All Elite Wrestling

[NintendoLogic]

Who said anything about killing the business? Nobody in this thread has said that guys like Komander can't get over or draw money, just that it isn't what they prefer to watch as fans. El-P is arguing with ghosts again.

[Matt D]

I will say this: a soft brand split can work. I choose who to “work with” around here and what arguments to avoid and how to engage and I’m pretty happy. You end up watching someone work with himself in the end but that’s ok by me. 

[Dav'oh]

57 minutes ago, El-P said:

Same old story.

32 minutes ago, Dav'oh said:

Same old story indeed.

It's clearly an enduring story. Cultures need story-tellers. I'm glad we can pass this one on to future generations for reference when Ricochet Jr Jr is booked against Son of Son of Cobb.

@Blehschmidt, I have no doubt a gentleman like yourself is among the 1% who can successfully rock a goatee i.e without looking like they've sucked a wombat's arse.

[El-P]

15 minutes ago, Matt D said:

I will say this: a soft brand split can work. I choose who to “work with” around here and what arguments to avoid and how to engage and I’m pretty happy. 

Matt is correct.

[El-P]

26 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

Who said anything about killing the business? 

No one. It was part of the joke post about boomers complaining about contrived wrestling, which has always existed. A joke post that some got and others did not apparently. Humor is like ring psychology, not everyone has the same idea of what it is.

[NintendoLogic]

There's an old saying that a joke is like a frog-you can dissect it, but it dies in the process. Perhaps the same is true of wrestling matches.

[El-P]

19 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

There's an old saying that a joke is like a frog-you can dissect it, but it dies in the process. Perhaps the same is true of wrestling matches.

You know what it makes me think about ? And with your avatar (which I have never really identified, it's Immortal, right ?) I guess you'll get the reference. I was reading an interview with Fenriz (from Darkthrone for those who don't know) where he talked about how when he was younger metal music had something magical to him. And when he started to play music, it stopped being magical. And at the same time, he loves house music and techno but he never even tried to understand how it was done because he wanted it to remain magical.

[Embrodak]

33 minutes ago, El-P said:

No one. It was part of the joke post about boomers complaining about contrived wrestling, which has always existed. A joke post that some got and others did not apparently. Humor is like ring psychology, not everyone has the same idea of what it is.

“Look like you’re having a struggle for victory while adhering to a heightened but intuitively plausible sense on the audience’s part of what the human body in a fight could reasonably endure” was the basic schema of ring psychology in North America, Europe, and Japan, at a minimum, with local stylistic and conventional differences in what the latter could comprise and what performers were willing to do to achieve it. (I’m unfamiliar with early lucha libre and so cannot comment on it, though I would be surprised if there hasn’t been a similar drift in plausibility and spectacle.)

I already said in my first post that wrestling was a spent force at the end of the 90s and that I do not begrudge the drift by the indies toward violations of that basic schema over the last 20 years, but it’s just silly to pretend that an Irish Whip or a suplex are the same level of implausible as what is happening now, *especially* given those same performers are doing Irish whips and suplexes, aka adding implausibilities on top of implausibilities, aka change in quantity amounting to a qualitative shift in the dialectic, Mr. “Ring Psychology is just an emergent dialectical agreement between performers and audience”. It’s fair to point out that there has always been a segment of fans that resent additional implausibilities and contrivances that are introduced for the sake of performative variety, but that doesn’t mean there *isn’t* a plausible and meaningful dividing line between 20th and 21st century wrestling. Many wrestlers ceasing to even try to hide the artifice is a big, big change! Artistically, it’s even a logical progression, but I simply don’t think wrestling has enough ontological content to make it worth doing, unless and until we get the wrestling equivalent of a Sergio Leone or a Kurt Vonnegut or whoever.

