Matt D

Meaning is derived from selling. It's what signifies consequence.

The CMLL vs AAA (or spotty lucha Indy matches) distinction probably matters there.

If you want to cede Parv the point and eschew the cultural issues (and I'm not convinced that's the way to go yet), then the next step would be categorizing elements of each style.

There are too many god damn package piledrivers.

When's the last time you were in an actual real life fight or a combat competition. Almost all real life fights or combat competitions are horribly boring. Not something to emulate for entertainment purposes. I disagree, and judging by the fact UFC is worth more than the WWE and their public perceptions most people seem to as well. Just to muddy the waters further, I wonder sometimes how much your distinct opinions about "realism" in wrestling have to do with when you were born relative to most of the rest of us. In that you've come into watching wrestling in a world where MMA is a much more fully developed sport. It takes up a cultural space. I've likened it to how learning more about science in the 20s-60s changed Science Fiction and what was accepted and not accepted as tropes. We've learned more about fighting and it seems to color your opinions more than it does a lot of us who have been watching since the 80s or early 90s.

I'm glad Parv's doubled back to at least try to engage this. It's not something that should be dismissed out of hand. Granted, a little more maturity and a little less snark might be the adult way to go? Right now it comes off as you being defensive as much as anything else.

I wrote a lot of words on trios matches last November. I'm sure anyone interested in this has read it but I'll repost again for the heck of it:

I'm going to try to go back and watch the bull terrier match, the super libre one and the mask match (maybe some of the trios too, if I can work it all out). I cannot imagine Delta in a situation like this, so I'm curious.

Dylan's cultural rant from GWE results times is probably worthwhile to dredge up at this point. I think that should have been the basis of the discussion that followed and it was generally ignored. Personally, as it pertains to Meltzer, I'd argue that the only aspects of lucha he cares about are ones that almost completely miss the point of it. I read what he was into in the 90s, the dives and the spots and the bumps and the quick sequences and you'd never know how great a rudo someone like Psicosis was when it came to attitude and character and interacting with his opponents and partners and the fans. You'd never get a sense of the ritual and the emotional build and payoff and the delay of gratification. I've almost never seen that in Dave's coverage. I think he's aware of it. He just takes it as a given or doesn't care. One reason why I think it's so hard for people to get into lucha is that they have to unlearn much of the traditional smark rhetoric about it first.

So I'm to this BTS (I am never going to be caught up). Small note on DDP taping his matches. I e-mailed him about this years ago, because I was curious if he did, in fact, have a ton of rare footage just hanging about. What he told me is that he wished that he did, but he basically just used the same tape and just continuously taped over it.

Wouldn't China make more sense anyway?

Christmas is great. Foley is creepy.

Yeah, Johnny. That's all nick was implying. You're preaching to the choir. We all want matches up and down the cards too.

Is Show vs Shaq actually happening?

Well Jericho and Revival were feuding up and down on twitter today, so there's that.

Chris Hero: I'm not tuned into Indy Wrestling much right now. I kind of resent it, actually. That said, I go out of my way to see Chris Hero matches. I've seen somewhere around 10 this year, maybe? Last night I watched the CODY match and the Kimber Lee match, the latter of which is really not the sort of thing I'd normally watch. I thought Hero was great in both. I'm excited for him coming into WWE because I'd like to have a reason to be more excited about that product. The elephant in the room is his current look, though. It is an elephant. Why? Because WWE and Vince, because of a mostly conditioned audience, because of a casual audience that is even further conditioned. You ask me, though? Elephants are kind of awesome. They can be at least. They stand out. They're noticed. In a company where they have Aries and Biff and Zayn and Rollins and just signed Strong. Where they have increasingly more and more indy darlings and cruiserweights and where the super indy style is the main event style, more or less, anything that makes you stand out is good. Right now Hero has the body type he has. Apparently there are health reasons for that. Time in FL would help to some degree, but when you're on the road, you're on the road. Personally, considering his general level of match quality this year, I think it's actually a plus. He's an amazing heel. He should be cast as a heel. As such, the whole KO King gimmick would only take him so far. How different is it from Owens (especially given their similar heel tendencies and ways to get under people's skin)? They should cast him as the modern day Buddy Rose. A guy like Miz is effective because the crowd resents him. They resent him because he's a cocky little bastard that they all think they could beat up. Buddy Rose was hugely resented. He was resented because he was a loudmouth braggart whose physique didn't match what he was saying, but who could also be dangerous and back it up. He won, often times legitimately, sometimes through hook or crook. Most of all, though, he was athletic. Hero could be a guy with a gut like a big chunk of the people in the crowd, but who is very athletic, who's living his dream when everyone in the crowd isn't, but who earned it, who is just that good, who reminds the crowd that they're not despite the fact that they may have physical similarities with him. For someone as talented as Hero, for someone who understands his audience as well as he does, and can perform to rile them up, that's a perfect heat engine, and it's one that works in the WWE format (because it's not that far from the Miz gimmick, just a different shade). I imagine people want him to come out as the straightforward asskicking jerk that he is, or whatever, but I'm not sure that'll stand out the way it has to except for as just another guy who has good matches. I think he could be a successful upper mid-card heel act for a few years running a Buddy Rose-esque gimmick. And that's not an insult based on his current body type. If someone's tall, use the height as a strength. How is this different? This is me likening him to the #3 wrestler on my GWE list and saying he could manage a similar act almost as well in an environment where almost nothing feels successful.

