supposed to like Punk anymore. And lest we forget, as much as the crowd has loved The Rock over the years, they've also been willing to turn on him at the drop of a hat, especially when he's being poorly booked, especially when he's dealing with a hot face act (or a heel who was a hot face act before being awkwardly shunted into a feud with Rocky), and especially when the thorny issue of him walking away from wrestling gets brought up. Honestly, as much as I don't like how this show turned out, I kinda see a light at the end of the tunnel. It seems possible - maybe even likely - that the crowd will refuse to accept Punk as a heel, will turn against Rock, the whole angle will go off the rails, and come the Royal Rumble, we'll have a face CM Punk defending the belt against Hollywood Rock, which would be totally awesome. But for now? Well, this way too many talented people not to produce something I want to watch, but as someone who's reasonably positive about WWE's in-ring product and strongly negative about their booking, this did nothing to change that.

The thing is, a lot of guys from that era and earlier (and to a lesser degree, after) had guts, including quite a few guys with guts more prominent than theirs. I get saying they're fat. I don't get the people who use it as a criticism. I don't get the people who can praise Murdoch, Rose, Gordy, Race, Hansen, etc., not to mention actual fat fat guys like Vader and Hashimoto, and then turn around and say Demolition are "too fat".

It's also absurd because people should be able to back up their own beliefs with their own opinions rather than pointing to someone else's star ratings like they were indisputable truth.

As long as I brought it up earlier...what is the wrestling that isn't really gay?

It's bad enough that you're gonna get beaten up and raped. But by CLOWNS? That's extra scary!

That's all good and well for a 10-year-old. What about the adults who make the same complaint but don't apply the standard as evenly as you did as a kid? You're not the only person who's ever complained about Demolition, Will. "Too gay" I admittedly can't think of any specific incidents to point to other than some guy recently saying that watching Demolition matches was something he was especially ashamed of because of the S&M look, and he was afraid of people walking in on him watching them, but I don't remember where that was, and a cursory trip through the search engine isn't bringing it up. Either way, I've heard enough people deride them for the leather daddy look to know it's an issue with some people. Regarding "too silly", I had an extended argument with Jerome about a year ago after he said that Demolition's act was "laughable to anyone over the age of 12". Probably true insofar as wrestling itself is laughable to anyone over the age of 12, but he disagreed with me on that point, and never really explained to my satisfaction how "big tough guy brawler in face paint" was somehow an unusually cartoonish gimmick by wrestling standards. The best he managed was to compare them to Brutus Beefcake, because "overly excitable guy with tassles and a prop" is apparently also an unusually cartoonish gimmick by wrestling standards. Yes, they are the John Cena of tag teams...in that John Cena is also a guy who people make weird as fuck complaints about based on standards that they never apply to anybody else.

But the physical and choreographed aspects of wrestling themselves involve storytelling and theatrics, and vice versa. In the past, I've referred to this kind of view as "judging wrestling like it's figure skating", but I've read up on the subject a bit recently, and I realized that's not an accurate statement. The ISU Judging System does put a high premium on things like technical ability and "grade of execution", but they also factor in these: -Performance/Execution; is the physical and emotional involvement of the skater/couple as they translate the intent of the music and choreography (e.g. carriage, style, personality, variety, contrasts, projection) -Choreography/Composition, which is the arrangement of all movements according to the principles of proportion, space and music (e.g. idea, concept, unity, pattern, phrasing, originality, design) -Interpretation, which is the translation of the music to movement on ice (e.g. timing, expression of the music, use of nuances, relationship between partners, character of music) This represents roughly 30% of the overall score, which is more than I recognized when I made the figure skating comparison in the past. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, other than to say that while one has the right to view wrestling as something emotionally colder and more sterile than figure skating, I'm not sure why you would want to do that, nor am I sure how you would have been attracted to wrestling in the first place, since it's very obviously not meant to be taken that way.

Literally the first promo cut by Eric Bischoff after he re-introduced the title explicitly stated that this was the championship of the NWA/WCW, and while it's never been treated as exactly the same thing, it's always been treated as a spiritual successor that linked back to that title.

I'm kind of a neutral party vis-a-vis Demolition, but I can't help but notice that they are on the receiving end of some truly bizarre complaints from detractors. I've seen them called too fat (maybe by 80's WWF standards, but certainly not by wrestling standards in general), too silly (definitely not by 80's WWF standards, probably not by wrestling standards in general), too gay (is there even such a thing as "too gay" in wrestling?)....I just don't get it.

Very first thing they did with the belt, actually, right down to it being the same belt. I have seen 80's NWA. They have too many belts.

