Why does puro get so much love? Why does lucha get so dismissed?

[Dylan Waco]

Why does watching pro wrestling have to be about the narrative? From reading posts and listening to podcasts it seems that some people are more into the discussion of wrestling than wrestling itself. Maybe this just has to do with what I do for a living, but for me, wrestling is something I come home and watch when I want a break from the sort of things I ordinarily do during the day.

 

I tend to focus on what viscerally pulls me in the most, which is coincidentally why I haven't invested that much time into lucha. The discussions on this board and the podcasts I listen to help me express why I enjoy what I do, and how to find other wrestling that is likely to be similar in that regard. In the GWE podcasts (at least the ones I listened to, I admit I got burned out and tapped out on a few), it seemed that the people that talked the most about how they were evading the "narrative" were also the most constrained by it.

 

It doesn't have to be about that. It leads to more interesting discussion from my perspective, but people can and should watch wrestling for whatever reason appeals to them.

[Dylan Waco]

 

 

 

The GWE exposed fissures that were already present. There are lots of interesting things that could be thought about looking at the results, and looking at my own ballot now - especially after the year that was 2016 - has me asking lots of questions about my own process, the role myth/narratives play in how we think about wrestling, et. Whether it was good or bad for the board depends on whether or not you think honesty and transparency is a good thing for community.

 

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?

 

 

Not enough to engage them at this point.

[Matt D]

Fair enough.

[Grimmas]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now Grimmas is saying things like he doesn't want to watch puro cos puro fans ignore lucha...

or Grimmas is saying he doesn't feel obligated to watch puro anymore, since puro fans don't feel obligated to watch lucha. That's a completely difference statement.

 

 

I find this statement really weird. People not feeling obligated to watch wrestling they don't feel emotionally attached to (or that don't like a particular style) is something that happens across the board, not just lucha.

 

There's a ton of fans that don't like or know about indy wrestling and don't feel obligated to seek and watch the most pimped matches. Same for British wrestling, lucha and even puro.

I felt obligated for years to try to seek out the best stuff of the year in order to make a best match of the year list or to feel worthy to talk about who is the best.

If you only watch your favourites how can you claim to make a best of anything list? Aren't you just making your favourites list then?

 

That was my mindset, but that is a minority mindset, so I'm dropping it.

Honest curiosity, are you changing the way you watch wrestling because you think you will enjoy a new/different viewing habits/patterns (or whatever) or are you changing because you don't like that you feel like others (or maybe enough others?) are doing it? I am curious as to why you are changing how you watch wrestling... frustration? fatigue? something else all together?

Felt pointless. Why hold myself to a standard that nobody else does?

 

Stick to what I like. Also I feel Lucha needs more advocates and if I cut out boring Puro I I can have more time for Lucha.

[Dylan Waco]

My advice is to watch what you want in any case. I still watch pimped Japanese matches, but I gave up on watching all of New Japan at the mid-year as I found the G1 tiresome, and chalk full of wrestlers I either didn't care about, or actively dislike (by contrast, I really enjoyed the BOSJ). I gave up watching all of CMLL because it's not a well booked enough/interesting enough promotion to watch religiously with so many other options available. I haven't watched a Raw in over three months. Despite this I've watched as much wrestling this year as I have any year because there is a ton of great indie wrestling I can watch that is easily available online.

[gordi]

 

In matters of taste, "it's not for me" and "it sucks" is a distinction without a difference.

Exactly

 

 

 

lol.

 

...and for the rest of your lives, you will constantly be wondering "Why is everyone mad at me? I was just politely expressing my opinion in a matte of taste."

[joeg]

Personally I think puroresu is just easier to get into. I think the psychology and the rules of lucha make it hard to get into for people who grew up watching WWF/E or WCW. A two hour television broadcast featuring 4 matches that are each a half hour long. Each match is a 6 man tag, captain's fall, two out of three falls. There are a different set of rules for each team. The rules for lucha libre (CMLL in particular) are so convoluted it makes it hard to follow for first time watchers. Then you combine that with that there are no angles and fueds develop slowly and the number of matches on a card that don't mean anything. It just makes lucha libre very difficult for some people to get into. Its the same thing with shoot style or WOS. It is just so different it can be a challenge adjusting.

 

With puroresu, you can start watching puroresu not understanding the deep psychology or the fueds or the angles. At 15 I didn't. I got into it loving the stiff strikes, head drops, athletic spots, and clean finishes. So just from an entry point, the violence of Japanese wrestling can make it more appealing, then once somebody has become engrossed with it, its easier to follow the more substanitive aspects of puroresu than it is lucha libre. I can articulate why my favorite Japanese matches and fueds are worth watching to a friend who only watches ROH and Lucha Underground. I struggled to explain the signifigance of Atlantis vs Ultimo Guerrero and Atlanits vs Sombra to that same guy.

