State Of The Industry: Professional Wrestling: the struggles of being a fan

I was actually going to do a part 2 to my video-game one, and I still might in the future, but for now, in the name of variety, I thought I'd write about something else, something I'm going to have to be writing about a lot in the very near future anyway as it's my dissertation research focus.

The title is State of the Industry, but I don't know much about the global industry of wrestling, other than the fact that Lucha Underground and New Japan Pro Wrestling are apparently really good, but I haven't seen those yet, also, it's my understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that TNA Wrestling has been continuously circling a drain and losing TV deals since I stopped watching several years ago (when last I watched I think Bubba Ray Dudley (then going by "Bully Ray") was the world champion, and there wasn't really much of an X-Division left to speak of. Which is a shame because I used to love TNA, it was great once upon a time.

The point there is, this particular post will focus on WWE, what with it being the biggest wrestling company there is (at least in the western world, I don't know if certain promotions are bigger elsewhere) and also the one I've been trying to get back into after deciding to write a dissertation on wrestling.

I had fallen out with this particular longstanding man-child vice around when I came to uni, I suddenly found I didn't have the time or patience to watch five-to-eight hours a week of the John Cena show featuring some other guys. (not a fan of John Cena) I still loosely kept up through friends telling me what was happening, and I still watched the Pay-Per-Views since those were the only shows where anything substantial happened. (early last year, or possibly late 2014 I don't remember, I watched one monthly PPV event, and didn't even think about wrestling until the next one, and I honestly didn't feel as if I'd missed anything in the 4 week interim, nothing had happened, everything was where it had been a month before.) 

it was in part due to the youtube show The Mark Remark by youtuber Martin "LittleKuriboh" Bilany. that I eventually got back into it. (if you haven't seen that check it out, even if you don't like wrestling, it's hilarious.) here's a picture of me meeting Martin at Alcon 2015, with me utterly failing to imitate his "Lawler Joke" face that he's doing. 

It didn't get me watching week-to-week again, NXT did that because NXT is great. 

There were other reasons I fell out with it, partly because being a part of Pro Wrestling fandom is exhausting, as much as I appreciate the craft I cannot escape the reality that a large portion of those who share my fondness for it appear to be children and young teenagers (physically or mentally) and the latter of those, the manchildren, let's call them, create an unfortunate image of "the wrestling fan." This image has actually caused me to feel embarrassed that I like the same thing as these people, not only that but in the product itself (at least in WWE which most people had heard of) well how else can I say it? the writing is dumb, welcome to the wonderful world of wrestling where there is no issue to great to settle with a fight, nor any too small to fight over. Not to mention the writers seem to be stuck in the 1980s in terms of cultural awareness. 

Case in point, right now, in 2016, there is a faction of villainous or "heel" wrestlers called the "League of Nations" Consisting of Sheamus, (Irish) Wade Barret (English) Rusev (who is portrayed as Russian despite actually being Bulgarian) and Alberto Del Rio (Mexican.) these men are currently being portrayed as an antagonistic force in WWE programming. Now, all wrestlers and factions have some kind of a gimmick, it's a universal truth of wrestling to the point that not having a gimmick is considered a gimmick in itself. so what is the gimmick of the League of Nations? Well, besides being evil boss Triple H's hired goons, basically...they're foreign...and...that's it...that's basically why they're bad guys...in 2016.

As you might expect, the League of Nations isn't getting a huge amount of traction, for a multitude of reasons, partly because they keep targeting Roman Reigns, who is the company's "pet project" but who really isn't that popular himself. But mostly, I believe, because you need more than just "evil foreigner" to make a compelling villain in 2016, again, might have worked in the 80s, doesn't really work now. 

This is frustrating because these specific people could have so much better reasons for running over everyone and trying to take over the company as a heel faction should (but that they haven't for some reason)

Firstly let's start off with Wade Barret, currently going by King Barret, he is the most recent winner of the "King of the Ring" tournament, a prize that once upon a time, meant something, the winner would receive a World Championship match along with the king gimmick, not so anymore. Wade Barret could easily be upset about being overlooked despite his accomplishments. A classic heel attitude is "I deserve better, if they won't give it to me, I'll just take it" and that, while a little unoriginal, is a very good reason for Wade to be in a heel faction, he did, after all, lead the Nexus, another such faction in 2010, with much the same ideals. 

Then onto Alberto Del Rio, now, this might seem strange considering I just decried the "evil foreigner" route, but militant Mexican might just work for him for one reason, see, in 2014 Alberto was fired from WWE, not as a work but in real life. I don't know all the details but from what I've heard this was due to a physical altercation between him and a backstage employee who allegedly made racist remarks towards him. I know WWE doesn't normally bring stuff like that into storylines, but Del Rio having been fired for, in his mind, standing up for himself, that's the perfect axe to grind with the company. It would mean the League would have to stop being Triple H's lackeys, but that's only a good thing in my opinion. 

