Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Apr 27, 2022 16:06:01 GMT -5
Overall, Talent wise, the AEW women’s division is miles better than WWE’s. But Becky’s right, they get showcased a lot more on WWE tv than AEW’s women do. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. You can have 3 segments with the women on a RAW and they all suck. Which is often the case. That said, quantity-wise, yeah, Becky Lynch is absolutely correct. If AEW fans don’t like what she says? Demand they fix it. If Tony Khan gets upset about these comments? Fix it. Agree with everything else but this part ? Yeah that’s not true. I'm not gonna say they're inherently better, but I would put Shida, Rosa, Nyla, Ruby, Toni, Deeb, Baker, Riho, Statlander, Soho and while green still Jade in a conversation with the top of WWE's division. I think they could very easily hold their own.
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Post by cornettesracket on Apr 27, 2022 16:06:07 GMT -5
Honestly I entirely believe that AEW only has a women's division because they realized it'd be bad optically if they didn't. Oh great so tokenism in the 21st century. Does Omega still have a big say in how the woman's division is booked ? Maybe it’s time for a high level female talent to have a say in that if they don’t already.
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Post by cornettesracket on Apr 27, 2022 16:09:11 GMT -5
Agree with everything else but this part ? Yeah that’s not true. I'm not gonna say they're inherently better, but I would put Shida, Rosa, Nyla, Ruby, Toni, Deeb, Baker, Riho, Statlander, Soho and while green still Jade in a conversation with the top of WWE's division. I think they could very easily hold their own. Miles better was what I disagreed with. The AEW womens roster not that far behind WWE but miles better isn’t true imo. Hopefully it’ll get there but as it stands they aren’t. And they have all the jigsaw pieces but whoever is tasked with putting the jigsaw together has made a mess of it for nearly three years.
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Apr 27, 2022 16:14:53 GMT -5
I'm not gonna say they're inherently better, but I would put Shida, Rosa, Nyla, Ruby, Toni, Deeb, Baker, Riho, Statlander, Soho and while green still Jade in a conversation with the top of WWE's division. I think they could very easily hold their own. Miles better was what I disagreed with. The AEW womens roster not that far behind WWE but miles better isn’t true imo. Hopefully it’ll get there but as it stands they aren’t. And they have all the jigsaw pieces but whoever is tasked with putting the jigsaw together has made a mess of it for nearly three years. Again, it hasn't been entirely on booking that the division has been a mess, I'm gonna say that it's been more squarely on them for the last year where things have improved but not enough, but the pandemic, injuries, and the onset where people like Kylie Rae left when she was primed to be like the top initial US star of it, are huge things that all happened that aren't particularly anyone in AEW's fault, but they've had to fight through it, and like I wouldn't wish what they've had to go through on any division, because frankly it could have just died or crumbled in that hardship and it thankfully didn't. I would say that Serena Deeb might be the best women's wrestler in the US though, like... she's just on a different level since she came back.
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Apr 27, 2022 16:17:16 GMT -5
Honestly I entirely believe that AEW only has a women's division because they realized it'd be bad optically if they didn't. Oh great so tokenism in the 21st century. Does Omega still have a big say in how the woman's division is booked ? Maybe it’s time for a high level female talent to have a say in that if they don’t already. It's not Tokenism, it's literally someone speculating that this is the case, and frankly it isn't the case. I've said it multiple times but if you want an example of actual tokenism, and "Having a women's division for the sake of it', it's not f***ing AEW, it's Ring of Honor before Maria took over the Women of Honor division... you will never find a more egregious or unsightly example than that. That's what it actually looks like.
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Post by cornettesracket on Apr 27, 2022 16:18:21 GMT -5
Oh great so tokenism in the 21st century. Does Omega still have a big say in how the woman's division is booked ? Maybe it’s time for a high level female talent to have a say in that if they don’t already. It's not Tokenism, it's literally someone speculating that this is the case, and frankly it isn't the case.I've said it multiple times but if you want an example of actual tokenism, and "Having a women's division for the sake of it', it's not f***ing AEW, it's Ring of Honor before Maria took over the Women of Honor division... you will never find a more egregious or unsightly example than that. That's what it actually looks like. Fair enough.