[MoS]

On 4/16/2023 at 9:52 PM, Embrodak said:

I don’t think it’s absurd. Even if Josie Riesman is right and kayfabe was just a myth that promoters used to enthrall the performers, not something that had mass audience buy-in at any point after the early 1900s or so (fucking Evan Lewis and Farmer John got called out faking it in like 1895 for fuck’s sake), the fact that the *performers* took it seriously made it easier to lose yourself and really buy in to the drama. Junkyard Dog really looked like he got caustic chemicals in his eyes because the performers planned it out in a meticulous way that you have to work hard to see through the seams of. I think the Bill Watterson quote about the delicacy of newspaper comics is applicable to wrestling, too. There’s a reason most old-timers hated VKM playing for the cheap seats with an even cartoonier version of wrestling than his old man put on, and there’s a reason that wrecking kayfabe only created a boost that lasted four years or so, followed by a steady and ongoing decline in the popularity of the art. It makes more money now than ever because of changes in the media market, and there might be as many or more total viewers globally as there were in America in 1999 because of international streaming, but at this point, let’s be real, it’s just a particularly inglorious branch of nerd culture writ large. Any specific version of it - The Elite’s postmodern spectacle wrestling, CMFTR’s neo-Bretism, WWE’s house main event style that is somewhere in between the two, outright comedy wrestling, deathmatch wrestling, lucha libre - probably can’t survive on their own in America, though any particular element can probably be excised; altogether, they sustain just enough of a market to keep things going, but for my tastes, they really do clash in a way that makes it hard for me to ever lose myself in what is happening, especially when there is no coordination to make sure that, say, a match that really needs blood isn’t having the audience desensitized to it by a totally gratuitous use of blood in an earlier match. Lucha libre in Mexico is at least consistently fantastical, such that the cooperative spots and unreality don’t really jump out at you as much.

Loss put it really well once: it didn't matter whether the fans took wrestling seriously. Wrestling took wrestling seriously. I prefer that approach to wrestling too. 

Do you really think that the death of kayfabe was the reason why wrestling declined after initially booming though? The steroid scandal would have happened regardless of how stringently VKM had adhered to kayfabe. We did have another boom like 8 years after the first ended. 

[MoS]

Also, Kommander walking the ropes looks stupid, but not as stupid as Taker sloowly, awkwardly and precariously walking the top rope, even as his opponent does his absolute best to ensure dude doesn't fall embarrassingly. I don't really know where I am going with this. Wrestling is stupid, I guess. 

[Embrodak]

4 minutes ago, MoS said:

Loss put it really well once: it didn't matter whether the fans took wrestling seriously. Wrestling took wrestling seriously. I prefer that approach to wrestling too. 

Do you really think that the death of kayfabe was the reason why wrestling declined after initially booming though? The steroid scandal would have happened regardless of how stringently VKM had adhered to kayfabe. We did have another boom like 8 years after the first ended. 

I think it’s a combination of wrestling stepping down from the central mystique that allowed normie buy-in, Vince McMahon and his weird fucking tastes becoming the only purveyor of any note, diversification of the media market to allow people to pursue more niche entertainment interests, real pro wrestling (MMA) becoming a thing, the creeping desensitization of the fans toward the spectacular element, and (maybe primarily) oversaturation and diminishing returns. People were tired of wrestling in 1995 after a decade of it being all over the fucking place and doing the same stories and finishes all the time, so I think it’s probably more instructive to think of the Monday Night Wars and Attitude Era as an anomalous interruption of a decline in popular interest that started earlier than as the baseline we should be lamenting the fall from.

[El-P]

53 minutes ago, Embrodak said:

Mr. “Ring Psychology is just an emergent dialectical agreement between performers and audience”. 

It is. End of story. Whatever works works. Plausibility doesn't matter. Not theoretically, but it actually doesn't. The biggest stars in pro-wrestling history are ridiculously unplausible, from Inoki's shitty-ass enzuigiri to Hulk Hogan's pathetic hulk-up and idiotic legdrop, to Steve Austin throwing a billion punches to the face of his opponent which never ever leaves a mark to Dwayne Johnson's PEOPLE'S ELBOW. 

The advantage of pro-wrestling going from a con-job to a craft appreciated for what it is is that it opened the landscape to a whole new dimension. Pro-wrestling actually takes itself, as a craft, much more seriously than it ever did before, that's the paradox. 

45 minutes ago, MoS said:

Wrestling is stupid, I guess. 

