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Post by HMARK Center on Jun 5, 2019 22:46:56 GMT -5
Ok, curious about this: what are your thoughts about rating shows based on who wins the matches vs. just watching the shows and enjoying them on their own merits? Could've made this thread in (w)rest since it applies to watching any promotion, but I think I find this issue very pronounced among reviews of WWE shows, so I'll put it here.
To break it down, here's what I mean:
-I'll often see people say that a show was great or that a show sucked based on which wrestlers actually won or lost their matches. You can have a mediocre match, but some might say "well, at least the right person won, so it's ok", stuff along those lines. You might also find a card that has great matches or storytelling on it, but then the "wrong" person wins a key match or two and the mood over the show sours for some people.
-On the other side, there's "enjoy the show as it unfolds", or however you want to describe that. With this mentality you can certainly still have your favorites that you cheer, still be happy if they win/bummed if they lose, but you kind of take storyline turns and match outcomes as they happen and roll with them. Maybe you see the logic in what's being done, or maybe you just have enough good faith and goodwill built up in a promotion that you say "My favorite might've lost, but I'm still entertained."
Ideally, I feel like we'd all be watching in the latter way, but given that there are some stories and moments where who wins/loses can really matter, when do you think the former is warranted? But if you find yourself doing the former a lot, is that a sign that maybe the show's not appealing enough to you on its own merits?
I ask because I feel like I'll see this divide come up now and then, and I can't help but feel it stems from a sort of Monday Night War-driven mentality when watching wrestling. Back in the late 90s, it felt like WCW or WWF making a "wrong" booking move on who won or lost a match wouldn't just impact the viewing audience, it could also have dire consequences for the entire promotion, since that era included the very real threat, eventually realized, that only one of the two promotions would survive the war. Thus, things like the nWo dominating certain cards likely drove a lot of fans to WWF and the satisfaction of seeing Austin win on most big PPV cards. You can probably extend it a bit to TNA's run in the national spotlight, too: their grip on their spot often ended up feeling tenuous, and it'd become easy to worry over who they were actually booking to win matches and feuds rather than just relax and enjoy any stories they were telling, for better or worse.
Meantime, I make no secret that my current preferred promotion is NJPW, and while I certainly don't always agree with their booking I tend to take things in stride with them, since I usually feel like I'll be entertained one way or another by them. Business-wise they're doing well, so that fear of "this decision will kill the promotion!" isn't there, and creatively they tend to tell satisfying stories more often than not, so I grant them a lot more leeway. Granted, some of my favorites in that promotion since I started watching were/are Tomohiro Ishii, KUSHIDA, and Hirooki Goto, and all three often bring cold splashes of water with their booking: Ishii is a gatekeeper and not a high profile champ, KUSHIDA never got that big push to work both junior heavyweights and the big guys like a lot of us wanted, and Goto's been booked to lose more heavyweight title matches than anyone in history. Yet despite that, I stick around.
How 'bout all of you? You ever notice that you watch some wrestling with one of the above mindsets, but other wrestling with the second? You find yourself doing one more than the other?
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Post by BatPunk on Jun 5, 2019 23:39:27 GMT -5
The wins need to make sense to the narrative. If that means to push a story further, or an arc to reach its climax, the wins can make or break a match/show.
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TWERKIN' MAGGLE
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Post by TWERKIN' MAGGLE on Jun 5, 2019 23:43:01 GMT -5
A good finish that makes sense in the story is more important to me than Wrestler I like wins against Wrestler I don't like.
I just want some damn stories, man...
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Post by Starshine on Jun 5, 2019 23:53:23 GMT -5
Wins and losses do matter. Otherwise WWE's top stars wouldn't win as much as they do. The "wins don't matter" BS is just spin on trying to argue that everyone on their show is a star, despite them not putting any effort into making that true. A surprising match outcome doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing though, it all depends on the follow up; which bring me to my next point.
