Are we in the dark ages of wrestling?

[Jcotton1]

The longer you been a fan = the more shyt you been exposed to = the less excited you get because of the fact

Also social media was less prominent so we didn't get such peeks behind the curtain, from talent themselves as well as abundance of dirt sheets nowadays.

I won't get into flippy shyt dominating companies because that is a fair criticism, but there's too much promotions out there to not be able to find one you enjoy. That is the positive of wrestling rn.

This . The only good about it was the video games. You can create your own storylines.

 

[Lurk Angle]

Spot on.

Wrestling these days is mostly wrestling nerds catering to what other wrestling nerds wanna see. It’s one of the main reasons all the booking in aew is so telegraphed. Don’t get me wrong though, some cool shyt happens every once in a while but for the most part it’s just all fan service for hardcore wrestling fans.

It's what happens when you let marks in the buisness

Back in the day wrestlers or promoters never let fans dictate the product

 

[Lurk Angle]

This. Cornette has said the same thing on his podcast routinely over the last few years.

Cornette is usually right about the wrestling now
Despite the racism

Him along with konnan and disco somewhat

 

[Reality Check]

These companies are a LONG WAY away from 94-95 when Monday Night Raw was being held in high school gyms and everyone had an occupation gimmick.

You can make the argument creatively it's a dark age, especially with the WWE product, but on the business side, the wrestling industry is more successful than its ever been (the Coli economist experts can break down whether adjusted for inflation the attitude era was more financially successful). AEW just had their first million dollar gate with DoN and have two more with Forbidden Door and All Out, plus they are in the midst of a deal that is paying the company somewhere between 45-50 million a year for broadcast rights. WWE has multiple Billion dollar deals and despite the product being 90% creatively bankrupt are still selling out stadiums (minus the MITB hiccup).

It's what happens when you let marks in the buisness

Back in the day wrestlers or promoters never let fans dictate the product

The biggest marks in the business are the wrestlers themselves. It's always been the case and always will be the case.

 

[Playaz Eyez]

That whole “marks in the ring” thing went from a hilarious punchline to actual facts. You can tell because every persons origin story is basically “I’ve been watching all my life and it has been a dream of mine”. This is how (the WWE in particular) can dupe the hell out of a lot of folks and treat them any way. It’s truly Stockholm syndrome.

 

[The Intergalactic Koala]

Wrestling right now is like if rap was mostly dominated by the swagless lyrical miracle dudes that can rhyme a bunch of syllables but can't make an entertaining song to save their lives.

In WWE feuds are mostly just a series of rematches with zero stakes. Because there's no motive for anything happening outside of championships, except that none of them matter except for the top championship, and nothing involving that matters either because no one is ever made to look credible outside of one or two people at a time. Whenever it looks like they're about to change course, it always gets squandered and back to the status quo within a month. Any angle that isn't just a series of meaningless matches usually involves some stupid comedy shyt or talk show segments.

AEW on the other hand will do some shyt like two guys have a match, shyt talk each other a couple weeks, and then their next match will be some shyt like "Electrified Barbed Wire Cage Match", just wildly escalated for no reason. It's as if they're using these matches to overcompensate for the lack of charisma and personality that the wrestlers today have.

Speaking of which, most of the roster in both companies have the personality of a doorknob. Most of them come off as soft or as geeks. Characters are bland and lack any intensity. A lot of times they'll try to force it by shouting, sprinkling in the word "shyt" in a promo, or calling the opponent a bytch, but it never comes off naturally. And the ones that do have an interesting personality are often further down the card than they should be. I'm not gonna get into WWE because nothing matters there, but in AEW, there's no reason someone like Hook should be in a comedy tag team doing pre-show matches. The battle royale from last week, you had Yuta, Swerve, Hobbs, and Andrade in the final six, but instead we get bland ass Kyle O'Reilly as the winner. All the in-ring talent in the world doesn't matter if I couldn't give two shyts to see you in the first place.

And on the subject of the in-ring action, everyone claims it's the best it's ever been, but it's rare to see a match these days without the same overused and obviously telegraphed high spots: flips, dives to outside, throwing someone into a barricade, or the worst one of all, someone dropping their back or their ass onto the apron. Why everyone keeps insisting on risking fukking up their back/spine like that is beyond me. It's like all most of the wrestlers care about is getting a "this is awesome" chant rather than telling a meaningful or entertaining story.

TL;DR: Entertainment value is lacking, everyone is a dork, the matches rely too much on high spots. Obviously there are exceptions to everything I just typed.

