Fandom Enraging Misconception / Professional Wrestling

• The most famous one is: don't call pro wrestling "fake". The results are pre-determined and the matches are scripted, but the physicality is still real. Besides, everyone born in the past half century knows it's not real competition, and whilst you're probably not going to get beaten up for breaking kayfabe like in the old days, you'll at best get an annoyed eye-roll.
• Don't call pro wrestling "WWE", and especially not "WrestleMania", unless you are specifically talking about the promotion or PPV itself, especially if you're referring to a wrestler that has never worked for that promotion as a "WWE Wrestler". While it is the only mainstream wrestling company left (at least outside of Mexico and Japan), there are plenty of other wrestling promotions out there besides WWE. Including All Elite Wrestling, formed in 2019 with a weekly TV show on TBS and two more on TNT. And yes, TNA is somehow still around.
  • Most major news outlets are notorious for this. Any time a wrestler does anything newsworthy good or bad you can be pretty sure he/she will be referred to as a "WWE wrestler" (or even a "WWF wrestler" if they're really not trying). Doesn't matter if they left WWE 10 years ago or never worked there at all, every wrestler in the world seemingly works for WWE.^note Though Vince McMahon brought this on himself, when you spend 40 years claiming you're the only wrestling promotion that matters you're going to get blamed for everything.
• Don't call every wrestling move a "body slam". Non-wrestling fans in particular often refer to the splash as a body slam, to the annoyance of many a fan. Mixing up the names of moves in general or resorting to Buffy Speak to describe them is also frowned upon.
• Claiming that wrestlers safely "just know how to fall" or otherwise don't get injured. Fans are aware of the concept of selling. However, "knowing how to fall" doesn't mean falling stops hurting and they can probably tell you about a number of real injuries that have occurred.^note That said, learning how to fall definitely is important and many older wrestlers will tell stories about how they spent their first couple months of training doing nothing but running the ropes (which is actually more difficult to do than it looks) and practicing the "flat back bump" - landing flat on the back with arms and legs out and the chin tucked in, which spreads the impact over a wide area and protects the head and neck.
• Claiming every wrestler is on steroids is not advised. It's true that the WWE favors large, muscular men and that steroid use has been a major problem in pro wrestling since at least the 1980s, but not every wrestler works a style or look that favors insane musculature, and not all of those who do have muscular physiques use steroids.
• Wrestlers aren't all drug addicts, and those cases of real addiction are more tragic than anything. It's part of the price they pay with their bodies for the work they do and the lengths they go to for entertainment. All wrestlers (at least in WWE) now undergo regular drug testing and are severely punished if they are caught using an illegal substance.
• The term "puroresu", as distinct from "pro wrestling", came into use because 1980s WWF and GLOW were considered offensive enough to pro wrestling fans among the Japanese diaspora that they didn't want to associate the shows they had grown up watching with them. The feelings leading to "berserk" responses have largely been lost through the generations but the term "puroresu" as shorthand for "Japanese pro wrestling" has stuck, no longer being overlooked as mere Engrish. In in fact stuck to the point wrestlers in Japan, such as Satoshi Kojima, have used it in a distinguishing context.
• A number of wrestling fans believe that Natalya Neidhart is Bret Hart's daughter. If you try to make this claim on a message board or some other place filled with wrestling fans, you'll most likely get reminded that she's actually his niece (hence their different last names), and that her actual father is Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart.
• While on the subject of the Harts, don't say that "Sting stole Bret Hart's Sharpshooter." Sting began using the hold (originally called the Scorpion Deathlock) as his finishing move several years before Bret did (Bret was a tag team wrestler when Sting broke into the business). And the hold was actually invented by Japanese wrestler Riki Choshu.
