Matt D

By having my kid watch Topper last night, I am proving myself to be king of all parents, apparently.

Bossman was first thought too. What about the Yukon Lumberjacks? How successful were the Medics/Interns whatever?

And I'm saying that I don't ignore the fact I'm watching two guys putting together a match with each other. I relate to the creative decisions, not to the story itself. I am seeing a moving image on a screen, the sum of a creative endeavor. I think I'm willing to take my understanding of the concept to the exact point that it serves any point in a conversation. If you break it down to "You're just looking at pixels!" then it's not a practical concept. If you're looking at it as "can you believe in this as a reality?" then it's fine.

I'm not keen on arguing this further, but I can appreciate the way that Marv Wolfman writes an issue of Tomb of Dracula and how he deals with the challenge of surmounting the unrealistic elements from a craft perspective without letting the inherent plausibility of them move me one way or the other. I can admit that those elements exist. The way I interact with the text when it comes to these is by examining how the author deals with them. It's never about me suspending them necessarily but instead about taking at look at how he attempts to get the general audience to suspend them and admiring that (even on an emotional level) or not. Admit that I can at least do this and we'll be cool. It's the huge majority of how I watch wrestling. It's less of how I watch Veronica Mars, but there's still maybe half of that there. It's a lot less of how I read New Warriors due to childhood nostalgia and other things but it's still there to an extent. I think the more interesting argument right now is not "is this possible?" but "how do we look at things differently?" with exact pedantic definitions and established terms not necessarily as important. In general I find organization useful and fruitful. Here we're pulling an outside term in, one that, as it is narrowly defined, isn't very useful for most of this discussion, except for the few people who seem to say that they can't watch wrestling if the punches are really crappy. Though even then, when I see a spot that's illogical or makes no sense or what not, it's not about "taking me out of the match," it's about me recognizing bad/disorganized/irresponsible storytelling, which isn't a suspension of disbelief so much as me thinking that the person is a bad storyteller. With other people, they admit that bad execution reminds them it's all two guys in tights rolling around or whatever.

He had a section in the WON. 700 words. Granted, it was far overshadowed by the Sasaki bio and pretty comparable to the Nakata obit.

You're with OJ, I'm with John, which honestly makes for a weird tag match. Maarrrrrkkkk (and I'm sorry, I actually don't know who you are despite your 60 posts and very noticeable avatar) seems to at least be trying to parse the argument (which I think is actually a separation of the act of creation from the creation itself more than anything else) while Charles is kind of just past the other side of the line. Johnny, as always, is the cosmic jester of chance.

1.) You should have gone with something like, 2.) I will admit to being able to suspend most things for Duck Amuck or The Great Piggy Bank Robbery. Less so for What's Opera, Doc. 3.) I think, again, that this is really a discussion where some people are taking a very dogmatic and narrow view of a term, which frankly, taken so narrowly (be it correctly or not) has next to no actual conversational value, and others are explaining something personal that tangentially relates to it in some very legitimate ways and not so much in others. Instead of pushing off to talk about what that second group is discussing, the first is sort of pedantically clinging on to what they feel is accurate instead of trying to explore what the second group is actually feeling, which does, in some distinct ways differ from how the first group feels, even if, perhaps, the term (used literally instead of conventionally) doesn't explain it well due to its narrow nature.

What the hell man! What the hell. You don't just drop that without some words of explanation.

Ultimately I do think this is down to semantics and perspective on some level, but I also think there's a mild disconnect too. Also, I still think the real money is in Johnny and I reviewing Tanahashi matches.

We're an oligarchy and the guy with the helmet has all the wealth.

It's not the main way I process and enjoy wrestling which i think is a more pertinent issue.

Is there a Malenko vs Rotunda match from 96 through 98? I want to see someone do a Johnny Sorrow take on that.

Oh man, I want to see Parv figuring out what people are thinking during stretches of matches. Do me during Andre vs Warrior SNME or a 2002 RVD match.

Well John talks about all the drugs he did in his early 20s when he was getting into wrestling. I don't know how to explain it for me.

Every Rene Goulet MSG match. It's actually just 11 hours but it feels like 500.

That you can't imagine other people seeing and enjoying things differently than yourself isn't something sad about me, but sad about you. Unless you are a cyborg or something, I call BS on feeling emotion while not suspending disbelief. Man, you can relate yourself and your experiences to a story while mostly seeing it on a craft level. It just takes an awesome ego?

Part of me still sort of wants Steph/HHH vs Brie/Bryan.

Maybe it involves Archibald Peck and time travel back to February 23, 1980.

Can Austin play Piper?

I think there's also a difference between the everyday and the novel. Something that feels like it's part of the language is fine. Something we haven't seen before that obviously takes a lot of cooperation or involves people moving into places they wouldn't normally be in or doing things they wouldn't normally do is different. For instance, someone who never, ever, ever used a power bomb wouldn't try to power bomb Kidman. On the other hand, it's very impressive to me how fluid and organic Rey finds ways to get people into 619 position. When he first started using it, it was a little jarring, but he's gotten so much better at it over the years to where it stopped being bs happenstance or cooperation and has become outright strategy.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0512590/ I await the Daniel Bryan: GOAT FULL OF DYNAMITE shirt.

I really do want to respond to you guys more about the psychology/logic stuff but i am swamped so much so that i'm barely even watching wrestling! That says something. I'll try to get you something next week.

I think we're not entirely on "bad wrestling" right now. I'm not sure where we are on but it's soemwhere between an etymology of wrestling moves and "suspension of disbelief" note. That's not really what I meant. I don't want things to be REAL, but I want them to do it for a reason. That reason can exist wholly within the "universe" that they're in where there is absolutely different laws of physics than the real world, thus the effectiveness of the irish whip. I love that wrestling has its own laws of physics. That's awesome. It makes it quasi-sci fi. I do want to know why wrestlers first started doing it and if it meant the same thing now as it did fifty years ago.

It's okay that you don't care! I'm kind of curious of the etymology of it (as part of the language of the normal match) though. Just because we take something as a given "this is what they do." doesn't mean that I don't want to know why they do it. It's cool that they do it. I'm okay with it, but I want to know why they do it and I want them to know why they do it too. That "rocker dropper position flip" thing bugs the hell out of me because a lot of times I think guys do it because it looks cool. I asked Rollins about it once and he said that he does it to get better positioning on his opponent, so I guess that's okay, but I don't know.

Hey, this is high level discussion, man. We're breaking down something fundamental and in every match and... I think i saw Buddy Rose do the trip once. Maybe. Anyway, one thing I love about lucha is that they do the cool sidestep instead.