The biggest difference between WWE and NJPW is that when the latter makes surprising booking decisions, or books strange results, you can almost always expect it to come back up later to where it may make more sense in hindsight. With WWE, they book on the fly so often that you can never tell what you're meant to take away from a booking decision, since it could just as easily be retconned a week later. NJPW also doesn't generally treat their midcard acts as second class citizens on their show, not worthy of your interest. When a midcard belt gets spotlighted, it is treated like a genuine prize (see Moxley winning their "D level" US belt, for example). So even if someone loses a main event match and falls down the card, they're not necessarily losing their credibility rather than that they're just not being seen as an absolute top tier performer. Which there is no shame in when the competition is at such a high level. With WWE we're consistently told (mostly indirectly) that the only guys who matter are the main eventers. Everyone else is basically a scrub used to bolster these other guys up.
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ayumidah
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Post by ayumidah on Jun 6, 2019 0:15:09 GMT -5
I normally don't care about match results. WWE is so 50/50 anyway, I know if there's a screwy result somewhere, they'll have a rematch and prolly get the opposite result.
However, I do get legit invested for the guys I really care about that their wins and losses can affect how I feel about things, like Seth, Dream, a couple of 205 guys, and when they get TV time, Heath and Zack.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2019 1:47:38 GMT -5
I've never understood when people argue that it doesn't matter what story's told or how a match finishes so long as the rest of it's good. People are a lot less willing to give a pass to a TV episode or a movie that is good for 90% good then ends on a garbage note than they are a match and I just don't understand why there's this disconnect.
Like, top of my head, the Ambrose / Rollins Hell in a Cell. Pretty solid stuff, some memorable slots and Seth getting his comeuppance, cool. Except the whole thing is destroyed and made stupid and pointless by hologram Bray Wyatt.
As for not liking results in isolation... Really I don't see why you owe a storyteller your patience or need to be willing to see where absolutely everything goes before you can judge it? Like, I don't enjoy watching Roman Reigns. I just don't. I don't care if the plan for where he'd go as champion is super well thought out and expected to lead to great stuff, it's still a story I don't have any desire to watch.
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Post by Long A, Short A on Jun 6, 2019 2:03:32 GMT -5
"If wins and losses made sense and mattered, I wouldn't have to make an effort to just sit back and enjoy it. This reminds me of the people that droned on about suspension of disbelief in the 00's. The amount of work I put into making a show make sense should not be greater than the work the responsible for making that show. That's why it will never be easier, if I do it your way.(If you're a member of the just sit back and watch camp)
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Post by Brian Suntan on Jun 6, 2019 2:33:07 GMT -5
I'd like to think I was somewhere in the middle - match results do matter but not to the point where they are the sole barometer as to whether it's a good show or not.
I'll take things being unpredictable over being booked exactly how I want them. The fact Becky and Kofi winning at WM was a foregone conclusion (and any other result would've led to 'f*** this company' x infinity), I'd say lessened my enjoyment of those moments.
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Post by "Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay on Jun 6, 2019 2:33:29 GMT -5
The winner is the conclusion of the story. If it's the wrong winner, the whole story is affected by it.
And this is a uniquely WWE issue because every other promotion I watch manages to not have people get buried by losing. Which is ironic because in WWE wins don't really matter either.
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Post by EoE: Well There's Your Problem on Jun 6, 2019 3:37:28 GMT -5
And this is a uniquely WWE issue because every other promotion I watch manages to not have people get buried by losing. Which is ironic because in WWE wins don't really matter either. WWE have put such a premium on the clean loss in how they go so hard in protecting talents in defeat, that anyone that takes one ends up being deemed a scrub. But then the ways they "protect" talents nowadays are often more detrimental than just taking the clean fall, for the winner and loser alike. Dean Ambrose with the hologram and the exploding TV, those were meant to "protect" him from the clean losses to Seth Rollins and Bray Wyatt, but that and the Lesnar match set him back about two years before he kinda got a rehab run with the world title. They rehired James Ellsworth for the sole purpose of "protecting" Asuka from taking clean losses to Carmella, but those dirty losses did more damage to Asuka than any clean fall would have. Hell, let's go back to CM Punk with the match he had with Triple H, that match couldn't have had more outside interference if they tried, all ostensibly to "protect" him... What did that matter in the court of public opinion if Triple H still got the three count either way? Roman Reigns, for f***s sake, their anointed ace, the cage match at Greatest Royal Rumble where they do the Spear through the cage and have Brock Lesnar retain the Universal belt by sheer luck of body placement, leading to honourable babyface Reigns spending the next few months whining about being the uncrowned champion? ...Sorry. Went on a bit of a tangent. It's just... They do it to themselves, booking things in such a way that there is only like one extra-specific way that works and 99 other ways to bork it up.