"So many title changes" is always an issue when it's present, but the other two I've been able to roll with as logical by-products of the brand split. But the brand split no longer exists in any meaningful way, and after Money in the Bank, when you look at the disparity in star power and significance between the WWE Title MITB match and the World Title MITB match, it's really hard not to see the World Title as the Intercontinental Title. Which I guess makes the Intercontinental Title the TV Title, and the US Title...I don't Know, the Western States Heritage Title? And yeah, I know the WWE Title was always the most important belt, but when the rosters were clearly divided up, you could at least pretend that each brand's champ was the best they had, and if one of them seemed more important than the other, well, that's just the cards they were dealt, and they were still theoretical equals. Now every wrestler, regardless of what brand they're officially attached to, appears on every show and can challenge for every title. So when I see an elite club of five main event players in the WWE Title MITB match, and a field of eight that includes Tyson Kidd and a guy who just made his in-ring debut in the World Title MITB match, there's really no way for me to suspend disbelief on that anymore.

AW isn't really a strong enough micworker to merit the gimmick. He'll have a funny comment now and again like the "you can't run to the border" line that cracked me up last night, but for a modern day Jimmy Hart, he is no Jimmy Hart. Admittedly, though, I'd probably like him more if I hadn't watched the Prime Time Players rise to prominence on NXT, and thus wasn't aware that Titus O'Neill is a much, much better promo than AW is. They're doing the "manager covers for guys who can't talk" thing when one of the guys can talk, can talk better than AW, and hasn't gotten his hands on a mic since AW showed up because of this. So I'm a little resentful of AW to begin with, I confess. But it's not like most of his live commentary is actually interesting. Where's Julius Smokes when you need him?

This is probably right. In my experience, Kane is...weird. He is terrible 90% of the time, but then he will go on jags where he will get inspired and start delivering the goods for a month or two, and after that, he'll go right back to sucking again. He's not incapable, he just doesn't usually do what he's capable of. As for good Kane matches, I was a big fan of his series with MVP when MVP first came into the company, particularly the London Street Fight. Notably, it's one of the only (the only?) good Kane performances I can think of where he's working monster style.

F4WOnline's note about it said.... That seems pretty definitive.

Stiff = can't work AND stiff = heightened realism, depending on which is more convenient to his agenda at the moment. He wanted to bury Jericho and RVD, so their stiffness was a sign they couldn't work. He wanted a 5-star classic with Taker at Mania this year, so his stiffness to bust him open hardway added heightened realism to one of the most laughably unrealistic matches I've ever seen. It's all relative (pun unintended). The question is, what will be looking to get out of his match with Brock: a burial or an epic?

I agree with Vic that Tony was generally listenable and didn't really detract from matches much until his final years. That said, there is a very low ceiling to what he brought to a match when he actually did bring something, and a very, very deep basement to what he could take away from a match when things went wrong with him. He did have flashes of greatness that suggest that he could have been much better than he was, but from everything I can gather, he just didn't care that much.

I was, too. Warrior was my first favorite wrestler, and I don't know what kind of joyless bastard you would have to be to hate Randy Savage, so I was happy neither of them sold out at the time. As an adult....Flair and Perfect went a very long way to accomplish something that they could have gotten from jumping Savage in the parking lot before his title defense against Flair. If the in-universe goal was to injure Savage's knee going into that match, this was kind of a needlessly elaborate plan that could've easily backfired on them. If the real life goal was to create added tension for the Savage/Warrior match, it's not like either of those guys need help being paranoid and insane. I was actually watching their tag against the Nasty Boys from the SummerSlam Spectacular just the other day. You totally buy that these guys would have dissension even without an outside heel party getting involved. So the storyline comes across as kinda pointless to me.

Yeah, I wish I knew how to do that better. Best I've got is attaching a relevant label to everything, but that only helps so much. Anyway, here's what I wrote:

Gene died in 1991 and CW's debut (under a mask, with no training) was in '93. I don't see Troy Graham as really being post-modern. He had the name and the Dusty-ish manner of speaking, but he was almost always doing it as a heel without any of the "son of a plumbah" working man stuff either. Wait it has been a long time. It might of been a Anderson trainee who gave him the name. It was Pat and Rocky Anderson.

To what extent would the Eddie Guerrero/Brock Lesnar feud be considered a substance abuse-based angle? It was definitely part of it. I don't know what he has now, but he had a big hand in the direction of his gimmick and angles in his last run with the company. He doesn't have creative control, but he's known to get more actively involved in his booking than most wrestlers, and I'd be surprised if that's changed. If he was planning something that got shot down, I'd be curious as to what it was, and why we got this instead.

