has 1997 vince finally been proven right? and what does that mean for the business?

[funkdoc]

i promise i'll have something more focused when i get home from work, but for now i'll just point this out.

 

i glanced at my facebook feed like 5 minutes ago and saw someone linking a story on john cena granting 500 wishes for make-a-wish. one of the very first responses to that post?

 

"He's a great human being until you learn he left his cancer-stricken wife to fuck with a Bella twin."

 

shit like this is what makes the classic wrestling formula virtually impossible, i'm tellin ya. we all live under skynet, everyone remembers everything.

[Loss]

Funny, I would expect young people to have a more sophisticated understanding of relationships than previous generations, given their more sophisticated understanding of the fluidity of gender and sexuality. I'm not excusing Cena in that case as much as I am consciously choosing not to have an opinion on it. It's not my business first of all, but without knowing the inner dynamics of his marriage, forming a judgment like that is pretty shallow.

[Laz]

Regardless of generation and awareness of varying relationship dynamics, that's a pretty shitty thing to do. Good thing it ain't true.

[Jimmy Redman]

Yeah I remember that being a made up thing. Like the fake story about Batista being mad at his sick wife for not vacuuming or some shit.

[funkdoc]

the point is that stories like that can easily spread and before you know it, the legend becomes fact and it permanently affects a person's reputation. the internet may have made the game of telephone more powerful than ever before

 

anyway, the eva marie thing is a great point and something i touched upon a couple times before. it seems like one of the few remaining ways to make fans genuinely hate you is to be bad at your job, and i think there's value in pushing people specifically for that reason. or there's having a background people hate, being perceived as stealing a spot from the people who bust their asses on the indies; i think the miz's heat is and will always be tied to the fact that he was on reality TV before getting into wrestling. people just hate the very *idea* of the miz.

 

as for the muhammad hassan point, there's a key problem with that: hassan was around before Web 2.0 was fully established. there was no twitter or tumblr, or at least they weren't relevant yet. trying a gimmick like that nowadays would make you look like a total joke among some of the most culturally influential groups. you'd have prominent social-justice activists trashing your company and getting thousands upon thousands of retweets from allies, and eventually one of the gawker network sites will pick up the story and shit will snowball even further from there.

 

this should be a separate thread in itself, but Web 2.0 has made "cultural influence" more important than ever. only a select few phenomena can dominate the entire country anymore, so for everyone else the path to relevance is to be considered cool by online influencers. among this generation, i would roughly categorize the influencers into two ideologically opposed sides:

 

1. activists & writers on twitter/tumblr (who often but not always belong to marginalized groups), their fans, and twentysomethings living in seattle/portland/san fran/brooklyn/etc. (what many would call "hipsters", much as i loathe that term). heavily liberal, basically the backbone of the bernie sanders campaign.

 

2. reddit & 4chan (which i am using as shorthand for "all english message boards with 'chan' in their name"). these are more likely to be part of the "One Punch Man crew", as obsession with anime & all things japanese is 4chan's entire raison d'etre. strongly libertarian, these sites don't exactly like each other, but will form an uneasy alliance to fight the "social justice warriors" in group 1.

 

to give you a quick example of each group's importance to a niche fandom: comic books have enjoyed a notable uptick in business & relevance by catering heavily to group 1 (e.g. female thor, muslim ms. marvel). and TwitchTV, a site where people watch other people play video games, relies on group 2 as almost its entire core audience - it was bought by amazon for close to $1 billion, and hadn't even been around for 5 years!

 

anyway, i think wrestling's problem now is not appealing all that strongly to either group. its best chance of getting buzz again is to accept that they'll never be as big as they were in the 90s, and just go hard for one of those groups. new japan has picked up a little steam among group 2 (remember, they're japan fanboys!), but its ceiling with english-speaking audiences is low unless they get better TV here. WWE has already moved a little in the "group 1" direction with the NXT women and stephanie's "TED Talks feminism" public persona (thanks, parties!), so that would be the more natural direction to go. the problem is that the core ideals of the wrestling bubble are anathema to group 1; i think it would take someone outside the bubble seeing potential and starting their own promotion.

[BBscout]

There best chance at getting legit boom period buzz again is when Vince passes.

 

There will be a ton of eyeballs from media and opportunity to cash in on a nostalgia audience.

