Matt D

I'm biased, but I agree that the direct challenge is Bockwinkel with the new footage we've gotten to sure up a lot of the questions that previously persisted or the glimpses we couldn't be sure of.

You need to take that presumption people like wrestling ironically and to prove points and sincerely fuck off. Is it groupthink if I agree with GOTNW?

Plus Volador is terrible.

Shoot Vince Russo on sight?

The people pushing all or nothing mentalities here are doing no one else any favors, and that's on both sides.

If nothing else, you can learn more personally through your attempt to engage.

Ah, Christmas on a pro wrestling message board.

I had been really hesitant to watch enough Terry for GWE,but I did a deep dive on SC right before it and was really glad that I did.

Wrestling is like any other hobby. We get out what we put into it. I think most of us get a hell of a lot out of it.

Something I want to double back on is the tenor of the board since GWE. I was talking to Loss yesterday about PWO in general and one thing that I don't think has come through clearly in this thread really does need to be reiterated. Everyone is willing to help everyone else if asked. I think lucha is hard. It took me ~100 matches to feel like I was getting it and those weren't the top rated matches. They were much more of the week to week ones so I could start to deconstruct it and work out patterns. goc and others thinks it's not that hard at all. If it was hard for me though, it could well be hard for you. There are also a few different ways of looking at. Someone like Rob looks at lucha completely differently than I do. Even the people I blog with look at it differently. Eric likes different things than Phil sometimes. We all take a slightly different stab at it and get slightly different takeaways. So it can be hard, but I think everyone here who does like it would be willing to help out anyone having a hard time with it. If you watch a match and you don't get why it's lauded or what the narrative was or why they did X instead of Y or just want to see a take on the match, say something. I'm sure people will be glad to break it down and help out. Sometimes it is just a bad match. Sometimes it is just an empty spotfest or a total mess. Sometimes there's backstory you need to know. People HAVE been hugely helpful. I can't imagine getting into lucha without cubsfan's site, both the archives and the match finder. OJ did a lot of painstaking research for the lucha history lessons for the set. Loss and Chad have reviewed a ton of big matches from the 90s. People like Fredo and Kris would always answer a question if I had one. And the aforementioned Eric is a great guy who will always back up his opinions when asked. So if you're struggling and you want to really dive in, people will help. That's true with this community in general on any sort of wrestling and even after GWE I don't think that's changed. (If your issue is purely execution based, I'm sure people could point to specific matches that you might like, but that could be more of an issue)

I don't think this is the most productive road to go down, but there are certainly sites that report on NJPW and a dozen indies (like wrestlezone or what have you) that wouldn't even report on the CMLL anniversary shows. Yes, people like Kris wrote up reports but you sort of have to go to a lucha specific site to find them now. They don't come to you like other bits of wrestling news. It's not like Stardom (or even AJPW) is reported on those sites either though.

I have absolutely no time right now, but I want to delve more into execution vs symbolism at some point. Realism/Sport vs Myth/Tradition.

Fair enough.

There were some points within this thread itself where it might make some sense for you to comment, Dylan, for instance the more cultural issues, some of which you (along with Herodes) raised. It certainly doesn't do the board good if people don't follow up with engagement. If there are things to follow up upon (outside even what's been raised in this very thread, which I think is a lot even past the initial question), follow up. I've largely said my piece on those things. I'm not above engaging on the subject further, but I'm not sure where to begin, nor am I sure I care enough about the subject at this point to write on it at length. You don't care about the imperialism/hegemony arguments that were so haughtily thrashed and dismissed in this thread by certain people?

There were some points within this thread itself where it might make some sense for you to comment, Dylan, for instance the more cultural issues, some of which you (along with Herodes) raised. It certainly doesn't do the board good if people don't follow up with engagement. If there are things to follow up upon (outside even what's been raised in this very thread, which I think is a lot even past the initial question), follow up.

I couldn't rationalize putting him higher than I did in GWE (one before Hansen at 25), but if it was a list of my all time favorites, he'd be top five.

I thought he reported very well on the UK stuff this week. I'd like to see what sort of Cota bio he has (if any) too. But I really shouldn't. I got what I needed like I do every year.

There are a lot of interesting things in this thread and there are some we should probably double back on. I don't think the title of the thread is the most useful however, and personal attacks back and forth really aren't helping either.

I would actually love to read Parv's academic review articles he writes professionally on other people's published articles/monographs/etc. I'm really curious if he attacks the argument or the author. I could see it going either way.

One of my absolute favorite things about PWO is that almost any thread, with almost any agenda, driven by almost any truly personal thing, can still open up channels for interesting discussion. it's just not always pretty.