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Dub H
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Post by Dub H on Apr 27, 2022 16:19:41 GMT -5
also Omega never had a high say in the women's division besides the initial struggle in 2019. He was the match producer before he went out to heal,not booker. also this is low key just in the WWE section because it breaks the rule of no more generic AEW Women's division bad thread, loophole at its finest ![:P](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/tongue.png)
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Apr 27, 2022 16:20:14 GMT -5
It's not Tokenism, it's literally someone speculating that this is the case, and frankly it isn't the case.I've said it multiple times but if you want an example of actual tokenism, and "Having a women's division for the sake of it', it's not f***ing AEW, it's Ring of Honor before Maria took over the Women of Honor division... you will never find a more egregious or unsightly example than that. That's what it actually looks like. Fair enough. It's just one of those things where I truly do think the AEW women's division could stand to improve but the take that "They never wanted a women's division" or "Only wanted it for the sake of optics" isn't true, or they wouldn't even sign new people nor would they be signing a bunch of promising blue chipper girl prospects to develop. They want the division, they just need to present it better, they need to delegate it better, which is something I agree about, maybe someone else should be a stop gap.
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Post by HMARK Center on Apr 27, 2022 16:36:08 GMT -5
Long post ahead, sorry in advance.
Ok, so this is a lot of stuff largely in character from Becky, but I think sometimes the discussions of the women's divisions in the mainstream US wrestling companies is a bit misplaced. The issues in place are very structural/institutional in nature, and it's going to take any mainstream US wrestling company time to get to a point even approaching parity because of it.
Let's start with the history involved: the sad reality in much of North American pro wrestling is that women's wrestling has too often been treated as a secondary concern, or even a joke for stretches of time...hell, at the height of WWF's and WCW's mainstream popularity it hardly existed. This has created a negative feedback loop that only started to get broken during the 2000s: you wouldn't get a lot of women interested in pro wrestling, great female athletes wouldn't get involved in pro wrestling, because the message they were getting was "pro wrestling doesn't want you (unless you're willing to be arm candy)". There were always exceptions, but they were just that, exceptions.
Again, though, recent history has begun to buck that trend; smaller companies like Shimmer got off the ground in the mid-to-late 00s, TNA's Knockouts division had some very high highs (but also a ton of inconsistency and some low lows), and WWE only started building a serious women's division within the last decade.
The end result is that there's a new class of very talented women, but there's not a lot of depth and not a ton of history behind them yet. This has created a situation that I think a lot of people would agree is true of Raw, Smackdown, and AEW: you've got pretty top-heavy women's divisions in terms of wrestlers who can readily walk out and main event or give a really great title match on a PPV card, but then a noticeable dip in terms of wrestlers who can match that level, whether due to simply not being quite on that level or due to inexperience.
This leaves you with two main options on how to handle the situation, and I think it's really as simple a situation as WWE and AEW choosing two different roads. Neither road, to me, is ideal, each has its benefits and its drawbacks, but it's what I think we've got:
-The approach WWE has largely taken is not worrying much about the gap that exists between their top women and the rest of their division; they'll have most of them on the show in some capacity, nonetheless, whether in short matches, longer feuds, comedy segments, etc. You'll get matches where someone like Becky wrestles lower card wrestlers on Raw, and sometimes those matches end up being done on PPV, as well, while the bigger cards (Rumble, WM, Summerslam, etc.) get the marquee women's matchups. Positive to this: more women get featured on the main shows, get a chance to connect with the crowd and TV audiences, and you hope through that experience some of them will grow to the upper echelon of the division. Negative to this: you have a number of women who aren't really going out there and performing on a level you'd want to see on a major national broadcast. This makes it hard to mask the weaknesses some members of the division might have, and further emphasizes the big gap that exists between those at the top of the division and those towards the middle/bottom.
