Professional Wrestling

...but Reigns and Jinder is awful. The fans are right and their actions are justified.

Also Punk deserves all the flak he gets.

Ok, but what about Samoa Joe?

Did he deserve to be booed, because what they did during Jinder vs Reigns, they did during Joe vs Reigns as well.

While hating Roman may be justified, I do think it's as much about hating Roman as it is about him actually being bad.

None of the three of them deserved that treatment. None of them are objectively bad, and honestly, Jinder and Roman's bad booking both ended last year. For the better part of 2017/18, Roman was actually on a PPV losing streak, before finally being bumped down to the Midcard at MITB. Jinder was honestly the better part of his feuds with Orton and Nakamura, and was the last person to hold the World Title that actually made it feel like anything. Plus Jinder wasn't even the worst champion last year (take your pick: Bray, Orton, or Cena).

Yes Roman was in 4-5 straight Mania main events, and yes he won his Midcard feud with Jinder, but they're both in the Midcard. Meanwhile Joe (just as guilty of rest holds as Jinder in their matches against Roman) is still near the top of the card.

But over all, the internet smarks won. Their indie darlings are most of the top of the Men's card, regardless of if they've grown in character or skill in the last couple years (Kevin Owens and Sami have, but many of the others haven't).

And if it were really about booing overpushed people who show little actual talent, then Alexa Bliss would be getting the negative same treatment from everyone, and people wouldn't have overrated Tye Dillinger, and no amount of Braun Strowman proving the fans wrong would work.

Because it's not about some discernable standard. It's about whining whenever you don't get your personal way.

That being said, we do have to admit that continuing to push Roman when people were booing him that strenuously was a mistake.

I still don't get why they were so hell bent on keeping him at the top.

No they've just been burned by the superman booking. They haven't "won" anything yet. They know that no matter who the champion is they aren't going to be treated like "the guy" for long. Just like Cena was so often at the top even when Punk was the champion for a year.

They don't believe that he is out of that spot he didn't deserve yet and I don't blame them after all the terrible booking of the last 15 years.

If you don't like how the crowd reacts why not just wait for the edited shows on the WWE network, (serious question)?

Popular with casual fans, basically because of that booking he has.

Edited by Wildcard on Jun 26th 2018 at 10:24:27 AM

The crowd isn't always awful, and it's not just live reactions. The IWC is still rather stubborn. And the edited reactions aren't genuine.

I'm starting to think the ideal solution for me is to watch the matches on mute - crowds can also be disrespectfully dead for good performers (see: 205 Live), and most of the commentary is grating (especially Graves).

You can't make out that what's happening today is the only thing that's important and that the years of torment that proceeded today are just to be forgotten. It doesn't work that way, for many reasons.

The second fans let up on Roman, Vince is going to scream, "It worked!", and we'll be right back where we don't want to be. We've seen it before in his midcard title runs, where he immediately ignored his midcard title and jumped right back into the main title hunt.

You can't run one short program in the midcard, and expect people to turn around on him, thinking the problem is fixed. Because...

Roman is not out of the main event scene. He's feuding with Bobby Lashley over who gets the next shot at Brock. And despite having already had a lengthy segment and match earlier in the show, he still turned up in the main event, trying to leech some of the good will Seth Rollins has earned over the past few months.

As for Samoa Joe, that match was a stinker. Joe can have good matches, as his recent segment with Daniel Bryan showed, but at Backlash the plan seemed to be, "Put on the slowest, most boring match possible, then when Roman starts his comeback, they'll cheer the fact that something, anything, is happening... right?" Wrong.

Edited by Daremo on Jun 27th 2018 at 5:57:12 AM

So basically, they just want Roman to disappear completely, and as long as Vince is determined to keep him in the spotlight, the fans will boo him and anything that involves him or making him look good.

It feels like the only way this can end is with Roman being tossed away like a piece of trash. I kinda feel sorry for him. If Vince had never become determined to push him, people wouldn't be going to such lengths to hate him.

It feels like there's no way for anyone to win here.

Eh, I don't know about that. Presentation is a big part of it. He could conceivably play more of a support role. Or, as he continues his current "more midcard existence", if people warm to him and Vince doesn't immediately jump back to "they like him. We need to push him to moon again", I think people will be cool.

That said, I have no real beef with him, although that might be because almost all of my WWE experience is via listening to Wrestling With Wregret synopses.

CM Punk got the opponent he should have gotten the first time, made it through all the rounds and lost by four points. I don't see what the problem is. /if it's Punk vs WWE, which is ridiculous, the doctor suing him for slander lost, WWE still look worse.

