Matt D

We live in a country where the most talked about/analyzed/broken down/obsessed over things are football and a TV show which has a kid being immolated so that a fire priestess can birth a shadow monster. Those are not just perfectly acceptable things to talk about and analyze and really obsess over, but if you don't, you're considered odd. NASCAR is up there. Golf is up there. For a while Survivor and American Idol were. We could have just as easily ended up in a world where ice dancing became the big thing. I don't want wrestling to be mainstream. I don't want it to be sport. I don't care if it's art. What I'm arguing instead is that there's no difference between having an obsessed argument about who should be in the MLB hall of fame or who should go in the NFL draft or The Bachelor or Breaking Bad or whatever. It's all a diversion from reality and whatever meaning it has comes from what we install into it through our discussions. That you brought up boy bands was a ridiculous comparison because that goes back to the mainstream argument, and frankly, I don't care. What the rest of society thinks has no bearing on what we do, nor should it. I care about the opinions of the people whose opinions I care about here. Going "Well, sure, let's talk about this, but aren't we nuts!" doesn't help anyone. It's pointlessly dismissive and we deserve better than that.

Goc's picks can be explained by not sleeping in days

I can see goc and I holding up things needlessly but Grimmas is too much the gentleman for that.

Frankly, I don't really care what wrestling is so long as we can break it apart and figure out what makes it tick and have fun doing it. John, when you say "We're all just weirdos on a message board who think about this far more than the actual people doing it and they'd just look at us strange if we talked to them using these terms and we're only doing this to feel better about this inconsequential thing that we value." and I think you do that lovingly, and even including yourself in that "we."... That's the absolute worst. The worst. Perspective is good. But we have a damn good idea of what we're doing and if we didn't enjoy doing it, we wouldn't be doing it. If we didn't think it was worth doing and worth doing with one another, we wouldn't be doing it. I can't think of almost any posts on this board that I find useless, including Johnny just marking out over something or OJ shitting on something he hasn't seen or whatever. Every bit of it adds to the whole, even some of the semantic arguments you and Parv have. Every single post is worth something and makes this place more than what it would be, save for you trying to knock down a peg and belittle what we do. The thought that people here put into things, the research that people like Kris and Kelly do, the footage gathering and deep dives that Parv does, the attempts at understanding that some of the younger people like Marty or Stacey bring to the table. It's a hell of a place, and I don't care if there were other "hell of a places" twenty years ago. We make what we do more than what it is because of who we are and the effort and thought we put into it. Stop taking that for granted.

I'm so sick of Great Art Theory

I guess I can't be president?

There's an art to that. It's awesome.

I am well outside the circle of trust now.

The mid-south crowd was perfectly suited for him in a lot of ways.

I still think Blassie was part of the key to moving into California for some people. (But just part of it)

Their finisher is the quadruple limb wrencher.

Incidentally, according to Kris, Arn is Ole's son in law. (non-kayfabe). The world needs more proof than what was provided though.

Southeastern is one of those promotions (like Memphis and on some level AWA) which just feels very much like it should feel. The rosters are spot on but not very interesting to me because they're so spot on (which isn't a bad thing by any means. I'm just wanting chaos) and it'll be in the booking. goc is, of course, Southwest, and we'll keep being confused about that as we move forward.

I will not run from being put on the spot but i will deflect. Success is a tricky metric, as mentioned, but I know the ones I am most interested in. Sometimes it's just seeing how someone fits into a territory, like Adonis in GCW. I have full faith in Kris to hit the ground running with that. He has a roster that hits his region's sweet spot perfectly but adds a few new elements. WWC is like that too as Kris and Boricua obviously know their stuff. I know some of goc's plans for Southeastern and I'm looking forward to seeing them play out. That, like Central States, is a territory that was so handicapped in real life that any improvement is a success. Then you get a place like Portland which did okay but now has some new elements to take it a bit more over the top. ICW being weird and surreal and outlaw should be fun too. Everyone's put thought into this but it's kind of mad to see the amount around Maple Leaf and WWF. I wonder if you guys have been doing anything BUT this lately. On paper, though, I think best balance of hitting the right tone + adding interesting elements, is probably Florida, especially after the trade for Hennig. Ultimately, I don't think anyone had a bad draft. There are some territories which were not done the way I would have, mind you. In the end, it's all down to the booking.

Joking aside (and there has been joking), I'm glad to see that so many people drafted so differently. Some people created a territory that looked a lot like the real territory. Others created one that would feel like the real territory but had different players. Others went completely different, etc. It should make things interesting moving forward.

Yeah, I'm leaning back towards performance art. sorry.

There's not a right answer here. Match A can be good in one aspect. Match B can be good in another. Match C can be great in one way but not another. Listmaking and comparisons are great, but if you can go into a match and point out the ways it hits, the ways it misses, your overall feeling of it, the crowd's feeling, if it accomplishes what it's set out to do (which sometimes has nothing to do with traditional metrics of quality), etc. To me that's the most interesting thing in a review. 1. Are you taking a 360 look at the match. 2. How do you feel about it taking all that in. Just admit your biases as best you can.

They had done a really good job with the Itami episode too. It's the sort of feature stuff that you never see on Raw/Smackdown, WWE TV save for maybe those weekly sit down interviews (and even then it's still night and day).

It's a fictional narrative. When good, it's an entertaining, coherent fictional narrative. When bad, it's not so entertaining and not so coherent, but still a fictional narrative. I'm cool with my classification along those lines. It's okay if you disagree.

It's way more of an art than a sport though, which is my point 78% of the time.

In general, I think the communists were heavily undervalued in this draft. 1983 people.

He just drafted Cortez the Cuban?

I think I'm going to start running with "Wrestling is fiction" instead of wrestling is art. That one's fair, if only because it distracts.

That was a brutal 3-5 picks in a row for guys who were left.

The best resource is Kris Z.