-The approach AEW has mostly taken is that they know they have a top-heavy division, and don't want to burn through the same matchups of those top level women too often. At the same time, most of the rest of the division is younger, less experienced, or simply not at that same level. They'll cycle through who gets featured; you'll still get a women's match on every show (and the number of women's matches a week is pretty proportional to the number of women to men on the roster), feuds will mostly revolve around who's chasing one of the women's titles. Positive to this: the lower card women get their reps on Elevation or Dark without getting overexposed on the main shows. AEW markets itself (to networks and advertisers, not just fans) in large part by the quality of their matches and long term booking, and it's harder to have that with a top-heavy division and a lot of wrestlers still growing. Top women's matchups stay fresh, the newbies get to grow at their own pace. Negative to this: Too many big gaps of time where some women don't appear on the main TV shows, including their upper level women. They've had some bad luck in this regard with things like injuries (e.g. Rosa, Riho, and Hirsch being hurt right now), but you still get long stretches where some people just aren't on the big cards, and it makes it harder to get the crowd to care when they do end up getting featured there.
Again, I don't think one approach is necessarily superior to the other; WWE probably has more women who can go out and put on a huge PPV card style main event, but they also have a massive issue with roster depth and, again, that gap between their main eventers and everyone else, and it just gets driven home worse with their approach. AEW is allowing people to improve without throwing them to the sharks, but it's hard to avoid the drumbeat of "Where's Shida/Nyla/Deeb/etc.?" on a pretty regular basis. I don't blame them for featuring Baker as they do, her act clicked with the audience and when you're trying to build a division that's worth its weight in gold, but other wrestlers need the opportunity she got to get over like that.
The third thing I'll hear sometimes is "Why don't WWE and AEW just book their women's division like Impact?", and the unfortunate answer, I think, is that Impact can afford to feature less experienced wrestlers or put on matches that are good, but arguably not "prime time on mainstream cable" good. They're on a channel owned by their parent company and draw 100,000 viewers; they don't have the multi-million dollar stakes involved that WWE and AEW have, so giving people time on TV to go out and learn by doing isn't the end of the world, while the bigger companies can't really go for that. Credit to them for working to make sure their women have defined gimmicks and get featured more consistently, but it's not a 1:1 comparison with the bigger companies.
All of this needs to be stated with an obvious caveat: women's wrestling 100% can be as great or better than men's wrestling, and sell tons of tickets in the process. All anyone has to do is watch 1980s-90s joshi matches and cards, or even watch the way that STARDOM is growing by leaps and bounds these days, but much of the Japanese scene also has a long-established system of training and developing women wrestlers with all the seriousness and emphasis on fundamentals that the men get. Simply put, we're not going to have that in the US for awhile; we're fighting against decades and decades of negative history leading to negative perceptions, and one markedly improved decade, the 2010s, won't undo all of that right away.
None of this means you can't criticize WWE or AEW's choices or creative decisions, of course; each could do a lot to improve things, I'm sure. But the problems facing American women's wrestling are very structural at this point, and structures don't get changed overnight; I'm hopeful we're going to get there now, given how much progress has been made in the last decade, but it's not necessarily a straight road to get there.
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Post by stoptheclocks on Apr 27, 2022 16:40:29 GMT -5
How long should it take? And why? AEW hasn't subtly laying the groundwork to give the whole division a big push in the coming years - Tony Khan evidently just doesn't think most of them are worth shit. I don't disagree that AEW need to get it together, but it took WWE over 30 years. Juuuuust saying. What an asinine arguement. The extension of that is that a new company could do all manner of outdated shit on and off screen, on the basis that x, y, z company was doing it in their third year of existence (even if that third year of existence was in 1973). But even then, it didn't take WWE 30 years to book their womens division like they do now. They decided they wanted to do it, and then it happened. Now, in 2022, there's no argument that a womens wrestling division needs to be built up, or fans need to be conditioned to accept it. I'm sure at some point in the future AEW will start to book their womens division like it matters, but they could've done it on day one if they wanted to.