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clifford
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Post by clifford on Jun 6, 2019 3:49:28 GMT -5
Compare the 50/50 asinine booking of Raw and Smackdown with the mostly great booking of NXT- it's night and day
So there are ways to have guys win and lose and for it to make sense. Vince does it one way and Hunter does it another.
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Post by Old Jack Burton on Jun 6, 2019 4:08:56 GMT -5
I cannot separate the two. But I believe what is most important to me is that the show makes sense. I can actually excuse quite a lot of shitty wrestling as long as the motivations and reactions of the characters make sense. I also want the show to represent relative power levels of wrestlers and become irked when lower card wrestlers pick fights with upper carders and there is no real sense that this is an unwise decision and the match goes on to be relatively even.
As the years have gone by I don't really have any particular wrestler I want to win. All I want is to see a good story that follows its own logic.
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schma
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Post by schma on Jun 6, 2019 4:32:37 GMT -5
For me, it's a mixture of the two and I doubt most would be at one extreme or the other. Take Game of Thrones for example, while I enjoyed the ride, the ending was not good and kinda tainted the whole thing (I won't spoil anything). It really came off as something they pulled out of their ass because people figured out the original ending.
Wrestling is like that too. They are telling stories and the ending to those stories matter. I never saw the Booker T vs HHH match and who knows, maybe it was technically an excellent match. However, that ending and that story combined mean that match will be infamous forever. Similarly, if Kofi had lost his match, that would have really diminished WM this year. I love to be surprised and sometimes it's nice to sit back and enjoy but what's presented needs to make at least some sense. Otherwise, it becomes too difficult to enjoy. Too many horror movies make little sense, even within their universe and it's tough to just sit back and enjoy that. However, if internal consistency is there, it's a lot easier to enjoy something and suspend disbelief. You need that internal consistency though.
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ssdrivin
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Post by ssdrivin on Jun 6, 2019 4:48:03 GMT -5
I wrote a bunch of stuff here and then deleted it, because everything I was trying to split up into different angles came down to one thing: suspension of disbelief.
I don't mind if my guy loses, that's how fights work, sometimes you lose, and it might give you something to look forward to when they chase down that redemption or revenge later down the line. But you have to make it interesting, fun, and logical. Stuff has to have continuity, character development, story progression, and meaning. If it doesn't then I'm going to be taken out of the moment, I'll stop caring about the fiction that's clearly been written so poorly that it's hard/impossible to invest in or stay attached to logically. Then I'll start picking holes in the show, because I've paid to watch it, I've got in the mood and blocked out a period of time to pay attention to this show, and unless it's super offensively awful then I'm going to try and stick it out. If you do lose my attention, try to gain it back - don't railroad me into getting more and more annoyed by throwing insincere self-promotion at me, followed by a string of heels winning when it makes no sense for them to win, and then close on a screwy nonsensical ending that's akin to having a movie end with "...and it was all just a dream, that 2 hours was meaningless, lol!"
Also don't build up fights with no intention of ever paying them off - over, and over, and over again. Brock Lesnar, for example. I'm only going to be burnt so many times, watching wrestlers I enjoy far more than Lesnar get fed to him with some vague pretense of "someone else might win this time!". Same, arguably, with Cena Wins LOL. If you keep conditioning people to expect a loss, they will expect a loss, and they'll no longer care. I certainly don't. Sure, it worked for the shock value of Lesnar beating Taker's streak, but that's an exception. Don't rely on that, because it's going to burn viewers out long before the payoff, and if people do care when it eventually happens they'll just hear about it somewhere online and then go check out a YouTube clip of it. You'd think that might promote interest in tuning in to see what the next big shock is going to be, but it won't come for another 6-12 (or more) months, by which time everyone's bored and critical again.
