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

[GOTNW]

I don't remember the lucha fans being the ones who turned into self loathing communists over a project about ranking wrestlers.

[JerryvonKramer]

Pointless ad hominem attack

[gordi]

 

 

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

When people criticize Tanahashi, they don't limit themselves to saying he's not for them ... They flat-out say he sucks.

Please reconcile those two statements.

 

Here's my guess: When you say "It sucks" about something people like, there is no distinction. When other people do it... it's wrong?

He's saying Lucha fans come across as being thin skinned so people feel like they have to tread on egg shells around them.

Whereas, for example, you come across as taking criticism with maturity and restraint? ;-)

 

 

[Matt D]

Ah, Christmas on a pro wrestling message board.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

 

 

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

When people criticize Tanahashi, they don't limit themselves to saying he's not for them ... They flat-out say he sucks.

Please reconcile those two statements.

 

Here's my guess: When you say "It sucks" about something people like, there is no distinction. When other people do it... it's wrong?

He's saying Lucha fans come across as being thin skinned so people feel like they have to tread on egg shells around them.

Whereas, for example, you come across as taking criticism with maturity and restraint? ;-)

Again totally pointless

[gordi]

Come on, JvK, first you flat out say lucha sucks, then you agree with N.L.'s post where he complains about people flat out saying Tanashi sucks... Then you make an ad hominem attack on all lucha fans (thin-skinned), then you accuse GOTNW of making ad hominem attacks... There is a fair amount of cognitive dissonance going on here.

 

It isn't pointless. It's an appeal to you to treat other people (and their opinions) in a manner similar to how you'd like to be treated.

 

So, in a way...it's very Christmassy

[JerryvonKramer]

None of any of this has anything to do with the point NL was making

[GOTNW]

In cultural anthropology it's widely accepted every culture should be discussed based on its own norms since attempts for "universal criteria" tend to end up in white supremacy, alt-right stuff.

 

So I would say it is absolutely an appropriate reaction to tell the chamoion of western canon he is full of shit on this one, especially aince this is all happening because he sought to get into and understand various different styles of pro wrestlig and failed in doing so but yet insisted on claiming people "have" to rank certain wrestlers, and even went as far as to rank wrestlers he doesn't like to legitimize his point. But sure, my post was pointless.

[ohtani's jacket]

We have a thread 300 posts long about how Japanese wrestling is more popular than lucha; of course people are going to be less upset if you criticise puroresu. It's like criticising classic rock vs. shitting all over jazz or hip-hop.

[JerryvonKramer]

No need to try to derail or deflect by trying to put focus back on me personally. Cheap argumentation tactic and foul play.

 

Underlying point remains that people say stuff sucks all the time and it only really becomes a problem if Lucha is involved.

 

No point bringing up GWE cos it was abnormal conditions with stakes. It should be considered off topic and a derailment.

[Dylan Waco]

 

I agree that there's a tendency for people who aren't really into lucha to treat it with kid gloves. But that only seems to apply to lucha. When people criticize Tanahashi, they don't limit themselves to saying he's not for them or bend over backwards to acknowledge the things his fans like about him. They flat-out say he sucks. I think it's because you'll get far more pushback for saying something ignorant about lucha than for saying something ignorant about puro, at least on this corner of the Internet. I've seen people say some of the dumbest shit imaginable about Kobashi without anyone saying a word in response when they'd get raked over the coals if they said something equivalently stupid about Negro Casas.

All of this is true

 

 

It may be true, but it also ignores context. When the leading voices in wrestling media are trumpeting Tanahashi as one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, there is a "industry standard" of sorts being set that people are going to react to. I'm largely uninterested in discussing Tanahashi at this point, and am happy to concede that at times I've been harder on him than he probably deserved. But Tanahashi also is the beneficiary of a narrative in a way that lucha isn't, or even other Japanese workers aren't. Whether it is fair for people to react to the popular/loudest voice take, and not the match is a separate question, but I think it's something that is a natural response for a lot of people even when they are actively trying not to.

[Dylan Waco]

No need to try to derail or deflect by trying to put focus back on me personally. Cheap argumentation tactic and foul play.

 

Underlying point remains that people say stuff sucks all the time and it only really becomes a problem if Lucha is involved.

 

No point bringing up GWE cos it was abnormal conditions with stakes. It should be considered off topic and a derailment.

 

The bolded statement is nonsense and shouldn't be treated seriously by anyone.