But WWE might actually contract Black Rose, which amazingly wouldn't disrupt anything I'm watching. Even when I watched WWE, I thought fans should just watch wrestlers wherever they work, rather wait for WWE to sign them, but I found it very strange when WWC ended its women's division almost seven years ago and WWE didn't try to sign anyone from it. In particular, I thought Black Rose had an obvious role they passed up, so the news they're interested now was pretty surprising.

But when STARDOM banned face punches I thought of the various times Black Rose punched someone in the face and figured she wouldn't be working there...

I love Kris Wolf, she's so fun.

I'm going to see Kaiju Big Battel this weekend, although I'm not sure how the venue, a traditional proscenium theater, works for a wrestling match.

Fuzzyboots, have you seen Kaiju Big Battel before? Or is that a reference to seating?

I have not seen it before. I have heard of it. But I have been to the Byham theater. It's set up like the usual theater. I'm used to my wrestling being in the round, to use the theater term.

Ken Jugan, aka Lord Zoltan, is fighting colorectal cancer.

His second cancer? As much as I hate to admit it, I probably would not have seen this go fund me if you hadn't posted, Fuzzy. I have a pay check coming up(and some money set aside for a different wrestler), so I'll see what I can do.

Oh, and I'm also embarrassed to admit I don't know what in the round means, although I have an idea and will look it up tomorrow to see if I'm right. Happy fourth to everyone in the USA.

Most theater is viewed in "Proscenium style" where the play is happening at one location and everyone else is seated to one side. "In the round" is where the audience surrounds the action, so there's no "downstage". On the plus side, it means that you don't have to "cheat to the audience" to ensure they can see what you're doing, but on the flipside, you're acting to 360 degrees of audience, so you can't just stand static and you can't hide "upstage" actions (this is where most wrestling venues fall).

A third common situation is "thrust" theater where some or all of the action is surrounded on three sides, providing a compromise where most of your audience is viewing from one angle, but you still operate to a fairly wide angle.

:-P Me, I started my introduction to Shakespeare as "in the round", so it's normal to me, but I have worked "proscenium" and "thrust" styles. Wrestling, as I've indicated, tends to be "in the round" because it pretends to a sort of realism where you can't hide things by them being "upstage" of the audience and you have to act to all sides.

In this case, the venue has all of the seating on one side, so it's almost certainly "proscenium".

You didn't trust me to look it up? Well, I hadn't yet...

Anyway, if Chikara is a comedy promotion(ahem, a fun filled lucha show) and Dramatic Dream Team is a parody promotion(of "American" pro wrestling specifically), Kaiju Big Battel uses pro wrestling to parody a completely different genre. While they occasionally book a Munenori Sawa, Chris Hero or Kota Ibushi most of their talent are not pro wrestlers who work the independent circuit or anything like that. If anyone is likely to work unconventional seating to its advantage, Kaiju Big Battel are them. Some of their shows are available on WWN's service, assuming anyone here has that.

I just finished the G1 Special in San Francisco.

What the FUCK?!

Tear Jerker moment - Chase and Yujiro too? WHY?!

If you're talking about the Tongan rebellion, Omega and Cody deserved it, and maybe The Young Bucks/Hung Bucks too for going along with those two. It says something about a group when the Pimp and the Card-Carrying Villain are its two most sympathetic people during its various internal struggles.

Yeah. Tama's interviews afterwards did suggest that others may be allowed in, but the onus is on them to get in line.

Edited by wanderlustwarrior on Jul 14th 2018 at 7:51:51 AM

So Mr. Fuji's old partner Masa Saito just died.

Never heard of him, but it sounds like he was a big deal.

Anyway, I didn't see Extreme Rules, but I'm wondering how the crowd reacted to the Roman / Lashley match. Did they boo both like they have with his last two matches, or did Lashley carry a bit more respect that they at least gave him props?

The Reigns Lashley match was pretty flat, a few big reactions. Nothing to write home about either way. The whole PPV was, er, pleasantly mediocre(?) in my opinion.

That's sad to hear.

...just out of curiosity, did Braun Strauman throw Kevin Owens onto the table from inside the cage?

I couldn't tell exactly what happened in the recap, but if he did...bravo.

Sad the Roman Lashley match didn't pop or that the PPV was just barely above average?

And yes, Kevin Owens was thrown from the top of a cage trough an announce table. It was slightly less brutal than it sounds. AJ Styles versus Rusev was the match of the night. Seth Rollins vs Dolph Ziggler could have been, but it was marred by a nonsensical finish.