Similarly, Rusev, who used to be a much more emphatic onscreen presence, has been essentially demoted and punished for getting engaged to his fiance, because it conflicted with a WWE storyline, might take a bit of tweaking to make that work within kayfabe (storyline), but that's perfectly useable frustration.

Then there's Sheamus, his is simple, in spite of his accomplishments (4 time world champion etc,) all he hears when he hits the ring are chants of "you look stupid" and there we go, fully realised heel faction of people with legitimate gripes with the company or the fans, and I put very little actual thought into that. So how much thought can possibly be going into it now? 

this lazy, often predictable writing is another example of why I stopped watching, I just couldn't bring myself to be compelled by it, I was more in it for the actual wrestling, as a mode of physical storytelling there's just something about a great wrestling match that is innately fascinating. Of course at the best of times, the physicality is backed up by a number of other factors, we've covered the writing, a compelling story can make the drama of the match itself much more palpable. There's also commentary. A good commentary team can keep the audiences focus on the match in such a way that even an hour-long slug-fest doesn't get old. 

Unfortunately, this seems to be a lost art, as the current commentary teams are...just terrible. For some reason there are now three commentators on RAW and it's even worse than two, and none of them help, between talking about everything EXCEPT the match going on in front of them and them just being irritating (I swear to god JBL if you go "Waah waah waah" one more time I will find a way to somehow convince Brock Lesnar to suplex you so hard that your hat becomes a permanent part of your head from landing on it) 

Back in the days of people like Joey Styles or Jim Ross being lead Play-by-Play commentator, well we actually got some play-by-play commentary for a start, now the commentator's job seems to be mostly to distract us from what we're watching, and if we're lucky they might mention a move or two between shilling the WWE Network. talking about parts of the show not currently relevant and JBL workplace-bullying Byron Saxton, this is not a conducive accompaniment to the goings-on in the ring. 

I just noticed I haven't yet mentioned the women's division, and by extension the  rampant sexism inherent in the WWE product. okay, so short version. Female wrestlers tend to be hired by this company for their bodies and not their ability, essentially hiring models and trying to pass them off as athletes, this started with Trish Stratus, now, to be fair to her, Trish learned her craft admirably and became one of the best performers of her time, she is now a retired former 6-time women's champion, in the hall of fame, and deservedly so. Unfortunately, her success appears to have led the WWE to think that they can train anyone to be a good wrestler, this is not true and led to an era of terrible female wrestlers, from which the division is only just now starting to recover. Also, they call them "Divas" which I think is demeaning already, without the "Divas" title belt resembling a fucking butterfly, and this replaced the Women's championship, which looked like an actual wrestling title belt. fortunately, with NXT being great and being the place most new people come from now, this is getting better.

Unfortunately these problems that caused the decline in my interest still persist to this day and that's not even mentioning Roman Reigns (in short, an otherwise decent wrestler is being shoved down our throats over more deserving performers because Vince McMahon who is in charge wants to try to force us to like him as much as he does) but that's not to say there aren't good things, as I mentioned before, NXT is great, the performers are all good (with the exception of Eva Marie, she is the worst, I mean, even worse than Kelly Kelly years ago. I don't remember the last time someone being so bad and yet getting pushed made me so angry.) apart from Eva Marie, there is a phenomenal women's division, and since most of the new talent on RAW these days comes from NXT, that same women's division is slowly migrating to the main roster and fixing that problem. Also, the rest of the roster have on average a much higher performance standard, NXT fits more good wrestling into one hour than Raw often does in three, (I'll just mention apropos of nothing that a solid hour of Raw's three-hour runtime is entirely ads)

The commentary is nothing special, but is basically inoffensive, which is still objectively better than the main show, so they even win there. Basically, it's a sad day when the developmental show is better than the main one, Even though Raw has a lot going for it, The New Day have taken the lackluster gimmick they were saddled with, (black preachers basically) and made it work spectacularly, which is a huge testament to all three of them as performers (Big E steals every segment he's anywhere near) A.J Styles has had great matches with Chris Jericho, and I think they're setting up for one more at Wrestlemania (I don't mind I could watch those two go at it every week)

So in summary, there are a lot of problems with wrestling, and being a fan thereof, the unfortunate association with other fans, and basically the writing being dumb as a bag of hammers with brain damage, and WWE in particular being INCREDIBLY racist and sexist, seriously I've barely touched on that in this post. but it's also a great method of physical theatre in my opinion, and deserves to be appreciated for that, professional wrestlers put their bodies through hell to entertain people, so it makes me sad that so many dismiss it as a "silly fake sport" despite the fact that it's arguably more physically demanding than most "real" sports out there. I think it starts feeling a lot less silly if you stop thinking of wrestling as a sport, because it isn't one, it's physical theatre.

In any case, that's basically just a few thoughts I have on the current state of the largest pro wrestling company in the world, if you disagree on anything I'd love to hear it in comments