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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

Redundant!

Also, this hit me as hilarious. Yes, that's right, even Sean Fucking Waltman was incredulous despite his usual commitment to X-Pac heat solidarity.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Koumei wrote:Use his full name, Handsome Rusev!
Undashing Handsome Rusev made my soul hurt.
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Post by TOZ »

Holy shit.

I was at Elimination Chamber tonight.
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Post by Koumei »

So last week they finally pulled the trigger on the KO vs Jericho angle. This week it actually managed to start with the crowd booing Owens, and I can't remember the last time they did that. Maybe when he first "sold out" and allied with HHH? Or do we basically have to go all the way back to NXT with his betrayal of Sami Zayn?

So well done there, they finally got people booing heel Owens. Through the magic of Jericho.
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Post by Whipstitch »

If he were still a heel I'd say they need a vignette of Jericho complaining about how nobody could have foreseen this to a silent but fuming Sami Zayn.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Anybody heard of Sting this year or last year or did he quit for good for reals?
Undertaker is still somehow going strong, despite being advanced in age.

And Austin, Goldberg and The Rock made combacks as well . .
Same with Cactus Jack somehow . .
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Post by Schleiermacher »

"Still going strong" may be a bit generous. You could say that about him at Wrestlemania, but ever since then he's been showing his age more and more in my opinion.

No shame in that; the guy is a legend and possibly my favorite wrestler of all time, but I think he should have retired in 2016 while he could do so on a high note.
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Post by Koumei »

Sting's neck injury wasn't a work, it was a real thing that happened and he can't wrestle any more. Sting isn't going to wrestle again.

And we're currently having another plague of injuries across the board, with Finn Balor still recovering from his broken arm, Naomi having to relinquish her title due to a knee injury that means she won't be able to wrestle at Wrestlemania (in her home town no less), and Seth Fuckings rolling his knee up again.

Also, why the hell did they bring Mickie James back just to repeatedly job her out to Becky Lynch?

Anyway, I've been thinking, these days escapism is more important than ever, heel victories - when they're Miz and Charlotte type heels - turn me off the shows more and more. Is it time that we change things up and stop actually having traditional faces and heels? There are other options:
1. Treat it more like an actual competition between two people, and even go so far as to have ladders and rankings rather than an inebriated GM stagger out to call a match at random.
2. Take the thing they've sort of been doing already and just go all the way with it - with "heels" that people cheer nonetheless like Owens, Jericho, The GAY Community? Styles, Handsome Rusev, Alexa Bliss...
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Post by Whipstitch »

Heels and faces don't have to go, they just need to quit treating "babyface" and "Fucking morons who lose in the end" as synonymous. True story: I once joked that Seth would be the one to turn heel because the Cerebral Assassin thinks that functioning brain cells is a heel trait in WWE. I thought I was joking, but hey, sometimes it turns out that you had all the puzzle pieces in front of you the whole time.
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Post by Koumei »

I'm not sure. Ultimately, people like (in fact particularly) the Miz and Charlotte would just need to go on big old losing streaks and also stop talking in order for me be happy with their existence. Not "they won't win in the end through outsmarting the faces", but actual "they head out to the ring, they do not speak, and then they get beaten. Ten weeks in a row".

Kind of like how I liked Bork Laser so much more ever since Goldborg flattened him and Hay-man practically lost his voice.

Not to mention the fact that Vince has a very hit and miss record when it comes to identifying what makes someone a face (hitting on married women like Trump? Using too much hair moisturiser? Being a big old racist like Trump? Actually being Trump?) or heel (Being Mexican? Being Bulgarian?).
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Post by Stahlseele »

@Koumei
Ah thank you.
Sads now . . never gonna see Undertaker versus Sting then ._.
I loved his insane Icon turn. And the Main Event Mafia was interesting.
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Koumei wrote:I'm not sure. Ultimately, people like (in fact particularly) the Miz and Charlotte would just need to go on big old losing streaks and also stop talking in order for me be happy with their existence. Not "they won't win in the end through outsmarting the faces", but actual "they head out to the ring, they do not speak, and then they get beaten. Ten weeks in a row".

Kind of like how I liked Bork Laser so much more ever since Goldborg flattened him and Hay-man practically lost his voice.

Not to mention the fact that Vince has a very hit and miss record when it comes to identifying what makes someone a face (hitting on married women like Trump? Using too much hair moisturiser? Being a big old racist like Trump? Actually being Trump?) or heel (Being Mexican? Being Bulgarian?).
Big losing streaks mean that there is no drama. You need the classic hero's journey. First the heel beats the face, then the face trains hard, makes a comeback, and beats the heel.

But the face has to lose first. That's the setback. You can't have a hero's journey without a setback. It would be like Star Wars without Empire Strike's Back.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Taker had hip surgery earlier this year and was reportedly in a lot of pain after his brief run in the Rumble. And by "run" I mean "standing around being old as fuck while dudes push their faces into his fist." He should build a nice retirement castle out of shellacked hundred dollar bills and stay away from wrestling rings. He's earned it.

