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Post by tigermaskxxxvii on Sept 21, 2017 15:04:10 GMT -5
A pro wrestling crowd, A PRO WRESTLING CROWD, chanted "THAT'S TOO FAR". I desperately hope people backstage aren't like "WOW WHAT GOOD HEAT" because no. That was bad. The Jinder experiment needs to end ASAP. A promo that is too racist for a pro wrestling crowd sounds like an Onion headline. Yet, here we are.
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Post by Mighty Attack Tribble on Sept 21, 2017 15:04:48 GMT -5
Hi, actual former heel wrestler here. The job of a heel in ring isn't to be boring, it's to set the pace of the match. If someone tells you to go out and work 15 minutes, then you go out there and lead the match for about 12 of those minutes, plus false comebacks and the finish. Work a leg, be a tall person, flip off the crowd, pull sneaky shit or whatever, but Don't be boring. ECW Cactus Jack disagrees. ECW Cactus Jack was still entertaining, had a very specific reason for wrestling that way, and got reactions from the audience. ECW Cactus Jack had audiences baying for his blood, while Resthold Randy had audiences sitting on their hands and TV viewers tuning out.
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Post by Magic knows Black Lives Matter on Sept 21, 2017 15:07:33 GMT -5
If the wrestler's biceps are big enough, I can rest my head on them while I'm in a rest hold and get a good nap in and get paid for it.
That's what you call working, daddy.
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Post by romanstylesiii on Sept 21, 2017 15:09:56 GMT -5
It does not help that Jinder did interview with the Washington Post saying he is allowed to null anything racist.
He has made racist comments two weeks in a row.
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Post by Clash, Never a Meter Maid on Sept 21, 2017 15:11:07 GMT -5
ECW Cactus Jack disagrees. Yet Randy Savage, HBK and Ric Flair do. Can't remember them suddenly flicking a "be boring" switch as heels. If anything Savage was more fiery and intense as a heel. Bingo. Every wrestler should focus on being as entertaining and batshit as possible. Some of those batshits just so happen to be jerks, while some batshits are a little nicer than the others. The "entertaining wrestler vs. the bore" feud doesn't draw.
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The Ichi
Patti Mayonnaise
AGGRESSIVE Executive Janitor of the Third Floor Manager's Bathroom
Posts: 37,321
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Post by The Ichi on Sept 21, 2017 15:11:10 GMT -5
I've never bought the "heels are supposed to be boring" thing. Some of the best villians in and outside of wrestling were entertaining as all hell. Look at Batman vs Joker. Batman is usually always the boring one, but you still want him to win.
Jinder boring people is not a sign that he's succeeding at anything. Come on now.
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Post by Clash, Never a Meter Maid on Sept 21, 2017 15:19:05 GMT -5
For real, this racism shit is hella corny and wack. I'm not even bothered by it because it's so absurdly childish and transparent (and keep in mind, I do social justice/race-related work for my job) but wow, this is weak for a world title program that has almost no juice to it. Enough of these "shock" promos. Enough of the meta "shoots" that aren't really shoots. Can I just get a wrestler to walk up to somebody else, be like, "I f***ed your bitch in my light up shoes and your hairline messed up, fight me" and leave it that? Keep my pro rasslin' simple. Don't try to get all philosophical with it.
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Post by Oh Cry Me a Screwball on Sept 21, 2017 15:30:18 GMT -5
The Indian fanbase, from what I can tell, loves dominant babyfaces like Roman and Cena, and are really big on kayfabe. A cheating heel who can't even use the bathroom without the help of the Bollywood Boys is not going to strike a chord with this fanbase. I watched TNAGFW's Global Impact, and I was kind of shocked how markish Indian fans are. That's because the India tapings were held in front of a studio audience that was paid to be there by Sony Six.
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Post by vinnysimmo on Sept 21, 2017 15:48:11 GMT -5
The heel's job is to wrestle a style during the heat segment and the hopespot/cutoff segment that makes the face look good when the face gets to his shine segment. If a heel is doing cool, fast, flippy stuff that pops the crowd, he will make the face look less good. Hi, actual former heel wrestler here. The job of a heel in ring isn't to be boring, it's to set the pace of the match. If someone tells you to go out and work 15 minutes, then you go out there and lead the match for about 12 of those minutes, plus false comebacks and the finish. Work a leg, be a tall person, flip off the crowd, pull sneaky shit or whatever, but Don't be boring. Hi! I never got far enough to wrestle an actual match but i did Go to rasslin school for 10 months. Way i Was taught is that the hopespots are supposed to make the crowd want to see the face make a big comeback. If the heel is doing a bunch of really cool moves, why would the crowd wanna see the comeback?
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Post by eJm on Sept 21, 2017 15:48:36 GMT -5
I watched TNAGFW's Global Impact, and I was kind of shocked how markish Indian fans are. That's because the India tapings were held in front of a studio audience that was paid to be there by Sony Six. To be fair, ALL studio audiences for TV shows in India are paid to be there. so it's not a Sony Six exclusive thing.