[ohtani's jacket]

 

Parv it's very cute how you've seemingly tried to turn yourself into a victim of "wrestling elitism" in this thread when you're the one who deliberately came in here to troll people by saying "lucha sucks." I don't even think you ACTUALLY think lucha sucks you just want to dismiss it and never see or hear about it again despite the fact that you've probably liked more lucha matches than you've disliked:

I think maybe "non-stickability" is something. I was relatively high on a lot of 80s Lucha set stuff but had very little desire to carry on, doesn't stick for some reason. It's like "that was a good match", but it feels ephemeral. Hard to put one's finger on, but I guess it really comes down to me feeling like not a lot matters.

But it's different and challenges you to think more than "oh look at Kobashi chop this guy really hard" so just say it sucks and move on.

I do feel victimised for not liking lucha, truth be told.

 

 

No doubt related to your hang-up about people actually liking lucha

[JerryvonKramer]

Less a hang up more wanting to get what people I respect and like get. That's not a hang up. It's probably the place new fans of things usually come from.

 

Parv, your post script to the GWE was an angry rant against the "wrong" type of fans who didn't follow the so called conventional wisdom that you defend so religiously. Someone who preferred Lawler to Flair didn't do so for genuine reasons, they were being "contrarian", wanting to right a wrong or make a point, "hipsters" who want to "challenge paradigms" etc. there's a sense of fragility when your orthodoxy is challenged, and a casting of suspicion as you position yourself as basing your list on the "right" reasons and thereby undermining the valid opinions of others. I don't want to harp on this but do so since you brought it up, after two years of debate and discussion, the epilogue was questioning motivations of fans which will of course foster negativity.

Yeah I just went and had a look at that again: http://placetobenation.com/greatest-wrestler-ever-project-postscript/

 

Doesn't look like an angry rant to me.

[overbooked]

I've been working on a longer piece around Why Wrestling? and I think the paragraphs from it below offer some sort of explanation, although like any theory I appreciate it is probably pretty flawed...

 

I think there are two predominant schools of thinking. I'm painting some pretty broad strokes with a pretty broad brush here, so bear with my generalisations. Obviously individual fans take a little from column A and a little from column B. But there are distinctive ways fans engage with and then analyse professional wrestling.

 

School one. The Objective School. I was tempted to call them the Meltzer School, as I think a lot stems from him and his contemporaries, but there is more to it than that. Your practitioners of the Objective School are looking to identify and then find the Ideal. They work around critical orthodoxies - that what matters is psychology, workrate, selling. They try to define those terms to a point where there is a standard point of reference to judge every match and every wrestler. This means they can rate matches and make lists. Lots of lists. It is essentially one huge effort to take something wholly subjective and make it objective.

 

I think at its heart is the enjoyment to be had in decoding a text - in this case a wrestling match. It is satisfying to see a well-executed story. It is just as satisfying to pull apart the text to work out what worked and what didn't, especially with the safety net of those theories around psychology, workrate etc. Within that critical common ground there can be an "Objective" conclusion.

 

It is a neat and tidy thought exercise, and an exercise that works better with some forms of wrestling than others. Classic mainstream US and Japanese wrestling come out well from this kind of analysis. Matwork offers an easy story to critique ("He sold the leg!"/"He didn't sell the leg!"). 1990s All Japan offers more complex narratives with callbacks to previous matches providing a very satisfying intertextuality to acknowledge and critique.

 

The Objective School methods are pretty dispassionate, by their very nature. It is less about being moved by a match, more about working out how. Which brings us to...

 

School two. The Emotional School. A lot less about the Ideal and much more about the Real. To some extent it is like the drug addict forever looking for the high of the first hit. The Emotional School are on a doomed crusade to find a place where wrestling is truly real again, which unless you pack up your bags and head over to MMA is obviously impossible.

 

This is a nostalgic School. Wrestling was better when it was in a studio, when the fans genuinely cared, when the VQ was wonky. It is the crowd going wild in Memphis, the masks being ripped in Mexico, the bloody brawls in Crockett.

 

The thinking is less around those critical orthodoxies, more around a set of values - a form of wrestling where it feels like everything matters, one that prioritises emotional manipulation and connection over athleticism and spectacle. The Emotional School doesn't see professional wrestling as an academic exercise but much more than that. Professional wrestling can tell us something about our lives, can makes us feel less alone, can bring us closer to feeling something almost spiritual. The best professional wrestling offers something elemental, intangible, magical. This is not something to rate or rank, but more important than that. It can be analysed, but the truly great stuff transcends that, just as the greatest art is always more meaningful than the criticism that surrounds it.