 

Vince is an American icon and will be celebrated as such. That whole "longest running weekly episodic" line will really ring true. Wrestling has a chance to be celebrated as an American entertainment staple and be credited to Vince when the day comes.

 

Hopefully the product is hot at that time or they have something really good in their back pocket to roll out, like a Cena turn or Batista return if he blows up.

 

Hopefully some things change related to concussion prevention and actual common sense by that time as well. There is a middle ground somewhere.

[Death From Above]

words

 

Words.

[JerryvonKramer]

Has there been a heel who has declared war on the Internet/ smart fans yet?

 

He could smash up iPhones with a sledgehammer

[JerryvonKramer]

If there's ever a This is Awesome chant during one of his matches, he could stop and refuse to continue until they shut up.

 

Heel heat shouldn't be that hard to come by, just be a dick to the fans

[Loss]

WWE doesn't want its wrestlers playing to the crowd because they think that riling up a crowd doesn't translate to viewers watching at home, who are the "real" audience. Yeah.

[GOTNW]

Has there been a heel who has declared war on the Internet/ smart fans yet?

 

He could smash up iPhones with a sledgehammer

They did the "fuck indy/small guys" gimmick with both Sheamus and Baron Corbin. Sheamus didn't work because it's Sheamus and nothing he does could possibly make anyone care. Corbin has worked out well and gotten nice heat too.

[funkdoc]

 

words

 

Words.

 

 

i guess i shouldn't be surprised that history buffs wouldn't be so interested in understanding the dynamics of the present, but i think there's just so much there and hardly anyone in this fandom is bringing it up. seems like this isn't the forum to do it, though, which is a shame to me because there could be so much potential given the knowledge you guys have.

 

maybe i should do a blog post about this topic and link it in that subforum?

[Loss]

I am interesting in reading it and reacting to it here myself.

[funkdoc]

a blog post may be necessary anyway just because there's such a wide range of crap involved with this, and there's a lot of 101 stuff you have to cover for the unfamiliar.

 

trying to explain 4chan to a 40-year-old may be a blog post in itself...

[Loss]

I think when you expand on it, it's worth explaining if this is a new reality that involves young, rural, low-income people who don't go to college too, since that's historically at least the majority of wrestling fans.

[funkdoc]

I think when you expand on it, it's worth explaining if this is a new reality that involves young, rural, low-income people who don't go to college too, since that's historically at least the majority of wrestling fans.

 

very good point! actually, a significant portion of the people i'm talking about would fit that aside from the "rural" part. affording college is a struggle yo!

 

but a lot of this is about attracting audiences that are outside that tradition, and why i think that is possible. that is still something worth talking about for sure, though.

[Ricky Jackson]

 

 

 

words

Words.

i guess i shouldn't be surprised that history buffs wouldn't be so interested in understanding the dynamics of the present, but i think there's just so much there and hardly anyone in this fandom is bringing it up. seems like this isn't the forum to do it, though, which is a shame to me because there could be so much potential given the knowledge you guys have.

 

maybe i should do a blog post about this topic and link it in that subforum?

Your content is interesting and it has nothing to do with us old dudes not caring about the "new reality". I think the problem is your blatant disregard for capital letters

[Loss]

He's metaphorically demonstrating that he's not a capitalist.

 

Actually, it doesn't bug me because his content is both very much worth reading and easy to read.

[funkdoc]

 

 

 

words

Words.

i guess i shouldn't be surprised that history buffs wouldn't be so interested in understanding the dynamics of the present, but i think there's just so much there and hardly anyone in this fandom is bringing it up. seems like this isn't the forum to do it, though, which is a shame to me because there could be so much potential given the knowledge you guys have.

 

maybe i should do a blog post about this topic and link it in that subforum?

Your content is interesting and it has nothing to do with us old dudes not caring about the "new reality". I think the problem is your blatant disregard for capital letters

 

 

i appreciate your honesty! it's just a stylistic thing i naturally developed over the years, as i've hung out a lot on places like something awful and twitter where this is commonplace. i could see where it makes the longer posts harder to read though, so i should probably just do those normally.

[JerryvonKramer]

I agree that I'd very much prefer it if funkdoc would make greater use of his neglected shift key.

[The Man in Blak]

Maybe he can write his 4chan treatise like Film Crit Hulk to make up for lost time.