How have your tastes in wrestling changed?

[Karl]

The older I get the more absorbed with 80's wrestling I become and the more intolerant towards current wrestling I become. Im all about the angles, the stories and the carny of it all. I have no interest in athleticism and acrobatic spotfests.

[Loss]

Mine changed when I grew up about wrestling in my late twenties and fully embraced that it's a form of entertainment that can be anything it wants to be.

 

It can be a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet. A pawn and a king.

[concrete1992]

The more wrestling I watch the harder it is for me to lose myself. I have gotten past the period where I can watch things that will regularly drop my jaw and have me go crazy. And I'm totally cool with that. It still happens from time to time and those times are real good.

 

On an aesthetic level I care less about pure athleticism in my matches and nearfalls. I still love nutty spots but what I classify as nutty has changed. Huge setups with fine payoffs are okay but big friggin' moves out of nowhere rule hard.

 

I also have changed my approach to watching wrestling which I'm not sure is a taste thing but I think it affects what wrestling I actually consume. Like, I'm no longer watching full shows unless I want to see every match on the show. It is 2017 and cherry picking is the name of the game.

[Laz]

I've come full circle. When I got really into wrestling in late '97, I loved the brawlers. Austin, Foley, Piper (favorite from my diaper years), even guys like DDP. Then I found ECW and it blended the crazy-ass brawls that I loved with high spots and some spurts of technical wrestling, basically becoming the live action Street Fighter II that I'd always wanted.

 

Then I found the internet. I found puro, I found more lucha than I was exposed to on Nitro, and I joined the ROH snobs. To this day I still hold LowKi/AmDrag from Round Robin Challenge to be one of the greatest matches I've ever seen, and supersonic's write up explains my love of it better than I ever could (and with considerably less cursing). I loved seeing the matwork lead to the bombs and the highspots and the dozens of 2.9 counts, but now I realize I loved it because it was fresh and not what I was getting from WWE/TNA.

 

Now? I find myself drifting back to the wild brawls. I've fucking loved most of Stan Hansen's work that I've dug up because he felt like the blue collar shitkicker, I love Scotland's ICW because it focuses on a more "street fight" atmosphere, and the only match at Beyond's Americanrana 2016 that truly had my full attention was the 8 (well, 7ish) man street fight.

 

There's a sense of hyper realism to that style which is sorely lacking in most modern work. So when I do see it? I go nuts for it.

[The Russian Daydream]

When I think about it, it's surprising how little my tastes have changed over the 27 years or so I've been a fan. I've matches I loved as I first watched them throughout the early 90s on WCW and WWF tapes are still matches that I go back to now.

 

The first video I owned was Great American Bash 1990. The first match on that tape was The Midnight Express vs The Southern Boys. I loved it at the time and it remains perhaps my favourite tag team match ever. Nostalgia probably plays a part, but watching it with as critical eye as I can muster, it still holds up to me.

 

More than my tastes changing, I have gone through phases. There was a spell in the mid 90s when we got Galavision on Sky that Lucha aired on a Saturday afternoon. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. That was a phase which passed though. Now, aside from the occasional match, I don't enjoy Lucha much anymore It's a similar story with ECW, early ROH, TLC matches and others. There were spells where I thought my taste had changed and I was 'into' the new thing. In the end though, I went back to the same things I always loved.

 

So, I don't think my tastes have changed a lot. What I like is a good story, logic, hot crowds, what I would call 'meaty' action and a bit of blood when the situation is right. Same as ever.

[Microstatistics]

Since I started posting here, I feel like my tastes have simultaneously broadened and narrowed. There's more stuff I like and appreciate on some level, but less stuff I absolutely love.

 

 

I don't think my tastes have changed so much as they've expanded. I definitely find that the more wrestling I watch, the more wrestling I really enjoy. I often observe that the more wrestling people watch, the less stuff they really love. It's possible "I didn't like this as much as Loss" is the most frequently used phrase in the Match Discussion Archive. That's not always the case, as I do see some people - Dylan comes to mind - who only love more stuff as they watch more stuff. But disappointment, or at least lack of admiration, does seem to happen more often. I'm curious why that is.

 

 

After thinking about it more, I think these describe me as well. My tastes have definitely expanded in that I like more styles and types of wrestlers/wrestling than before but the stuff I consider to be all time great has substantially shrunk.

[dawho5]

My wrestling tastes have changed a lot and a little. It's hard to describe. I grew up on WCW, found japanese wrestling through the juniors and ended up being a huge 90s AJPW mark. Then it seemed to me that 96-99 WCW was really my sweet spot again because it combined so many elements of wrestling that I watched into one ridiculously satisfying whole despite all of the flaws. 1980s wrestling from across America really opened my eyes to what WCW came from and the parts of it that were lost to form what i had broken in on. Then I watched lucha and British wrestling a little more and found aspects of both that I really wished were more prevalent in other forms of wrestling. And I absolutely fell in love with how simple wrestling was in Puerto Rico.

 

I can't say that any one of these things is defining in how I look at pro wrestling. I still love watching All Japan matches from the 90s when they come up and seeing how my opinions have changed on it. I still do enjoy some aspects of NJPW juniors even if some of the tropes drive me up a damn wall. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for late 1990s WCW. There are aspects of 80s territory wrestling, lucha, British wrestling and Puerto Rico that I love so much, but other parts of it that take me out of where I need to be to enjoy it as well. Mileage varies on that last bit. So in truth not a lot has changed about what I like with regard to most of it. NJPW juniors I struggle with a lot. Later 90s AJPW, NOAH and the slew of imitation styles...just can't do it.

 

The big changes for me come in all the details, why I like a style, what I like within it, what I don't like. How all of that interacts when I watch has always been a constantly evolving thing and I think that's the important part.

[JerryvonKramer]

As Bob Dylan once wrote, “I used to care but things have changed”.

 

But one day I will care again.

[C.S.]

I was thinking about this today...

 

In my 20s, I was mostly about the Benoit type of worker. Now, I realize that Hulk Hogan was a far better worker...brother. Aside from the Sid and WM victories, Benoit never, ever took me on an emotional roller coaster in his matches the way Hogan did. Hogan got a much better match out of Warrior, for example, that Benoit and the like ever could have. Even back then though, I appreciated so-called "guilty pleasures" like Meng, Barbarian, Earthquake, etc. But I've since come to understand they were just as good at what they did as a "vanilla midget" type was at their style.