 

The Emotional School generally see wrestling as Art. The Objective School often disagree. They are looking at different things.

[El-P]

Actually, that's rather well put.

 

Glad I'm neither here nor there though.

[The Russian Daydream]

My advice is to watch what you want in any case.

It comes down to this.

 

I've tried watching Lucha, and while I appreciate some of the matches, as an overall 'thing' I just don't enjoy it on the way I do other things. I don't think as fans we have a duty to watch particular styles or promotions if we prefer other things.

 

That's not an attack on Lucha fans though. We're allowed to like different things and that doesn't make anyone a better or worse fan. We're just human. If you like something and think it's great, that's fine but don't take it personally that not everyone does.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

My advice is to watch what you want in any case.

It comes down to this.

 

I've tried watching Lucha, and while I appreciate some of the matches, as an overall 'thing' I just don't enjoy it on the way I do other things. I don't think as fans we have a duty to watch particular styles or promotions if we prefer other things.

 

That's not an attack on Lucha fans though. We're allowed to like different things and that doesn't make anyone a better or worse fan. We're just human. If you like something and think it's great, that's fine but don't take it personally that not everyone does.

Yip

[Dylan Waco]

One thing I would say is that I think it's possible that Japanese wrestling is easier to get into as a tween/teen, and lucha is easier to get into as a younger child. In most cases Western fans who get into Japan are getting into it through tape trading/smart fan culture/et. Basically things that come about when you are in the 11-18 age group. To a degree I'm kind of an exception to that (I'll address this if asked but it's not really relevant), and I can think of maybe one other, but this seems to be the norm. I think at one point Japanese wrestling really appealed to traditional ideas about masculinity in a much more visceral way, while also coming across as something exotic without being radically different from the norm, and that's something that seems likely to appeal to a lot of people in that age bracket

 

With lucha I've noticed that when I'm watching something and younger children are around they are FAR more likely to be interested in lucha than they are Japanese wrestling, or in many cases U.S. wrestling even with the language barrier. I suspect this is largely tied to the aesthetics of lucha, but I can't say for sure. It's just a consistent theme I've personally seen, and there are probably a dozen or more lucha fans I know who got into it as younger kids which makes me wonder if there is something to the argument that age of exposure plays a role in whether or not people "get" it.

[gingears]

I wonder if magazine culture does not also factor into this. I know for me that was my first glimpse into wrestling beyond weekend TV shows. It probably sounds stupid to a lot of people, especially to those that grew up online, but stuff like the PWI 500 certainly informed some of my opinions as I was starting to dip my toes in waters like these. Every year, it would break down where there was one Japanese guy in the top ten, maybe two, and then the stars of lucha wouldn't start to surface until much, much later. Granted, that's just going from memory and not actually researching the stats, but there was definitely an attitude of "top puro stars need representation for us to give this list credibility" whereas lucha stars did not. That probably speaks to a preexisting bias, but for somebody looking for an A > B comparison between the two in that era, I think that that's where one would look and the conclusion one would draw. If it didn't start it, it may have reinforced it and exposed it to a wider audience.

[Grimmas]

I wonder if magazine culture does not also factor into this. I know for me that was my first glimpse into wrestling beyond weekend TV shows. It probably sounds stupid to a lot of people, especially to those that grew up online, but stuff like the PWI 500 certainly informed some of my opinions as I was starting to dip my toes in waters like these. Every year, it would break down where there was one Japanese guy in the top ten, maybe two, and then the stars of lucha wouldn't start to surface until much, much later. Granted, that's just going from memory and not actually researching the stats, but there was definitely an attitude of "top puro stars need representation for us to give this list credibility" whereas lucha stars did not. That probably speaks to a preexisting bias, but for somebody looking for an A > B comparison between the two in that era, I think that that's where one would look and the conclusion one would draw. If it didn't start it, it may have reinforced it and exposed it to a wider audience.

PWI and that British top 50/100? magazines list really demonstrate what I am talking about.

[JerryvonKramer]

Random thought but I wonder what Mil Mascaras's rating was year by year vs next closest luchadore

[Grimmas]

Random thought but I wonder what Mil Mascaras's rating was year by year vs next closest luchadore

1991

#1 Hulk Hogan

#20 Great Muta (highest puro)

#111 Negro Casas (highest lucha)

#142 Mil Mascaras

 

1992

#1 Sting

#18 Jushin Liger (highest puro)

#156 Negro Casas (highest lucha)

#187 Mil Mascaras

 

1993

#1 Bret Hart

#19 Great Muta (highest puro)

#77 Ultimo Dragon (maybe highest lucha or might count for puro?)

