LogFAQs > #950685566

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This isn't really a valid argument, considering he didn't really talk about much wrestling other than those two even before the pandemic. He mostly talks about the two most significant mainstream companies, and only really talks about other companies in the context of his own direct personal relationship with them in the past (TNA, MLW, NWA,RoH, etc). And the rest of the time he's talking about anecdotes from 30+ years ago during the territory days (which is where he's the most interesting/enlightening, IMO).

It's the same reason why most wrestling YouTubers don't bother making review videos to cover Impact shows, but will cover WWE and AEW. Because that's where the interest is. He talks about AEW because it's popular enough to justify it. Not because he's got nothing else to talk about and is begrudgingly giving attention to something he otherwise wouldn't be giving the time of day.

Except if he actually wanted attention and to chase the crowd, he wouldn't go with AEW -- a show that can't even pull in a million viewers per week -- he'd focus on either Raw or SD which pull in close to 2m or over 2m viewers per week. (And it looks like lately SD's numbers might even be better than Raw's at times? I guess because it's on Fox now?)

The only thing AEW has going for it is that it's easier to mock most of the time, although Bray Wyatt's goofy nonsense gets attention at times for how bad it is.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Though this leads me to another minor tangent - it might be worth an aside that I've never entirely bought into the philosophy that kayfabe is the END-ALL BE-ALL of wrestling anyway, because I honestly can't remember a time when I ever thought wrestling was real in the first place. PART of that might be because I grew up in the Northeast instead of Memphis/Mid-South/etc, where Vince was putting on ridiculous shows (and Hulk Hogan had his own cartoon!), part of it might be because I was always pretty smart/cynical in general even from a young age (and had a skeptical father who tended to encourage that style of thinking), maybe it was because having Mister T and Cyndi Lauper show up (while Captain Lou was hanging out with The Goonies) made it hard for me to assume any of this shit was real, or maybe for some other reason - but I feel like as early as the mid-80s I was blatantly aware that it was all acting and predetermined storylines. I was certainly aware of it by the time the Undertaker was murdered, rose to the Heavens, then reincarnated as two different people and he had to fight himself to reclaim his identity. All while Leslie Nielsen investigated in-character as Frank Drebin.

Even in 1998 and 1999 I still ran into fans who -- despite watching the WWE -- thought wrestling was real. >_> So kay still somehow existed at least a little bit.

And yeah, region certainly mattered because tri-state was big on comedy bullshit wrestling so people were less likely to take it seriously, whereas other parts of the country played it straight. (And this was BEFORE you had things like the Undertaker, even back when Vince Senior was running things... although it's worth noting that Vince Senior -- unlike Junior -- had his limits. Vince Sr supposedly hated the idea of wrestlers getting into entertainment because he was allegedly worried about exposing the business. VKM had the opposite opinion, he always wanted to be the Walt Disney of wrestling so he tried to promote partnerships with the media.) Then you have fucking Mexico and lucha which looks like highly coordinated hokey bullshit, and when wrestlers started bringing that crap into the US and it caught on that helped make wrestling look like crap nowadays.

It's like watching a movie, where you can either get lost in a fight scene or distracted by the hokey dumb shit in a fight scene where your suspension of disbelief keeps getting killed.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

There was a time when Westerns were the most popular genre ever - and then suddenly there was a time when they weren't. Pirate films went from being really popular, to utter cinema death, to popular, and then back again. The popularity of superheroes seems to go in cycles as well, at least in comics themselves. Like it or not, pop culture tastes are always changing. Maybe wrestling (which itself used to peak and dip in cycles!) is simply an idea whose time has passed, and no style of wrestling will ever be as popular again.

The idea that things just happen to get big and then they just happen to go out of fashion is magical thinking. And wrestling isn't like a film genre or tv genre, it's a separate beast entirely. It'd be more comparable to a sport than anything else. And back when it was massively popular and people believed it, it was treated as a sport.

However, when things go from being popular to tanking, there's a usual trend where as something grows you get cheap imitators and knockoffs which choke the market and ruin things, ultimately alienating the fanbase and killing the popularity. Cue the mud shows, which could kill entire territories. AEW is a modern day mud show. It pops for a very small demographic who really love that crap, while turning off everybody else. (Of course, the irony here might be the fact that WWE itself effectively killed a lot of territories by virtue of playing in those territories and making wrestling look like crap, so if AEW's garbage wrestling did hurt Vince by killing wrestling's overall fanbase with its hokey & stupid product, it would be almost karmic retribution.)

But otherwise part of wrestling's overall decline is the WWE's decline. Partly because -- as you mentioned -- of all the hotshotting which threw everything out that you could possibly use to impress people in just a few years, but also because they can't recognize or build credible talent any more.

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