This is my first post on this forum. Unfortunately I missed this poll that I had been waiting for for around 5-6 years because of things like the war and the internet outages that have been happening since the start of the year. It’s fine though, if I’m still around I’ll participate in 2036
I’ve known about GWE for a few years now, even before it started getting promoted on X, and I already knew this community back then. What always made this place interesting to me was that people actually talked about wrestling tastes and wrestlers here. If someone didn’t like a wrestler they explained why, and if someone liked them they explained their reasons too. Both sides usually came from people who had actually watched those wrestlers enough to really talk about them.
Honestly I don’t think that’s fully the case with this poll anymore. There are some opinions today that have become really widespread, like Shawn Michaels not being a good wrestler. I’m not even saying I completely disagree with that opinion myself, but when something becomes this common in certain circles it makes me wonder how many people actually believe it and how many just want to believe it. The reason I say that is because when you look at some of those people’s discussions or lists, they praise wrestlers who are actually very similar to the wrestlers they claim to dislike. So it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people are influenced by negative narratives around certain wrestlers.
You can still clearly see different tastes in the poll though. The fact that Tam Nakano and MJF ended up at number one shows that pretty well. There’s nothing wrong with that, more people are participating in the poll now after all. But I do think it removes a certain overall identity these lists used to have. These lists might seem unimportant, but for some people they can become a roadmap for watching wrestling. That was the case for me. I started watching some wrestlers because I saw their names on lists like these. I discovered British wrestling that way and I found Luchadors I didn’t even know about before.
I still respect this kind of variety more than people putting wrestlers on their lists just because of hype without watching them enough to form their own opinion. The reason I think that is because I’ve seen some wrestlers rank really high on certain lists even though just a few years ago people barely talked about them at all. Then after people like Elliot started promoting them heavily on Twitter over the last couple of years, suddenly they started getting called some of the greatest wrestlers ever. I just hope the people putting those wrestlers on their lists have actually watched enough of them to form their own opinions.
Anyway, I hope people keep discussing wrestling on this forum and on their blogs, especially the people who participated in the 2006 poll. Organized forums like this have way more permanence than platforms like X, Discord, and places like that.