Its such a shame too because one of my favorite matches in this shyt era was MJF/Punk, Jerickkko/Kingston, and Orton/Bray in the Inferno match. All three of those matches have a...what you call it....story to tell. Punk/MJF was slow and methodical but the storytelling was there despite it being a slog to watch in some eras. Jerickkko/Kingston was incredible because it was two vets from two different eras fukking shyt up for the business, and Orton/Bray was *chefs kiss* fukkery 100 percent prime cut.

Hell another match of mines was "Blood and Gutz" despite the shyt ending. Wrestling should be raw, have storytelling antics, and make you believe that this shyt is real despite it being fake. Why do I need to see flippy shyt, wrestlers doing corny ass spots where they punch each other after taking Ls, and folks getting their shyt in and no selling in the process?

Its annoying and takes away everything that wrestling stands for. Hell, even CZW in its Zandig days told better stories in the ring than these marks .

 

[The Intergalactic Koala]

That whole “marks in the ring” thing went from a hilarious punchline to actual facts. You can tell because every persons origin story is basically “I’ve been watching all my life and it has been a dream of mine”. This is how (the WWE in particular) can dupe the hell out of a lot of folks and treat them any way. It’s truly Stockholm syndrome.

Remember when Sasha Banks was talking about watching the WWE Network to see Mick Foley's Hell in the Cell match to get into that mode? Like no sort of identity nowadays.

Like wrestlers back in the days had background tropes that work with the character. Vader coming out of nowhere just to murder wrestlers because he was from the Rocky Mountains. Sabu letting the scars from his matches tell the story of how psychotic he really is.

Now we get "omg, like omg I wanted to be a wrestler since I saw Hulk Hogan lolz and tee hee hee, I want to be the best"

I give it to the new NXT. Even though I won't watch that shyt if you had a Jigsaw shotgun trap to my dome, at least they realize this mark shyt is getting corny and redundant by giving wrestlers actual backgrounds and fukkery storylines.

 

[Larry]

Wrestling is fine. There’s shyt I enjoy from both major companies and shyt I hate from both. Been that way since I got into wrestling in 2001.


Just check out on the stuff you think sucks and pay attention to the stuff you like

 

[The Intergalactic Koala]

Wrestling is fine. There’s shyt I enjoy from both major companies and shyt I hate from both. Been that way since I got into wrestling in 2001.


Just check out on the stuff you think sucks and pay attention to the stuff you like

Thats the thing though. The shyt is 3 card monty where the Joker is all three cards . Even my beloved DDT is suffering because the product is not hitting. It just feels like promoters are confused with the times, fans just don't know what they want, and wrestlers not showing their worth because they are used to being marks. Its a three way Spiderman pointing meme.

 

[RammerJammer]

Wrestling is fine. There’s shyt I enjoy from both major companies and shyt I hate from both. Been that way since I got into wrestling in 2001.


Just check out on the stuff you think sucks and pay attention to the stuff you like

Pretty much, when you realize that you can just flip the channel when you see some shyt you don’t like, wrestling is so much easier to digest, I’ve flipped the channel on both AEW and WWE before, it can be done .

Although I will say that characters and storylines are lacking a lot in today’s wrestling, and I think you can have really good storylines and characters without sacrificing the in-ring product. Take Liv Morgan for example, I really like Liv Morgan but idk what her character is supposed to be.

 

[Larry]

Pretty much, when you realize that you can just flip the channel when you see some shyt you don’t like, wrestling is so much easier to digest, I’ve flipped the channel on both AEW and WWE before, it can be done .

Although I will say that characters and storylines are lacking a lot in today’s wrestling, and I think you can have really good storylines and characters without sacrificing the in-ring product. Take Liv Morgan for example, I really like Liv Morgan but idk what her character is supposed to be.

I always say it but I highly recommend watching with a FF button

That sounds like a joke but I’m 100% serious. Maybe don’t catch every show live brehs. Watch something else, and circle back when the show is over. Watch the bits that appeal to you, FF through the obviously terrible shyt.

It’s literally the only way I watch weeklys (I do catch PPV’s live though)


shyt. That’s how I caught Raw last night. Watched the NBA finals live, circled back when raw ended. It’s the only way my brehs

 

[Mr. Manhattan]

this aint 1995, or 2009 bruh

 

[Breh Obama]

Breh we’re in the dark ages of every aspect of life

 

[StatUS]

No, not even close.

 

[Larry]

I feel like perspective gets lost as we get older



We’re in someone’s golden era right now. There’s kids out there that are having the time of their lives with todays product and 15 years from now will be having nostalgic conversations about how they miss this era and the current (future) product will never compare.


It’s a cycle. We’ve been around long enough and have watched it happen enough times to understand this by now.