• While he is beloved by fans of territorial era wrestling and Japanese strong style, Keiji Mutoh and his "Puroresu Love" project were a constant source of ire among fans of traditional professional wrestling during the 2000s, especially those of 1990s All Japan as booked by Giant Baba. In the 2010s, Mutoh would be Vindicated by History in a way, as "Puroresu Love" was financially successful. Though many fans still hate it, many more are now willing admit that some sort of change in course was needed to save All Japan and that Mutoh's successor was an even worse promoter. Puroresu Love in fact attracted a comparable amount of fans for Mutoh's then new Wrestle-1 breakaway as the NOAH case that sparked Mutoh's changes in the first place, enough to ever so briefly surpass All Japan after Mutoh failed to reacquire his leadership position in an effort to save the company from said successor. That said, the Wrestle-1 promotion gained many detractors for many of the same reasons as Mutoh's All Japan stint and it started losing ground to All Japan once Jun Akiyama successfully initiated a more hostile takeover of All Japan and promised a return to Baba style booking. So it's no longer as dangerous but be careful when speaking the words "Mutoh", "Puroresu Love" and "Wrestle-1" in the company of All Japan fans.
• Prior to reverting to Total Nonstop Action Wrestling in 2024, fans of the Anthem-owned Impact Wrestling will kindly remind you not refer it to its former name to the point that TNA chants were shouted down at post-Anthem events. While the fans at the time acknowledge the ties to its past such as Bound for Glory, Slammiversary, the X Division, Abyss and other talent that came before the Hogan era, the TNA initialism became a deadname, with post-sale Impact treated as its successor.
• WCW fans really don't like fans repeating the same mistruths about the company that WWE has spread since they bought them out in 2001. Such things include the assertion that the company was only briefly popular in the late 90s and this was due to stealing the WWF's talent. In actual fact, most of these people left for creative reasons, and WWF took many WCW stars around this time too (not to mention that even during WWF's initial boom in the mid-80s, the stars from that era were almost entirely talents Vince had signed away from the territories, including Hulk Hogan). WCW had, for a time in the late 90s and early 2000s, a higher budget and better distribution than WWF - their programming being produced by Turner Broadcasting and their figures being produced by Toybiz (best known for Marvel), both of whom had wider reach than WWF at the time. The likes of Hollywood Hogan, Goldberg and Sting were as recognizable to non-wrestling fans as Stone Cold and The Rock. Its cruiserweight division set a modern standard for fast-paced lucha libre compared to the longer matches seen in Mexico. Poor gimmicks such as The Shockmaster and RoboCop were brought up, as was the presence of celebrities such as David Arquette, even though the WWF had numerous poor gimmicks in the 90s as well as using celebrities like Mike Tyson for ratings.^note Comparing Arquette to Tyson (in a wrestling context) is like comparing apples to oranges, or more like dog turds to oranges. Tyson acted as special enforcer for a match and threw one punch (and hit a guy that's probably the furthest from a "shooter" as you can get), Arquette won the WCW world title. Of course the other major difference is Tyson actually did help draw ratings, HUGE ratings in fact, while the buyrate for the PPV that featured Arquette's (unsuccessful) title defense was down 90% from the previous year. To his credit Arquette knew this was a very stupid idea and lobbied hard against it, and he donated the money he made during his brief wrestling career to the families of the late Owen Hart and Brian Pillman.. Even the way things ended was somewhat suspect. The official WWE line is that it ended because the declining quality had led to poor ratings, but fans generally believe that whilst late 1999/2000 was not a great time for the company, they were in the process of improving in 2001. Rather, what happened is that due to the AOLTimeWarner merger in which Turner Broadcasting was involved, the new owners decided they would not renew its TV deal. At the time, WCW's assets were available for purchase and former WCW president Eric Bischoff was in the process of obtaining financing for them so that it could be relaunched on a new network. However, Vince McMahon managed to buy them before he did, in circumstances that are more than suspicious. For years, barely any WCW material was released on WWE's DVDs, but fortunately, most of it is now available on the WWE Network, leading to renewed popularity. Whilst it was customary for WWE-sanctioned books to have the wrestlers bash their time in WCW, recent interviews have them reminisce more fondly. Additionally, WWE has revived some of WCW's concepts over the years, most notably the WarGames matches that were a common feature in the early 90s.