As for the rest of it, I would say that Miz is the least of their problems. His current gimmick basically started out as Johnny Cage cosplay and that would be A-OK if they were willing to let their second & third tier babyfaces have unambiguous victories where they get to outsmart his goofy ass instead of doing whatever tweener bullshit it is they're trying to do with Dolph. It's the fucking midcard so you don't need a lot of depth. You could just have Dean beat on his ass for a month or two until they need a ginger to job to Reigns again.
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Post by Koumei »

hyzmarca wrote: Big losing streaks mean that there is no drama. You need the classic hero's journey. First the heel beats the face, then the face trains hard, makes a comeback, and beats the heel.

But the face has to lose first. That's the setback. You can't have a hero's journey without a setback. It would be like Star Wars without Empire Strike's Back.
I'm fine with no drama outside of the main event if it means the Miz gets shit on. He can just be used as enhancement talent to boost some other people a bit until "Yeah but everyone beats the Miz up" renders that useless. Then he can go to TNA to challenge all newcomers.

If we really need a thing where the face has to lose first, then that takes us back to "Everyone needs some baseline likeability and not really have traditional heels, meaning Miz, Charlotte and Reigns just have to go away and find a new occupation, and Lesnar needs to destroy Heyman and go solo." Even in WCPW I just fast-forward through anything involving the Swords of Essex or Doug Williams (and, back in the day, Prince Ameen and the "Youtube Wankers" authority stuff).
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Post by Whipstitch »

I know I'm repeating myself at this point, but I don't care, because this has been bothering me for a long time.

I'm tired of faces being portrayed as dumb shits who fall for shit that wouldn't stump an infant or have to stand around quietly while Steph claims they'd be penniless losers without the McMahon family deigning to let them rassle. For example, Sami Zayn was positioned a million times better back in NXT than he is now. That's because over there they established a clear pecking order where he'd stomp the ever living shit out of dudes lower on the card and when he did lose it was for understandable reasons against other top guys. Then Corey Graves would shit talk him and the audience would shout "Objection!" because Corey is a god damn heel and would inevitably take the criticism way too far. There was a marked lack of surprise schoolboy losses and getting distracted by fucking entrance music. People cheered for him because he wasn't a total loser but he also wasn't a sure thing, either, so there was still drama involved.

Incidentally, this is why I kinda like the Revival even though they can be sorta dull at times. See, they do this thing where the faces avoid most of their obvious trickery and only finally succumb to the dirty tricks because the Revival works super hard to finally outnumber a guy and will just keep fucking cheating until something sticks if they have to. It's like they're evil cheaters who you should boo instead of the faces being dumber than my cat.
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Post by Koumei »

I have found the wrestling that provides what I want, and it is... TIGER MASK W!

From wrestling to storylines to character arcs and development to themes to simple catharsis, it is perfect. And intelligence is not limited to heels.

Also, Kenny Omega ate all of the cakes. What a heel, Bullet Club truly are the lowest of the low!
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Post by Whipstitch »

Heard the ppv was mostly hot garbage. I didn't watch it, so whatever.
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Post by Koumei »

It wasn't too bad, to be honest. Now, Tiger Mask W aired a new episode the same day, and that was better, but it still wasn't awful. The main downside to it was Invincible Reigns being the first person to actually pin Swamp Man, in an inconsequential match. Or maybe that Bayley's victory was a bit dodgy (but on the other hand: she beat Charlotte to retain her title at a PPV so w/e).

Okay, and the final match actually was a 3 second Goldberg squash match, but thanks to Jericho distracting Owens as a lot of people assumed, and after this weird minute of mind-games... before the bell rung. Owens got ahead of himself there. Also it's really a shame that there were around three or four major predictions for how the match would end, and not one of them was "The reigning champion, who knows what he's doing (heel intelligence) and is probably at the perfect age of having experience but not being worn down, cleanly defeats the fifty year old man who only wrestles short bursts and has only just wrestled a couple of matches after returning from a 10 year hiatus".
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Post by Whipstitch »

I watched the god damned thing and nobody warned me that Rusev got slapped around a bit by Jinder fucking Mahal.

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Post by Stahlseele »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8BL2BC9WEg
Not the insane icon anymore, but still Sting.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Koumei »

Let's look at them bit by bit.

AJ Styles vs Shane O'Mac
It started with the most athletic technical wrestler (and crazy Christian fundaMENTAList, I will always remind people of this), AJ Styles, vs the nearly-fifty-year-old son of the owner of WWE. Nobody expected it to be good, so they made it first, that way it wouldn't be a disappointment to follow big things... and it was great.

Shane straight-up used jujutsu-style wrestling, and looked fairly legit doing it. The triangle to armbar to omoplata, the fast-snap hiptoss straight into kesa-gatame...

He didn't just leap off the tallest thing he could find (note: they built a fucking rollercoaster as part of the decorations, that would be a very impressive way to leap to his death). Styles carried through with the more "flippy shit" and apparently inventing moves on the fly. And the actual wrestler still won, even though his opponent is related to the owner. So it made Shane look great without devaluing one of their top stars.