You have your agenda, which comes off as hugely defensive. Steven has his, which i'd label more as aggressive. Both have a lot of resentment gurgling underneath. In the midst of that, there's some very solid discussion in here both along historiography lines and a style lines. It's just muddied by the personal stuff. You feel like people look down upon you for your lucha views, solely for "coolness" reasons or to be different or difficult or to derive identity from being contrary, despite you giving lucha as fair a chance as you've felt you've given everything else. Therefore, you're happy burning down everything and frankly just wish this lucha annoyance within your otherwise quite pleasant, conservative (but that's ok) wrestling life would go away. Why the fuck can't we all just march in line up and down the square, right?

Where? Not at my college dorm if I was 17 in 2014, I'm pretty sure. Then I would have said Okada and Nakamura and probably messed up the pronunciation and called him Tahanashi.

When I was 17, in my first few days of college in fall, 99, I was just on the internet following wrestling for a year or so, with no access to tapes, having JUST been back in wrestling watching for about a year. I met some people on my floor who were into wrestling, and I immediately wanted to establish my credibility with one other person. I did this by mentioning that I was a fan of Misawa and Kobashi, despite having seen none or at least very few matches with either of them. And then I totally botched the pronunciation of Misawa by mixing up letters because I'd never heard it, just seen it. At that point, I promise you I couldn't have named a single luchador I hadn't seen in WCW or ECW. I'm not particularly proud of any of that but we do what we do when we're young. There is, or at least was, a primacy in fandom which had nothing to do with people's opinions of the style. I was talking to Loss about this yesterday. We're in an age where footage is far more freely available, where thought is not nearly as monolithic, and where everything is becoming more democratized. Streaming/blogging/twitter is sort of like the printing press in a lot of ways, as it pertains to wrestling fandom. But I promise you that at age 17 in 1999, I knew what I was supposed to like and it wasn't CMLL-styled lucha.

How many hardcore WoS fans even exist? It's a smaller number than lucha certainly. The WoS guys did worse than the lucha ones in GWE.

I think lucha IS hard. Not Sangre Chicana vs MS-1. That's primal. But if you were to just watch tomorrow night's show on Clarosports, it would be hard. I can think of a couple of reasons for that, some of which I've touched on before, and it is about the viewers and how they've been conditioned, not the wrestling. 1.) Everything you think you know is wrong: Or at least it's inadequate. You've been given the wrong information to help you. This is not for the younger fans but the ones approximately Parv's age. Nitro conditioned us poorly with 8 minute spotfest trios and Mike Tenay giving us the least useful information in the world. Again, i've covered this before, but coming in knowing the RULES about captain's falls and tags not being necessary if someone leaves the ring is about as useless as watching a 80s WWF match for the first time and being told about the 5 count on a rope break or if someone goes up to the top rope. They are trappings but just trappings. What's far more useful when it comes to that 80s WWF match is to learn about shine-heat-comeback, about some traditional transitions (putting the head down on a back body drop), about hope spots. That's what you would tell someone in understanding a match like that. No one starts with the RULES. It's like starting to explain the plot of Star Wars by going on about the different things Vader can do with the Force. It's not the narrative. So you end up with people thinking they're ready to understand lucha because it'll be just like what they're used to except for a few rule changes and that's not the case. There are the similarities that goc mentioned but except for in the lowest hanging fruit, you have to look for them and more importantly look for the patterns and symbols. For instance, captains getting pinned doesn't matter nearly as much as trios matches having a central feud/focus (when they do, which is often, and it's often not the captains at all). 2.) Meltzer (and thus much of the commentary that followed) focused on the wrong things. This is a guy who couldn't figure out why Mocho Cota was a big draw in 1993. This is someone who was into early AAA but only ever seemed to notice (or at least note) half of what was going on in the matches. Look, at my work we have annual performance reviews, and due to the nature of the organization, in these, your core work is generally ignored. It's one objective out of seven, even if it's 90% of your work. What you're supposed to focus on instead is all the other bonus projects you were working on, even if they're ultimately incidental compared to what you've been hired to do and what the organization needs you to do. It's like that with organization-wide awards too. They never reward the CORE work. Meltzer is like that with wrestling. Maybe it's because he grew into wrestling in the 70s when so many of the things we've gone back and discovered and lauded over the last few years were just commonplace for him. "Working" (as opposed to workrate) was taken for granted, or even outright boring, the illusion of action instead of action itself. But that "working," the emotional manipulation of the crowd through falsehood... that's what wrestling is all about. That's the CORE of wrestling. All the big spots and movez and everything else? That's just the bonus and a lot of times it comes (much like in my job) at the expense of the real day to day business, which is a lot harder than it actually looks. Good lucha is almost always about delayed gratification leading to the comeback. It's not about the dives or the flips or the tricked out matwork or the frenetic pace. Those are part of what makes things special (either by highlighting the tecnicos so that when the rudos cheat and take over, you're madder at them due to your respect and awe of the tecnicos skill or in the way that skill is again shown as part of the comeback, the tools for the favorites vanquishing their foes, but really, that could be awesome punches or tricky babyface fouls or someone like Tinieblas, Jr. or Marco Corleone or Dos Caras Jr using their size, or Maximo or Super Porky using humor any number of other things too).