It is. It's a glorious stupidity though. But it is, in essence, completely ridiculous.

[Matt D]

I am going to drop some stuff I've written over at DVDVR about incentives and chemical changes because they feel tangentially relevant.

 

Quote

 

This isn't going to be a great analogy because I'm not a huge sports guy anymore and this could be wrong, but I'd argue a lot of the changes in Football or Basketball or Baseball games over the last 30 years are (in science terms) more physical changes. Different strategies. Different ways to make up teams. Different rules. Different ways for athletes to train. The games are still basically the same. The reactions are the same. A lot of the incentives are the same.

With wrestling, it's completely different, a chemical change. The goal of a pro-wrestling match in 1985 is almost completely different than today and that drives the fan reactions which drives the way the match is wrestled and so on. The incentives are different. The audience is looking for different things and is, thus, catered to differently. The ways of drawing money are completely different. It's not necessarily better or worse (though obviously I have my own opinions there) but it's different. And it's a cycle so it feeds on itself as it becomes more different and further and further away from the sort of suspension of disbelief (wilful or not) that drove everything decades ago.

 

 

Quote

 

My hottest hot take possible is that Wrestling is Dead. In the same sense God is Dead. It doesn't mean that what is now called pro wrestling can't be a good and enjoyable product. It doesn't mean matches can't be good. But it's an entirely different medium than it once was. Apples and oranges.

Cable TV and PPV changed it considerably. The death of the territories changed it considerably. The Monday Night Wars changed it considerably. The death of WCW changed it considerably.

What killed it though, what can never be come back from, is the shift from fans 1) wanting to see the babyfaces wrestle the heels and the heels get their comeuppance to 2) wanting to see the company push the wrestlers that they wanted to win to 3) wanting to see great matches/memories/etc for the sake of them.

That's not necessarily about kayfabe though the relaxing of it was either a symptom or a driving force. It's not about fans BELIEVING so much as it's about them no longer letting themselves suspend their disbelief. That's what doesn't really happen anymore. It means that the incentives for wrestlers and wrestling companies to perform in a certain way are completely different than they once were. It's no longer about utilizing heat to get people to pay moment because real emotions are being stoked (and that could be watching a morality play or seeing that there's some justice in the world or just having a socially acceptable excuse to hate someone). It's about witnessing something special or spectacular instead, about having the bragging rights that you were in the crowd for it. Even when heat is utilized now, it's much more performative and winking. It's less genuine and just having the crowd be more of a part of the act. The crowd (still a mob of its own) gets to drive things more now instead of being led by the wrestlers. The incentives are completely different and therefore it's a entirely different medium.

The genie is out of the bottle and the nature of the audience, the methods used to perform for them, and the very purpose of pro wrestling matches and angles themselves, are now transformed into something unrecognizable relative to thirty+ years ago.

It can still be exciting or entertaining when done well, but it's no longer Wrestling (2023 addition: don't get hung up on this last sentence. It's a taxonomy thing).

Quote

On 1/8/2021 at 12:48 PM, Log said:

Do you feel like it has something to do with the focus going from solely making money to being having a good match and hopefully making some money?

There's actually a lot to unpack there. There are maybe three different strands. Also note, I'm most interested in how wrestling matches are worked but the overall presentation and how angles operate are important too.

1. Wrestlers being fans of wrestling who are in it because they are fans as opposed to people mainly trying to make a living.
2. Current wrestlers growing up on post 1990 (or even post-2000) wrestling as opposed to older wrestling.
3. The different incentives re: the fans and what draws.

1. is very similar to things we see in other mediums, be it genre writing or comics or animation or whatever else. Almost every stream of entertainment right now is "Fan fiction" to a degree in a way that it really wasn't in 1980 or whenever.

3 is mainly what I'm focused on however. Let's minimize the idea that people are wrestling for the sake of wrestling or having great matches for the sake of having great matches. In some ways, that'd be pulling wrestling even further away from the medium it once was and into something else. Let's assume that the point of pro wrestling is still to make money and as such, to get fans to spend money on a product.