I think my favorite "don't you know it's fake?" moment was in high school. I was talking to this other kid - who, in fairness, was actually a pretty cool guy other than this - and the subject turned to wrestling. I forget who we were talking about, but he defended someone I didn't like because he was a good micworker. I countered that he was lousy in the ring, but he said he didn't care about the matches because it was all fake. I went with my usual counter at the time, asking him what his favorite movie was. He said The Fast and Furious, and I told him that that was fake, too. His response? "No it's not! It's based on the real sport of underground street racing!" The best part is that I still lost the argument, because I was so flabbergasted after hearing that that I couldn't form a decent rebuttal. He actually stupided his way to victory. My best friend believed wrestling was real until he was 12 specifically because of the blood. Because they did bleed on a fairly regular basis for something that was allegedly fake, and the blood looked very real, and it did appear to be coming from real wounds, and it's not like anyone would be crazy enough to intentionally slice themselves open like that for a fake sport. Right? I also remember a conversation with my cousin when he stayed with me for the summer a few years back. He wasn't a fan, but was always very respectful of my fandom, and occasionally talked about it with me. Anyway, this was right around the time that MMA was starting to take off Stateside in a big way, and we were talking about the merits of MMA vs. wrestling. Him: "UFC can get kinda bloody. I guess you can't really have that in wrestling because it's fake." Me: "Oh no, there's plenty of blood in wrestling." Him: "What, like fake blood?" Me: "No, real blood." Him: "You mean from accidents?" Me: "Sometimes. But sometimes, if they want to have blood in a match, they'll do this thing called 'blading'. They hide a razor blade in their wrist tape or something, and when no one can see, they'll take it out and swipe it across their forehead." Him: "Oh....that's horrible." Me: "Yeah, it is." I can't call it a trope I loathe considering what a vampire I am, but as I've written before, it does kinda bother me that in 2012, we still can't come up with a better way to show wrestlers bleeding than to actually have them cut themselves open. I know it's downright safe compared to a lot of stuff that happens in wrestling, and you'll never hear me complain about it in a serious, meaningful way like I do with a billion other things, but seriously, this is still the best method we've got?

Is it wrong that the first thing I thought of was an ROH show where, when buying tickets for the next event there, we specifically asked for - and received - Green Lantern Fan's seats?

These are both true to be sure.... ...as is this, but more than anything else, I think it really boils down to one issue: They weren't told to like him. Cena might be the least protected company ace in wrestling history, maybe not in terms of wins and losses, but in terms of how his character is presented by the company. Is he inauthentic? Perhaps. But anybody in wrestling can have authenticity. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every carny fraud who's slunk through this business is capable of possessing at least some degree of perceived authenticity. If you compare John Cena to more than a few of the men he's been booed against, I have a very hard time saying he's really less authentic than any of them, and they were cheered over him regardless. But they have one thing he hasn't got: a seal of approval. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon John Cena the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality. Crisis averted. As to whether or not he should be turned heel, they're certainly in a place right now where they can get away with doing it without causing much long term damage, and it definitely seems like an angle that could spark fan interest in the short term, but the company is so colossally fucked on the most fundamental creative levels, I can't imagine it would mean much after a month or so. And frankly, if they were to unfuck themselves, I think there's more value in an angle where Cena, Rock, and Punk were all forced to put their differences aside - and I mean really put their differences aside instead of just teaming while still hating each other - to combat a larger heel threat. Ever since Money in the Bank, part of me has wondered if there might be some money in booking Cena and Punk as the Riggs and Murtaugh of WWE. Rock seems like a weird Leo Getz, but I think we can deviate from the formula for him. But really, to the point of this thread, my general feeling is that you shouldn't turn a wrestler unless you know you can get a clear benefit from a wrestler in that role that you can't get in his current role, and that that benefit is worth sacrificing whatever you might still be getting out of the wrestler in his current role. I was strongly opposed to turning Cena for a long time because I didn't think the benefits of a turn were worth sacrificing your top drawing face. Now, I don't really have a problem with it, but I still don't see it as an especially useful option, nor do I see it as something that would be especially entertaining (the romanticism that people have for Cena's heel run always struck me as odd, as does the desire to take a guy who's offense we all agree is his in-ring weak point and put him in a position where he'll spend most of his matches on offense). It really fails to address the bigger problems in the company, and until that happens, this all just feels pointless.

This thread makes no sense to me. Dylan calls Punk/Henry a MOTYC. MJH, Jerome, etc. watch the match, and they like it, but think calling it a MOTYC is greatly overstating the case, and they ask what this says about match quality standards in 2012. It says their standards are different from Dylan's standards. Personally, I thought that was kinda obvious, but I guess not, because apparently, there are people in this thread who think that one guy's esoteric tastes in wrestling not jiving with their own esoteric tastes in wrestling can somehow be extrapolated to a much larger statement about the tastes of wrestling fans in general. One can argue the merits of one set of values against the other, but "this guy whose opinions I usually disagree with expressed an opinion I disagreed with, so clearly there's some sort of larger change going on" is a very silly argument.

Cena is a guy they've done an epically shitty job establishing as top guy in the first place, to the extent that you could legitimately question how much they even have tried. That they've failed to establish anyone else at or near his level save maybe Punk should neither be surprising, nor should it reflect poorly on anything Cena has done. Might as well throw Great Khali - a real nothing of a wrestler who popped a buyrate opposite Cena and seemed to come out of their feud with a better grasp of how to work around his limitations - as a guy who benefited from working with Cena. I think it's telling that practically everyone who works with Cena benefits from it while they're working with him, but it often doesn't stick when it's over.