Would I have preferred Styles vs Wyatt for the title? Sure. But being told "This is the match you will have", it turned out great. Having decided on that match, they then made quality booking decisions, and made it seem like they want the audience to be happy sometimes. Do not be fooled by this.
Bring out the women!
So that attitude barely applies any more. We had two Womens' Championship matches on the main card, and while they were both multi-competitor scrambles, they both had a lot of solid, gifted wrestlers. In the first, Nia is probably the weakest from a technical-wrestling-capacity and interesting-character-development standpoint. Her entire existence is being big (too big - wrestling needs to use weight classes or something so we stop seeing Big Show vs Mysterio, Strowman vs Zayn, and Nia vs... any other woman on WWE) and mean. So she was eliminated first, but through a triple-team effort, meaning it didn't leave her looking weak.

We didn't get the Sasha heel turn, which you could call good or bad. Charlotte still lasted to final two, meaning we might get yet another Charlotte/Bayley match in the near future, but they do work well together. My reservations with Charlotte are just with her being so good at being a heel that I personally hate her and want her to go away and I always fast-forward through any of her speaking moments. And in the end, Bayley won, cementing her status as the top face of the division and a serious champion.

For Smackdown Womens' Championship, Naomi won - she had to vacate the title after an injury, and returned just in time to compete at Mania for her home town. So this was absolutely a feel-good moment. But ever since her "Feel the Glow" reinvention, she's been really over and people have given her a chance, and wow, that paid off. And for this match she traded her dumb finisher (making it a transition move, and anything can work for that) for an awesome double-shoulder-lock neck-crank submission. I don't even know what it's called, but it's great.

Oh and Elsworth had his No Chin Music countered into a Becksploder. That was nice.
Tag!
I'm including the mixed tag match here, not just the tag title match. So that's still two of them on the main card. Yeah, return of the Hardyz - and it looks like WWE are going all-in on them after Broken Matt gave a new burst of energy to them. They're the champs now.

Cena defeated Miz, and while some hate that because lolCenawins and because "The Miz was in top form of his career as the greatest heel and now he's just buried", see everything I said about Charlotte, that applies to him too. So I'd be happy about that if I had any intention of ever watching again. more on that later
Almost all others
Owens defeated Jericho, which is sad but probably necessary for building the stock of Owens (who is fairly young), whereas Jericho is a multi-time champ and nearing retirement. I mean, it's not just "I'd like face Jericho to beat heel Owens", it's that kind of redemption story where it's thematically appropriate to close on a high point. But the fact is, Owens kind of does need the win. And it was a great match in and of itself.

Bork Laser finally defeated Oldberg, and just after Oldberg made sure to prime the fans to boo himself (they were already supporting Bork anyway for the most part, but one last nudge) thanks to that podcast thing. Where he complains about all the hard work of the job. And it was a <5min explosion of violence. And surprising athleticism - check out the bit where Lesnar leapfrogs to avoid a spear.

Orton, the master of boring, buried Bray Wyatt, in what we thought would have been the biggest disappointment of the night - oh how naive. More on that later.. You can call Wyatt's party trick dumb and cheesy or cool and surprising and creepy. It worked for some people, not others. Not that it matters, Orton still won with an rko out of nowhere. Except he always automatically does that to everyone within reach as a free action at will, so people should just expect it as a matter of course by now.

And Seth Freaking Rollins overcame the odds and defeated Triple H, the King of Kings (who rode in on a motor-trike, with a police-bike escort, because of course he did). This is the only way the story could possibly end. Seth got his redemption, and the basically-retired Triple H used his status to put over younger talent. The sledgehammer came out, there was a phoenix splash, a chain of pedigree-countering, and a fair about of teasing a re-injured knee (kayfabe obviously). And that awesome inverted figure four Triple H seemed to learn/innovate just for Seth. Which is a special level of "fuck you". Also Stephanie McMahon was accidentally (in kayfabe - it was absolutely a planned, scripted thing) bumped through a table. Finally, she got some actual comeuppance.
And then, all light and warmth faded from the world on the day that love and music died.
Without hyperbole, I think it is safe to say this is literally the actual worst tragedy to ever befall human civilisation in history, without question. Possibly that was a new level of hyperbole to add "without hyperbole". Roman Reigns beat the Undertaker at Wrestlemania and retired him, then celebrated with a fucking fireworks display at the audience's expense. There is no longer any reason to watch the WWE. Cancel your subscriptions, find a free-to-air option for the aftermath shows of the week if you want, then sever all ties with them and just watch Tiger Mask W.
Oh also, there was a lovely sign being held up stating "Romain Reigns is a Holocaust Denier". That is perhaps a new low for the signs, though I'm probably not one to talk, having just rated that match as a worse atrocity than aforementioned Holocaust.
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Post by Stahlseele »

*booooooos*
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I let my subscription lapse and skipped Mania despite the multiple paths to a free month. I only started watching WWE again due to a goofy infatuation with Team Hell No, so I don't really see an argument for sticking with the show any longer. They've been trying to get me to care about Reigns vs Brock for years now so I'm just done.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I still haven't been watching but the idea of everyone uniting in hatred of JBL makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
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