The way this was done changed over the years from just buying regular tickets to local shows, to buying tickets to more occasional nationally touring shows and merch, to paying for PPVs, to buying DVDs, to signing up for streaming. And that's important and it's also connected to the change, but I think we should be focusing on what drives fans to give up their money now relative to thirty years ago.

In that regard the change is making money by creating heat and stoking emotions vs making money by supplying a stream of qualitatively, socially agreed upon, good matches.

 

[El-P]

I'll add this and I'm so out of this argument.

The irish whip thing is funny. Like there was different degree of implausibility that went from acceptable (the irish whip, which can be done in a context of very much "struggle" based matches) to unacceptable (whatever crazy spot or sequence you can think of). In reality, the degree of plausibility of the irish whip is exactly this : ZERO. Null. Void. Nada. And I'm not even the one saying this, I've heard Bryan Danielson (some dude) say it : if you throw someone onto the ropes, there's no world in which he bounces back. It's ridiculous. The plausibility is FUCKING ZERO. From that point on, considering we're already at zero, there's nothing less plausible.

It doesn't matter that people believe it's "more credible" because it's been there seemingly for ever, it's just that they have been used to it. There's no degree of implausibility between an irish whip and a Canadian Destroyer. None of it is happening in this world. It's an equal level of plausibility : zero. 

[TheDuke]

I dont think using floppy MOVEZ is a problem as long as wrestlers limit themselves to flippy MOVEZ that are used in legitimate combat sports or that could conceivably work in a shoot fight.

Also part of the problem is that after performing a flippy MOVE they move too quickly to the next flippy MOVE before it has time to register with the audience. If after performing the flippy MOVE the wrestlers laid around in the ring selling for a while, maybe saying "OW" loudly or grabbing a hold like a bear hug or a good iron claw or something before moving to the next flippy MOVE it could slow down the action better. This would give the fans a chance to sit down and rest for a while or head out for a bathroom break or a smoke or something while the TV announcers can talk about upcoming TBS programming. 

[Jmare007]

3 hours ago, Matt D said:

I will say this: a soft brand split can work.

In theory it can, but for it to work it needs the sort of focus and planning that I don't think any big wrestling promotion has right now, specially someone like TK. Seeing that whole talented roster AEW finally having a weekly outlet and more big matchups happening sounds cool, but I'm not confident it would last more than 3-4 for months, once the initial feuds/angles have finished.  

 

[The Man in Blak]

Maybe as an attempt to redirect, I’ll just say that AEW takes a lot of flak for moves that require excess gymnastics and cooperation, but it’s everywhere in modern wrestling: Austin Theory does more forward rolls before moves than RVD and one of the hottest new finishers in NXT is Sol Ruca springboarding off the top and flipping/tucking forward into a cutter while their opponent just kind of hangs out for a few seconds. Athleticism is the aesthetic now for wrestlers that can’t elicit a “CALL THE POLICE” from Titus O’Neal at ringside when they blister someone’s chest with a chop.

[KawadaSmile]

I don't think a brand split would work, tbh. Essentially you are doing WWE-isms for the sake of it. Or rather, this is a decision made to please a single wrestler who isn't popular with his peers.

 

Jericho is only behind Bray Wyatt in terms of being a con artist. Absurd.

[MoS]

Reports are that WBD are heavily involved in Punk's return, which makes me think that he is a bigger difference-maker than we can make out from publicly available metrics. 

[Stiva]

I’m all for another AEW show where Khan can put together weird match ups but it feels like it’s going to give another big blow to our chances of getting any real angles or stories to attach to

[sek69]

5 hours ago, MoS said:

Loss put it really well once: it didn't matter whether the fans took wrestling seriously. Wrestling took wrestling seriously. I prefer that approach to wrestling too. 

Do you really think that the death of kayfabe was the reason why wrestling declined after initially booming though? The steroid scandal would have happened regardless of how stringently VKM had adhered to kayfabe. We did have another boom like 8 years after the first ended. 

Did VKM ever really adhere to kayfabe tho? I mean he didn't say the word fake, but the outlandish gimmicks in the 80s and 90s kind of screamed it. I always got the impression Vince never cared about kayfabe but never said it in public until it benefited him financially because he didn't want to hear the older folks in the company complain. 