[JerryvonKramer]

I will say that the situation on twitter is not the same as on pwo.

 

As I've said before it seems to be a culture on twitter more that people aren't allowed to dislike anything.

[goc]

I will say that the situation on twitter is not the same as on pwo.

 

As I've said before it seems to be a culture on twitter more that people aren't allowed to dislike anything.

I'm not sure how you're qualified to speak to what the culture of wrestling twitter is when you only follow 8 people. It's the same as various wrestling message boards, what is liked and disliked varies by the person you follow just as it does based on what boards you go to.

 

There are people you can follow on twitter who will praise a bunch of WWE stuff while bashing New Japan and vice versa. There are people you can follow who pretty much only tweet about lucha, or who talk a lot about the euro indy scene. It's really not a monolith.

[JerryvonKramer]

I do see more than just the 8 people I follow.

 

List of about 150 people or so. Still quite a small sampling I grant you but it's the impression I've got over the past year -- for whatever that is worth which might be nothing.

[cad]

What other country has all of its wrestling glossed over with "it sucks"? And not just once, but frequently? There are people who have no interest in anything from Japan but I don't think I've ever heard anyone flat out say "I don't like it because all puro sucks." Same with US, PR, Britain, Germany.

 

Also, protip, calling out someone's hypocrisy isn't an irrelevant argument. "But x is how you behave!" is a perfectly logical response to "I cannot stand people who behave in x manner."

 

 

[JerryvonKramer]

It's not relevant at all to this because I literally do not care if anyone thinks my faves suck.

 

It's not really fair to bring up GWE since the whole argument there (from me) was about how the thing should be about dispassionate assessment of cases, not a list of favourites. I have zero interest in going over those arguments. Zero. And see them as being entirely irrelevant to this thread.

[Dylan Waco]

If anything Twitter is filled with more outright burials than any message board. It's not even close.

[JerryvonKramer]

If the burial is of someone the community likes though, do you expect that tweet to have an afterlife? What does that afterlife look like?

[goc]

If the burial is of someone the community likes though, do you expect that tweet to have an afterlife? What does that afterlife look like?

Again, this goes back to the "it's not a monolith" thing. If you bury Okada on twitter, some people are going to agree with you and some people are going to call you a fucking idiot. Same goes with Cena, Roman Reigns, Misawa, Ric Flair, The Young Bucks, Charlotte, Sasha Banks, whoever the hell you want to name. The size of the positive or negative reaction really just depends on how many followers you have and whether you're existing in a twitter echo chamber or not.

[NintendoLogic]

Maybe I'm in the bubble, but I'm curious as to where you guys are encountering fans who categorically dismiss all wrestling from Mexico. I'm sure there are random dudes on Twitter who do that, just like there are ones who think that puro is just Japanese men chopping each other. But I don't know of anyone whose opinion carries weight in any organized fan community expressing that view.

[Parties]

A lot of internet wrestling fans are inclined to find Japanese culture cool, and Mexican culture uncool, due to reasons both aesthetically and culturally ignorant (“Japan = avant-garde and stoic, Mexico = poor and gross”). People who *do* think that way aren’t likely to own up to it, or even consciously recognize it in themselves. The jokes made when lucha comes up on something like 4Chan or Reddit tend to be oblivious at best. There is a big crossover among puro fans (esp. present-day NJ fans) who also like manga/anime/Japanese film and fashion. Nothing wrong with that, but suffice to say the number of Americans and Europeans subtitling El Chavo del Ocho and Xavier Velasco books for each other seems smaller than the number of nerds who think Okada’s frosted tips are badass.

 

Puro’s footage has been better preserved over the decades than lucha’s. Even if YouTube is starting to help people see the matches, we usually lack context of what a match was about and how it fit into a career. OJ nicely explained lucha’s current lack of hyped notoriety, match lists, and legends brought by AJ Classics/BOSJ to the prior generation of internet fans. Follow the money: nations that have more to spend on presenting their culture worldwide are the ones that garner acclaim. Noodles is spot-on in the cinephile comparison.