Basically my view is that it's hard to care about wins and losses when WWE actively encourages you to not care about wins and losses. They render outcomes meaningless (within days, hours, even minutes sometimes), they write nonsensical endings, they put on the same matches over and over, they over-promote matches as having a potentially different outcome to the outcome we all know is coming, and they expect us to swallow it wholesale. That's not how fiction works. They need to learn that.
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Post by héad.casé on Jun 6, 2019 5:00:00 GMT -5
I've been a fan for near 30 years, grew up with Sting, Bret Hart and Hulk Hogan as my heroes. Wrestling was the one thing I was passionate about. Never missed a RAW, never missed a Nitro, bought every PPV once I started earning my own money, used to be devastated if I couldn't get tickets to a show when WWE came over here, even spent 6 years as a wrestler myself.
As I understood more of the work behind wrestling, I really, really used to care about whether a win or loss would make my favourites look weak, or buried, but over the last few years, I just don't have the same passion anymore. It's more like I watch out of habit - because watching wrestling has always been part of my life. So in a way, I guess I do "just enjoy the show" as much as I can because I know the WWE I used to love and watch religiously isn't really for me anymore and hasn't been for a long time.
I really, really do want to watch WWE and feel excited again like I used to, I don't want to be negative about something I loved so much, and hopefully some day that excitement will return, but I get my wrestling enjoyment from NXT and AEW has me hopeful after Double or Nothing.
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Dub H
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Post by Dub H on Jun 6, 2019 6:40:17 GMT -5
Caring about the match outcomes means you care about the product.
Which is why i find "victories doesnt matter " nonsense,you are saying that there is no reason to be invested.
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Post by HMARK Center on Jun 6, 2019 7:15:10 GMT -5
Yeah, to clarify about "Just enjoying the show", it's not say that wins and losses don't or shouldn't matter, or that you shouldn't be watching with a critical eye, or that you shouldn't criticize creative decisions; it's more to say that you can be invested in a match outcome, have it not go the way you wanted, and still feel like you're invested in the overall product a promotion is putting out. In a way I think it comes down to having faith that a promotion will make wins and losses matter; that way, even if your favorite loses, you still might feel "this is likely leading somewhere", whereas a lack of follow-up can have even your preferred outcome happening still feel a bit empty.
To go back to the NJPW example, their most glaring example of this right now is that they didn't have Tetsuya Naito win the heavyweight title last year at Wrestle Kingdom, instead booking Okada's title reign to be a record breaker. For a lot of us this felt like the "wrong" decision, and I'm sympathetic to arguments that say as much, but at the same time the rest of Okada's reign was still very good, still drew a lot of money, etc., while the Okada/Naito match itself played with and leaned into Naito's character and where he was at that point, so I think for a lot of us there wasn't this feeling of "@#$% this company!" over the outcome, just disappointment that the favorite didn't win the big match. So where the divide would come in would be those who saw the outcome and went "Wait, really? Damn, there must be an idea behind this, I want to keep watching" and those who saw it and thought "Oh, screw this, way to kill my interest." Heck, saw it today after the Will Ospreay vs. Shingo Takagi match, many people across the board are calling it a MOTY candidate and are discussing how the booking will likely play into future events in the promotion, but some see who won and can't really even acknowledge the rest.
This year I saw a lot of decent reviews of Wrestlemania 35, but a lot of it just felt to me to fall into "Well, they booked the right people to win most of the matches, so thumbs up" rather than commenting on how they got there, the overall journey, the outright quality of the matches (except Bryan/Kofi, which was pretty universally praised from top to bottom), that kind of thing. I guess I'd argue that you can have all the "right" people win, but does it do much good if you don't have faith in the follow-up/the execution? For example, I remember cheering like everybody else after Wrestlemania 20 when Benoit and Guerrero held the titles, but the follow-up on Smackdown wound up being the rise of JBL (no, it was not fun) while Benoit's Raw title run was mostly him playing second or third banana behind whatever Triple H was doing that week and facing Kane now and then...huh, like what happened with Bryan shortly after his WM 30 win, oddly enough. Meanwhile, Brock beating Undertaker, as mentioned previously, did have an actual follow-up: Brock sort of "gained Taker's powers" in a sense, and it was parlayed into him laying Cena to waste and becoming "the conqueror". People obviously have some major issues with where that character arc eventually went, but at least for the first little while it wasn't like Taker lost and it didn't mean anything.