My simple, unasked for, answer is that they need to stop booking week to week and insert more mysteries and surprises and payoffs. Where does that fall on "overused talking points" bingo?

Two different things here: 1.) I think matches like the Spoiler and Chavo ones are really important because we don't have a lot of footage of the Spoiler at all or a lot of quasi-Squash matches with Chavo. You can learn a lot from those historically. 2.) I'm less keen on the studio squashes sent in, but it's better to post them than nothing, and more than that, if you're going to post squashes, you could do worse than Bockwinkel ones. In other news, I came across this while looking for something else. Hopefully it links correctly (scroll up two pages to the start of the article). It's a May 1976 Texas Monthly article on Houston wrestling, and it's actually pretty great. https://books.google.com/books?id=ZCsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=wrestling+last+ten+minutes+in+the+ring&source=bl&ots=uXaZQtFxmx&sig=X-ud8yyjKD-P8VetIyeJphP1N1k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjq1YzVr_HQAhXqqlQKHZdyAUgQ6AEINTAF#v=onepage&q&f=false

I personally approve of Robert's username.

I'm not as high on that Charlotte promo as the rest of you, specifically because she didn't have the fans at all. They whatted her most of the way through (which is more on them, but also a sign that they weren't going to buy into this no matter what she said, really) and then booed the hell out of the hug, not buying it at all. It didn't put heat on Charlotte so much as it made Flair just seem sad and pathetic. I'm not sure what to compare it to, recently, maybe the Sasha retirement promo where the fans pretty much bought into it.

I think so, but I'm not sure. If so, I think she'd have an easier time than some people. I know that her democratic opponent for senate in CT has come forward saying she's not a terrible choice, basically.

What's funny to me is how much the cruiserweight division sort of feels like the 1998 WCW cruiserweight division.

Far more problematic is someone like Verne, who'd almost never use black guys, and when he did, it'd probably be Kamala. But then, who drew in St. Paul? I guess the point is that it's complicated and you shouldn't use too wide a brush, neither you nor Meltzer.

Hero randomly going into a Microscope-esque rant on the difference between bumping and selling and how people get it wrong on Reddit was the funniest part.

It's hard to make points not clumsy, when they are completely wrong. Clumsy but not wrong What? Bill Watts was a racist, because he thought the black fans would accept any black wrestler as a star, so kept pushing George Wells, Snowman, etc.. as replacements for JYD. Not realizing JYD was a star, because of his charisma. He's saying that's not racism against black people, but in fact, Bill Watts was being racist against white people there? That's Dave's point, and it's just wrong. Bill Watts was not racist against white people when pushing George Wells and Snowman. Steven, I think Watts understood how charismatic JYD was and how hard he would be to replace. What he was trying to do was to provide representation to a large portion of his audience that had been drawn in by JYD in part (but certainly not completely) due to his race with the limited options he had available. He did this so that they would continue to buy tickets. That doesn't mean he wasn't racist. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, but I think that things are much more nuanced than you're presenting. We're in a world right now where there's a lot of discussion about providing minority (racial, lgbt, or otherwise) representation in media. Some of it is well-meaning. Some of it is highly profit driven (such as including generally throwaway Chinese characters and/or moments in movies so that a movie will "draw" in China).