#127 Mil Mascaras

#328 Silver King (highest lucha)

note; Negro Casas and El Hijo del Santo not listed

 

1994

#1 Bret Hart

#15 Great Muta (highest puro)

#62 Love Machine (highest lucha)

#94 El Hijo del Santo (second higest lucha)

#188 Mil Mascaras

 

I think that's enough.

[Matt D]

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.

[Loss]

The PWI 500 also started after Mil's peak years. The guys to watch for in those early years of the 500 are Konnan, Vampiro, Cien Caras and Perro Aguayo. Konnan and Vampiro in particular were hotter than anyone in the U.S. in the same years, and probably just as hot as anyone in the world at the time. The value of the peso was up, which led to an economic boom in Mexico, and both guys had distinct looks that made them huge stars at a time that most households had more disposable income. I should start a thread in the Military Industrial Suplex at some point to explore if NAFTA killed the lucha boom of the 90s.

[Grimmas]

The PWI 500 also started after Mil's peak years. The guys to watch for in those early years of the 500 are Konnan, Vampiro, Cien Caras and Perro Aguayo. Konnan and Vampiro in particular were hotter than anyone in the U.S. in the same years, and probably just as hot as anyone in the world at the time. The value of the peso was up, which led to an economic boom in Mexico, and both guys had distinct looks that made them huge stars at a time that most households had more disposable income. I should start a thread in the Military Industrial Suplex at some point to explore if NAFTA killed the lucha boom of the 90s.

 

I missed Konnan on the list, somehow. I think they spelled it weird

 

1991: 49

1992: 143

1993: 125

1994: 34

 

Vampiro

1991: unranked

1992: unranked

1993: unranked

1994: 255

 

Cien Caras

1991: unranked

1992: unranked

1993: unranked

1994: 158

 

Perro Aguayo

1991: unranked

1992: unranked

1993: unranked

1994: 223

[Luchaundead]

Puro is based more on the same concepts as American wrestling so for me it's easier to get behind the emotions and story of the matches more based on competition and sport. I like to watch combat sports but, person experience in team sports so I can relate to the idea that you are trying to best an opponent. Having felt the feeling that another team or competitor is taking an unfair advantage by bending the rules I understand the anger you get at heels who do the same in a worked environment.

 

Lucha on the other hand as always seems foreign to me even though I grew up in Southern California in heavy Mexican communities heck even I am part Mexican I just could never understand what they are doing in there. One day pretty recently (with in two years) I read something touted as the "Rules of Lucha" and when I got that the concept of the match is to out macho your competition based on your role in the match that's when it all clicked to me. Not in the a-ha now I get it and enjoy it way but in the oh now I know why I can't relate to this.

 

Lucha goes against my very core as a person. I despise overly egotistical people the concept of reproduction at times feels arrogant to me I don't understand how people do it, I see it as people saying "I'm so important the world can't go on with out my genes being around at least one more generation". I cannot in anyway relate to the idea that you are in a fight even with some basic built in so let's call it a competition or a sport and you are thinking more about showing off than just winning based on your talent and skill.

 

This is why I believe lucha is not as popular in America, it was said "America is great because she is good..." This idea that we value sportsmanship, humility, focus, and determination played a pivotal role in the designation of heels and babyfaces even in wrestling heels should show a disregard for this values while babyfaces embrace them . There probably is an argument that we are at a time where America was ceased to be good so maybe it's time now that lucha could break through but, I think this is why it hasn't to this point be a very popular style to American fans.

[NintendoLogic]

The thing is, it's only certain kinds of puro that American fans tend to gravitate toward. For the most part, it's limited to the All Japan crew and guys like Muta and Liger who wrestled high-profile matches in WCW. Stuff like shoot style is just as esoteric to most Americans as lucha, if not more so.

[Herodes]

Well as it relates to the oft-ridiculed cultural reading of the import and development of Japanese wrestling post Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shoot style was the first real assertion of a native wrestling style rooted in Japanese martial arts traditions explicitly seeking to disassociate itself from the dominant American influence. But it's appeal to western fans is significantly more limited than "traditional" Puro which presents a hypermasculine version of the otherwise conventional and familiar tropes.

[JerryvonKramer]

I'd much prefer to watch Lucha over shoot style if you held a gun to my head so there's that.