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Perd
Patti Mayonnaise
Leslie needs to butt out for fear of receiving The Bunghole Buster
Posts: 32,027
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Post by Perd on Sept 21, 2017 15:51:39 GMT -5
I am by no means a wrestling historian, but this "heels are supposed to be boring" argument sounds ludicrous to me. This is entertainment. The worst thing it can be is boring.
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Post by eJm on Sept 21, 2017 15:55:29 GMT -5
Hi, actual former heel wrestler here. The job of a heel in ring isn't to be boring, it's to set the pace of the match. If someone tells you to go out and work 15 minutes, then you go out there and lead the match for about 12 of those minutes, plus false comebacks and the finish. Work a leg, be a tall person, flip off the crowd, pull sneaky shit or whatever, but Don't be boring. Hi! I never got far enough to wrestle an actual match but i did Go to rasslin school for 10 months. Way i Was taught is that the hopespots are supposed to make the crowd want to see the face make a big comeback. If the heel is doing a bunch of really cool moves, why would the crowd wanna see the comeback? I have never been to wrestling school (I want to try and be a manager at some point, though) so you might (understandably) snub my view from this conversation. That doesn't necessarily mean you don't want people to react to you at all. If you make them bored by not even doing stuff like finding ways to hurt the opponent to set up the hope spot, you won't be able to get them invested FOR the hope spot. I'm not saying you HAVE to do flippy stuff or anything, like Alice Syndrome said, you want people to boo you and a good way of doing that is getting the crowd to react to you, being cocky, all that stuff. And considering every time he's had the belt television ratings have gone down, Orton's a REALLY weird example to use for 'good boring heels'.
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Post by TWERKIN' MAGGLE on Sept 21, 2017 15:58:48 GMT -5
Hi, actual former heel wrestler here. The job of a heel in ring isn't to be boring, it's to set the pace of the match. If someone tells you to go out and work 15 minutes, then you go out there and lead the match for about 12 of those minutes, plus false comebacks and the finish. Work a leg, be a tall person, flip off the crowd, pull sneaky shit or whatever, but Don't be boring. Hi! I never got far enough to wrestle an actual match but i did Go to rasslin school for 10 months. Way i Was taught is that the hopespots are supposed to make the crowd want to see the face make a big comeback. If the heel is doing a bunch of really cool moves, why would the crowd wanna see the comeback? 10 months in wrestling school and your idea of ring psychology that isn't boring is "lots of cool moves", huh?
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Fade
Patti Mayonnaise
Posts: 38,299
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Post by Fade on Sept 21, 2017 16:06:06 GMT -5
I am by no means a wrestling historian, but this "heels are supposed to be boring" argument sounds ludicrous to me. This is entertainment. The worst thing it can be is boring. BRUH. The goal is EMPTY arenas. We can get there!
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Post by Final Countdown Jones on Sept 21, 2017 16:13:40 GMT -5
To see that "heels should be boring and that doing fast paced modern stuff is bad heeling" isn't true, look at the Revival. A team so old school their whole deal is not being flippy dudes. A team so old school Jim Cornette, who believes Kenny Omega is killing wrestling, loves them and actually watches their matches. Now go and look at their f***ing awesome sagas against American Alpha and DIY, and find me any f***ing minute of those matches where the dudes are boring. That shit is a tag team heel clinic and they're incredible in everything they do, but at no point, even when they're slowing the match down to stifle the faces' momentum, are they ever boring. Amazing matches, great heels who can get effective heat out of the mega smark crowds you get for Takeovers these days, the very platonic ideal of what a heel should be. And they're not boring for a goddamn second.
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Post by Cyno on Sept 21, 2017 16:31:18 GMT -5
There is rather large middle ground between "boring as all hell" and "TNA X Division circa 2005" in terms of moveset and setting the pace of a match as a heel.
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Post by HMARK Center on Sept 21, 2017 18:26:41 GMT -5
I did not actually watch these promos, but I'm under the impression that Jinder's first take of this promo, last week, was essentially pretending to be a racist, trying to get the audience to laugh at the tasteless jokes, then turning around and saying "I just proved how racist you all are; listen to them, Shinsuke, they'll turn on you at the drop of a dime, and it's because, like me, you're different from them." There's a number of places that could go, some interesting, some not so great, but it's at least a concept to work off of.
It sounds like in week two they removed a good deal of the potential nuance, but if I'm wrong I'll gladly take the correction.
On first blush, the initial concept sounds like an interesting one. I don't mind a heel being as God awful as humanly possible, so long as there's a purpose behind it and so long as there's a cathartic payoff at the end of all their wretchedness. There may be a few red lines where there's no real getting a true comeuppance on the heel for their actions (e.g. if someone went far enough to use something like rape in a storyline to sell a damn wrestling match), but by and large as long as there's a clear narrative purpose and conclusion that satisfies the audience, I don't personally mind a heel going far for heat...easy for me to say as a straight white dude, and again there are definitely limits, but I see plenty of merit in the old school "we should want to see the vile heel beaten down by a righteous babyface into a fine paste" mentality.