[MoS]

9 minutes ago, sek69 said:

Did VKM ever really adhere to kayfabe tho? I mean he didn't say the word fake, but the outlandish gimmicks in the 80s and 90s kind of screamed it. I always got the impression Vince never cared about kayfabe but never said it in public until it benefited him financially because he didn't want to hear the older folks in the company complain. 

No, my point was, even if he had adhered to kayfabe like he was Bill Watts, the steroid scandal that destroyed WWF's business and sent the entire business into recession would still have happened. Wrestling would have still entered its dark age. 

[The Thread Killer]

7 hours ago, Dav'oh said:

I also suspect many of you sport goatees. That question went unanswered.

 

I would like to address this issue because I feel it has gotten lost in the rest of the conversation.

I freely admit I have a goatee.

However my goatee comes with an explanation. I went clean shaven for my entire life, until I went on my honeymoon in Mexico in 1993, at which point I sustained such a terrible sunburn that I was unable to shave for two weeks (especially since the resort I was staying at had no hot water and I wasn’t going to shave my sunburned face with cold water.)

Upon allowing my beard to grow in for two weeks, I was shocked to discover that my beard just does not grow in on the sides of my face, for some bizarre reason. I just naturally grew a goatee by accident. Upon growing the beard, people kept telling me that it looked good, and since I am naturally lazy, I decided to keep it because that meant I did not have to shave every morning from that point forward.

Therefore, I feel I should be officially exempt from your mockery of people with goatees.

[MoS]

Hey, if a goatee is good enough for this man, it's good enough for anyone - 

 

[Embrodak]

5 hours ago, El-P said:

I'll add this and I'm so out of this argument.

The irish whip thing is funny. Like there was different degree of implausibility that went from acceptable (the irish whip, which can be done in a context of very much "struggle" based matches) to unacceptable (whatever crazy spot or sequence you can think of). In reality, the degree of plausibility of the irish whip is exactly this : ZERO. Null. Void. Nada. And I'm not even the one saying this, I've heard Bryan Danielson (some dude) say it : if you throw someone onto the ropes, there's no world in which he bounces back. It's ridiculous. The plausibility is FUCKING ZERO. From that point on, considering we're already at zero, there's nothing less plausible.

It doesn't matter that people believe it's "more credible" because it's been there seemingly for ever, it's just that they have been used to it. There's no degree of implausibility between an irish whip and a Canadian Destroyer. None of it is happening in this world. It's an equal level of plausibility : zero. 

This is just silly. If you can throw somebody such that their momentum takes them all the way to the springy ropes, they might bounce off a step or two, if they haven’t reclaimed their momentum by that point. But in reality, at least some of the time, Irish whips were a gamble on *regaining* momentum, on hitting the ropes, turning around, and trying to check the guy that threw you. It wasn’t *always* that, certainly, but there’s absolutely a plausible kayfabe explanation of at least some instances of that little ritual. Moreover, though, you are simply forgetting the distinction between absolute and relative plausibility. Even if one grants that neither have any basis in reality, a fucking Irish Whip *could* look plausible to somebody without firsthand knowledge or a strong internal sense of the relative physics of the bodies and the ring structure. All wrestling is cooperative, all of it entails some degree of implausibility, but a wrestling where those things are not even *attemptedly* hidden is just qualitatively *different*, on a fundamental level, such that you really can’t say the performers are doing the same thing. That’s what makes your contention that the craft of wrestling is stronger than ever simply incommensurable to my sense of it, because prior to the last 20 years or so, the craft of wrestling was as much in hiding the cooperation and artifice as it was in what the bodies in the ring were actually doing. I have any number of outlets to watch bodies doing amazing things; what makes *wrestling* different is in seeing people looking like they’re hurting each other more than they actually are and telling a plausible story of interpersonal physical struggle while they’re doing it. Random MSW TV matches from the early 80s are way more compelling and skillful-looking to me than most of what AEW puts out, for example. For all that AEW wants to be a WWE alternative, it often strikes me as the ultimate actualization of what he himself started, just from a different angle.