“How do we make every wrestler successful?”

[A Platypus Rave]

Batista's move to Smackdown was to try and boost it.

Not as a demotion or to try and make Cena the star of the A show.

[carp (SPC, Itoh Respect Army)]

Jul 26, 2020 5:51:46 GMT -5 HMARK Center said:

[I think this discounts too greatly the nature of pro wrestling involving a lot of build up and payoff. You have the more predictable matches precisely because it adds weight and significance to the less predictable ones; you have New Day or whomever squash jobbers using their signature spots, because now those spots are firmly established in the audience's mind as effective, thus making them bigger deals in major matches, or making it a bigger deal if someone avoids/reverses them in said major match.

Just about every major successful wrestling promotion has had a pecking order; hell, to this day we still refer to 90s puro with the Four Pillars in AJPW and the Three Musketeers in NJPW. That didn't mean those guys constantly squashed their opponents, but it did mean that many opponents, even just in tag matches, got to look stronger in the eyes of the audience just for being able to step up to those guys and give them a challenge. Of course, in those promotions this was done with an eye on the future: you have your current top stars, but you use them as storytelling mechanisms to build up the guys who may eventually usurp them, either by building the new guys' credibility by showing them pushing the top guys to the limit, or by eventually having them win. Kazuchika Okada was a made man in NJPW by his second month back from excursion because he beat Hiroshi Tanahashi clean in the middle of the ring for the IWGP title; no, it didn't firmly establish Okada as the new ace immediately, but now he was a force to be reckoned with, and would eventually surpass Tanahashi by Wrestle Kingdom 10.

You don't then suddenly have Okada tear through a bunch of lower card guys and make them look bad, but if one of those guys beneath him in the hierarchy does face him, then Okada should be the favorite going into the match, which again sets up more stories than "either of these guys have an equal chance of winning!"...ok, if they have an equal chance of winning, why should I care who wins?

There's an expression in football called "any given Sunday", where it's possible for the lowliest team to knock off a top team under the right circumstances, so you watch even if the outcome doesn't feel that in doubt. But for that upset to actually qualify as an upset, you need to have established expectations in the audience's collective mind: like, in the NFL, the Browns shouldn't be able to beat the Patriots. But what if they do? What then? What if they at least give the Pats a major score in a game and show that maybe they're not the pushover team people thought the Browns were? That's a story in and of itself; obviously it's a real sport so nobody can control the narrative quite so carefully as you can in wrestling, but that's how real competitive sports work, and where many natural narratives can flow from.

Still, I suspect that aversion to hierarchy in WWE is based on WWE's track record with such things, ala "Super Cena" where it felt less like Cena was the ultimate champion of the company and more like "lol Cena wins", where WWE tried to simultaneously make him look like the underdog with their booking while never having him wrestle like one, all as the guys below him fight over the scraps. Plus, WWE is a weekly TV company that runs shows on major networks in prime time and have an aversion to squash matches or clear "this guy SHOULD beat the other guy he's facing this week given where they both are on the card" matches. That, to me, is more an indictment of WWE's booking than of the concept itself.

I absolutely do not understand the logic of "if they have an equal chance of winning, why should I care who wins?" That's when I care the MOST who wins. Lots of people are justifying hierarchies by pointing to how exciting it is the rare times someone ascends the hierarchy or scores an upset, but there's two problems there. First, that system inherently is mostly boring (the expected thing has to happen most of the time). Maybe this is what real sports are like, but wrestling is a TV show and not a real sport. And second, the cat is very much out of the bag about what REALLY makes someone an underdog, and it ain't being chosen to upset people above you. If you're chosen to rise up the ranks, then we all know the bookers favor you; you're not an underdog anymore. Again, the only time it works is when we know the bookers really do hate every second of having to push this guy, like Kingston last year. (how depressing is it gonna be when Kingston actually IS only put in the HOF with the New Day and not on his own? That's what the racist guy said as a racist dismissal, and it's totally actually how things really are gonna be, because that's how they always really did see him)


It's not hard to have upsets without a hierarchy! You just WRITE A STORY where someone is dominant at the moment, and then that person loses. This is the thing... the good alternative to a hierarchy isn't 50/50 booking; the good alternative is everything is part of a narrative.

And no, my issues with hierarchies go way back farther than before Cena. My primary emotional issue with it is "I care about Norman Smiley!... oh, but I guess I'm SUPPOSED to care about boring ol' Sid?" But why's Norman Smiley doing more entertaining things than Sid, if he's not the one I'm supposed to care about? The assumption is, generally speaking, the audience likes strong bad-ass WINNERS and does not like lame dumb LOSERS, but the assumption is just wrong. Why do you fill your roster up with so many people I'm not supposed to care about, and who lose all the time so beating them doesn't mean anything? That's just such a waste!


But I think I've been really clear about my other main things, and people haven't talked about them much, maybe because they see it so inherently differently from me. But my first big problem is this hierarchy thing severely limits the stories you can tell to ONE: "Who's getting a push?" No matter what surface-level stuff is happening, that is the sole, single narrative you can have with a hierarchy-based roster. Any time a guy beats another guy, it means he's getting pushed over his opponent, and that's kinda ALL it means. And this just has gotten really really boring. Even all the worked shoots are just about this (like Kingston).


And the second issue, which is the biggest, is the way this is ludicrously plays out in real life. The WWE still, to this day, gives people a bigger bonus for an event the higher up the card they are. This is LUNACY. They want to make it so everyone's fighting over a higher kayfabe spot IN REAL LIFE, rather than working together to put on a good show. I'd still find it to be unnecessarily boring TV, but it'd be miles less egregious if being a solid JTTS, who puts on great matches and makes their opponents look great, was a highly regarded, well-paid position.

Vince just needs to pretend his company is a meritocracy, and all the wrestlers are expendable so they're forced to go along with it, and it hurts the product.

[eJm]

Jul 26, 2020 15:35:03 GMT -5 A Platypus Rave said:

Batista's move to Smackdown was to try and boost it.

Not as a demotion or to try and make Cena the star of the A show.

I'm just going by what I heard. But it is hard for me not to believe it a bit because, well...*waves arms around the past 15 or so years of brand split history".

[cornettesracket]

Simple answer is you can't. You can make every wrestler relevant to the fans by using them in matches and interviews that make sense and giving fans a reason to care about wrestlers. Arn Anderson said there's a difference between fans "seeing a wrestler and caring about a wrestler."