A huge problem, though, is what I've seen brought up here and in other write-ups of this whole thing, namely that WWE really hasn't earned a lot of goodwill or benefit of the doubt to take a subtle concept and actually make it work. They can barely manage Point A to Point B concluding at Point C storytelling, expecting them to handle hot button social issues or nuance just seems overly optimistic, at best. You can already tell they didn't much know what they had going on this, given how they immediately went about not putting any YouTube videos of the promo up.
But yeah, think about how poorly they even handle simple narratives, and there's another reason why this wouldn't work even if they were more gung ho about exploring the nuance it could offer: they've trained the audience not to go along with it (not insulting the audience's intelligence, just that almost anything we watch long enough kind of trains our reactions at a certain point). What I mean by that is that in an angle where the heel goes full metal piece of crap and does something God awful (Jake Roberts attacking Savage/slapping Liz, anything with racism, etc.), the audience has to want to see a babyface who is morally the polar opposite of the heel, and who will be motivated and animated by righteous anger and can deliver, again, a cathartic punishment to the heel that will work as a stand-in for the anger the crowd feels toward the heel. In other words, there are two parts of the equation, and the whole attempt at major heat falls apart if you don't have them both: if you're going to have that type of heel behavior, then you need appropriate babyface behavior to interact with it.
The Uproxx write-up of this segment brought it up, but WWE doesn't really allow for that often enough. Too often their booking style isn't "heel does something awful, likely directed at a babyface, so the more ethical/moral babyface seeks payback; hence, the crowd cheers the face"; instead, it's "heel doesn't really do anything to the babyface, just acts kind of annoying, then the babyface arrives to beat them up for it; the crowd cheers because the face is supposed to be more popular than the heel, not because he's avenging any serious slight." Think of the first as a heel Rock calling Mick Foley a ton of names then Mick running out and getting some well-deserved payback on him, and the latter as babyface Rock just insulting a heel because, hey, that guy's a heel, who cares if he didn't actually do anything to the Rock?
That's just been their style for so long: get the crowd to react to the first few sounds of somebody's theme song and then react to their finishers, not to what's actually happening in their stories. If that's how you're going to book +90% of the time, then you really can't expect your crowd to suddenly buy into an old school-style "actual vile heel who deserves angry retribution" style angle, especially because even a lot of the times they do attempt those angles, the faces rarely seem to sell what should be the visible anger behind things (e.g. cut out the headlocks and Irish whips and start throwing fists when a guy has you really pissed off; sell the emotion the story and the announcers claim you're feeling).
Sorry if that's kind of long and rambling, I'm having a harder time putting this into words than I thought, but hopefully that makes some sense.
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Post by Mister Pigwell on Sept 21, 2017 23:31:34 GMT -5
I think there's a place for racism discussion in wrestling but this just isn't the right time for it. It's too damn close to home for too many people to be dealt with right now. Just... not good timing.
It's been an effecive tool in the past (from heel commentary jokes to Nation of Domination) and has helped frame different stories.
Even in modern times with Hassan to some of Jinder's points a couple weeks ago, it can be interesting.
It can work again, but that exploration seemingly may need to wait a while.
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Post by vinnysimmo on Sept 21, 2017 23:38:09 GMT -5
Hi! I never got far enough to wrestle an actual match but i did Go to rasslin school for 10 months. Way i Was taught is that the hopespots are supposed to make the crowd want to see the face make a big comeback. If the heel is doing a bunch of really cool moves, why would the crowd wanna see the comeback? 10 months in wrestling school and your idea of ring psychology that isn't boring is "lots of cool moves", huh? I think the point I'm trying to make is tht Jinder is a more effective heel in his matches than say... Heel Seth Rollins, or Heel Kevin Owens (although he has been getting a lot better lately)
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Post by vinnysimmo on Sept 21, 2017 23:50:41 GMT -5
The heel's job is to wrestle a style during the heat segment and the hopespot/cutoff segment that makes the face look good when the face gets to his shine segment. If a heel is doing cool, fast, flippy stuff that pops the crowd, he will make the face look less good. Hi, actual former heel wrestler here. The job of a heel in ring isn't to be boring, it's to set the pace of the match. If someone tells you to go out and work 15 minutes, then you go out there and lead the match for about 12 of those minutes, plus false comebacks and the finish. Work a leg, be a tall person, flip off the crowd, pull sneaky shit or whatever, but Don't be boring. I'd be interested to know how you feel the "traditional" match structure holds upo today and if it is still used? IE: Shine, Cutoff, Hopespot, Comeback, Go Home (repeat if necessary) Is it still relevant or is it not a concept talked about? (this was talked about contantly at my school when I used to go)
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