 

“Whether or not lucha is good” is a tired conversation that’s been beaten to death online for 20 years. The people who actively dislike it tend to be squares with other insular opinions. Almost all intelligent fans would agree that lucha has as much value as any other country’s stuff. The more interesting question – which Cooke and others have touched on – is why it doesn’t get the coverage it deserves, and how that lack of insightful press influences common perception. Again, I would say it’s largely-but-not-exclusively an embrace of Japanese culture, and rejection of Mexican culture by a blinkered group of English-speaking fans. Meltzer and all those dudes who went with him to Japan in the 80s are no longer the arbiters of taste, esp. as more people have gotten into the reporting game this year. I don’t know the answer to this, but would suspect Dave just has better sources for Japan info than he does for Mexico, and perhaps sought them out more because he preferred the style. I heard Meltzer once say on a podcast that he loved going down to Mexico because hotels were affordable and he could eat cheap steak dinners every night, but I don't recall him then specifying what workers he saw.

 

Grimmas’ note that the Purotopia/Smarkschoice crowd isn’t willing to give other styles the same chance that their critics give it has been the case for over a decade. PWO is a Niche within a Niche within a Niche, and as OJ noted, seeking out the new/diverse/original isn’t an exclusionary hipster tactic: it’s the pursuit of broader horizons in a medium you love. There are people who want to try new foods and actively seek out varieties of wrestling, and there are people who say, “I like what I like, everything’s subjective, nothing can touch the majesty of the warrior’s fighting spirit, etc.”, at which point I fall asleep.

 

If you really want lucha to not be “dismissed” by some perceived masses, then be the change you want to see and go preach the gospel. Go do historical research and analyze the new stuff for yourself, rather than waiting for other dudes on a board to explain it to you or tell you who’s good. Week to week, lucha is the most fascinating of all styles, in that it often feels like any given segment could end up being the best match I see all year, or the worst match I see all year. That’s really what you’re getting out of a tag or even a title/apuestas stip in CMLL or IWRG right now: a mammoth crap shoot that can be transcendent or horrendous from match to match, or even fall to fall. Lucha tends to be theatrical in a way that’s kind of like seeing live comedy: when it’s bad, it’s brutal, and when it’s great, there’s truly nothing better.

 

Getting Meltzer to start watching Los Traumas matches isn’t particularly important to me, but more power to you. He actually seemed to see more CMLL this year than he had since probably 06/07, but his chief takeaways were that Cavernario’s going to end up as destroyed as the Dynamite Kid, and to keep praising Volador, Jr. for his own weird Dave reasons of what makes a top worker. Point being that you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make that horse fully appreciate Virus.

 

Lastly, since this came up like fifteen god-forsaken pages ago: I also do think it’s a fair criticism (esp. because it’s specific and visibly citable) to say that lucha refs often suck, and in most cases would suck less if they weren’t so old and creaky.

[El-P]

Not sure I'd agree with the supposed negative cultural stereotype about Lucha though. As I said, I do think Lucha is actually the coolest form of pro-wrestling in pop culture because of it's very strong aesthetics. Again, there was (still is ?) a lucha bar in Paris,despite lucha not being showed on TV, ever, Puscifer's last album had a lucha theme. Maybe the in the very japanese oriented gamers community do you get more references to Japanese pro-wrestling (if at all), but I wouldn't be too sure about that. I never see any reference to puro anywhere.

 

So, I do think there's an inherent "coolness" of lucha libre, at least from the outside, because it's visually pleasing while good ol' pro-wrestling still remains cheesy as shit. Hulk Hogan vs El Santo, whose picture do you really want in a cool urban spot ?

[stro]

Starting out that dissertation with "Wrestling fans think Mexico is poor and gross and that's why they don't like lucha" is so fucking bizarre that I don't even know how to respond. Just starting the thing out more or less calling internet fans racist or prejudiced against the country and people instead of the style. Then you continue with saying they're idiots who just don't understand. Worst of all, you say they're probably racist/bigoted even if they don't realize it, so someone can't just think lucha is goofy and dumb, they have to tie it in with thinking Mexico is some poor, dirty place that is beneath them to even watch wrestling matches from.

 

What the fuck, dude? Did you actually mean to write all those words to boil down to people who don't like lucha = dumb racists?

[JerryvonKramer]

Summary of thread which has remained the case throughout from page 1 till now:

 

1. Some people don't like the fact that other people don't like lucha.

 

2. Rather than accept the fact they just don't like it, they instead try to come up with other explanations cultural or contextual.

 

3. People come out and say they don't like lucha, get accused of trolling or are attacked personally.

 

What did I miss? This has been the whole thread. It's not awful because of those of us who have just baldly stated the fact we don't like it, it's awful because people have insisted on over complicating the response to that. I suspect the net result is that people want to speak to those lucha fans less not more.