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the2ndevil
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Post by the2ndevil on Jun 6, 2019 7:28:09 GMT -5
If I’m understanding this correctly, I don’t think it’s a black and white thing. There have been matches where the person I really wanted to win didn’t. I was disappointed about it, but was still able to move on from that and continue watching and enjoying the rest of the show.
I’ve noticed in online fandoms in general lately that too many are treating developments they don’t like or didn’t want as a personal insult.
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ssdrivin
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Post by ssdrivin on Jun 6, 2019 19:58:40 GMT -5
If I’m understanding this correctly, I don’t think it’s a black and white thing. There have been matches where the person I really wanted to win didn’t. I was disappointed about it, but was still able to move on from that and continue watching and enjoying the rest of the show. I’ve noticed in online fandoms in general lately that too many are treating developments they don’t like or didn’t want as a personal insult. I feel like that's because WWE never sweetens the deal, though. It's like I mentioned above, I can take my guy losing, it would take all the fun and suspense away if I liked someone who either always wins or quickly regains a victory to whitewash a temporary loss. But then the next match will start, and the heel who should be getting served at the end of an angle somehow wins. Then the next match and it's a womens' screwjob. Then the next match and a guy I like wins but somehow the result is overturned. Then 5 minutes of self-congratulatory marketing. Then another match where the commentators are just crapping on everything. Then the main event which is either highly predictable or unnecessarily and nonsensically screwy. There's often no relief, no catharsis, no sugar to make the medicine go down after the loss to pull you back in after your brief disappointment at a loss of your favourite guy, the dynamics are all wrong. Sometimes they'll even do it just for giggles, too, like having the hometown guy or the crowd favourite lose decisively because f*** you I guess. Then the ramshackle zig-zaggy split-end booking means you can never be sure that it was part of an angle, or a setup for something new, they might just forget about it next week. Then that loss just sits there in your mental list of how much they think this guy sucks or how they don't want to give me what I want (but for no other reason than "nope, no favourite for you"), because you know they probably won't explain it or pay it off. One "bad" (read: "didn't end the way I wanted it to") match is fine. Two is acceptable (maybe a couple of your favourites just happen to lose, it could happen). But when you're in that temporary mood slump of disappointment, you're more prone to finding other things which may not be showstoppers normally a whole lot less tolerable, and sometimes WWE just don't take that into account, they just keep barreling on with the disappointments, marketing eye-pokes, and non-events. Edit: Also, in response to the OP (because I feel like I've been sort of pulling the question in a direction that works for my explanation), "enjoy the show as it unfolds" is what I did when I watched DoN. I seem to find that easier to do if I don't know who people are, or have any context intrinsic expectation for who should be winning. It doesn't hold my interest for too long, just watching pure wrestling for wrestling's sake, I need those stories (or some context from the commentators, or just those little clues as to who's who). But I can more easily just say "oh, cool, these guys are pretty good" or "I'll have to watch out for him in future" or (as with the DoN joshi match) "that's a cool style I've never seen before" and I can come away happier than if I was watching WWE or something I'm highly familiar with and invested in ending or happening in a particular way. I don't know if that's because WWE has just sucked all the goodwill and tolerance I had for them, or whether it's because I'm having to put more effort in to latch onto a show I've never seen before, or whether other promotions just suck less at booking. Maybe it's even that I just kinda know what's coming with WWE, but in promotions I don't know already I feel more like anything could happen or that I want to make the most of exploring this new experience. But either way, WWE feels much more difficult to "just enjoy", as though it has this sort of negative forcefield of "meh" around it that just keeps eating my enthusiasm.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2019 20:16:18 GMT -5
I feel it is a hard split
because a shitty ending can and will ruin any story no matter how great
but an ending no matter how great it is wont matter if the story leading to it does not engage people and make them actually care about the ending
A strong balance is needed
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