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Dub H
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Post by Dub H on Apr 27, 2022 16:53:16 GMT -5
You could also argue that Becky was the biggest star period in WWE ,male or female and yet today she also wont main event a single PPV.In fact she went straight into playing damsel for her husband.
WWE had the chance to really break that paradigm and didnt do anything with it.But here have more Roman.
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Post by cornettesracket on Apr 27, 2022 17:11:51 GMT -5
It's just one of those things where I truly do think the AEW women's division could stand to improve but the take that "They never wanted a women's division" or "Only wanted it for the sake of optics" isn't true, or they wouldn't even sign new people nor would they be signing a bunch of promising blue chipper girl prospects to develop. They want the division, they just need to present it better, they need to delegate it better, which is something I agree about, maybe someone else should be a stop gap. boom. Nailed the main issue. They need to reset internally and decide a way forward and stick to it.
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Post by Finish Uncle Muffin’s Story on Apr 27, 2022 17:33:56 GMT -5
Becky's opened the Forbidden Door and the great women's wrestling debate from the AEW board has arrived.
There's some truth to what she's saying, but I also think they're actively trying to fix it.
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The Ichi
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Post by The Ichi on Apr 27, 2022 18:45:32 GMT -5
I don't disagree that AEW need to get it together, but it took WWE over 30 years. Juuuuust saying. What an asinine arguement. The extension of that is that a new company could do all manner of outdated shit on and off screen, on the basis that x, y, z company was doing it in their third year of existence (even if that third year of existence was in 1973). But even then, it didn't take WWE 30 years to book their womens division like they do now. They decided they wanted to do it, and then it happened. Now, in 2022, there's no argument that a womens wrestling division needs to be built up, or fans need to be conditioned to accept it. I'm sure at some point in the future AEW will start to book their womens division like it matters, but they could've done it on day one if they wanted to. Like I said though, AEW's womans booking isn't outdated. They're still presented as wrestlers and not eye candy. Women have still main evented. They just need better booking. I agree it should've happened day one.
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Post by xCompackx on Apr 27, 2022 18:54:39 GMT -5
Regarding the WWE vs. AEW women's division thing, I mean, I don't think WWE's is that good either. Like, sorry, but it's the same two or three people on top all the time.
And I'm not sure we can say "they should've been doing this the whole time" when AEW was a little busy trying to get itself, a roster of 90% unknowns, and an entire universe of storylines established in a two hour weekly show. They only JUST got a third hour in 2021. Give them time.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2022 19:09:55 GMT -5
Both divisions in boths companies suffer from pretty much the same problem terrible usage and the biggest is a complete refusal to spread the wealth around.
It has been way more obvious though with WWE just for length of time alone.
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Mecca
Wade Wilson
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Post by Mecca on Apr 27, 2022 21:48:11 GMT -5
WWE is also shifting back to the eye candy sex symbol division..they're just gonna expect their handful of good workers to carry them.
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lucas_lee
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Post by lucas_lee on Apr 27, 2022 23:17:33 GMT -5
Long post ahead, sorry in advance.Ok, so this is a lot of stuff largely in character from Becky, but I think sometimes the discussions of the women's divisions in the mainstream US wrestling companies is a bit misplaced. The issues in place are very structural/institutional in nature, and it's going to take any mainstream US wrestling company time to get to a point even approaching parity because of it. Let's start with the history involved: the sad reality in much of North American pro wrestling is that women's wrestling has too often been treated as a secondary concern, or even a joke for stretches of time...hell, at the height of WWF's and WCW's mainstream popularity it hardly existed. This has created a negative feedback loop that only started to get broken during the 2000s: you wouldn't get a lot of women interested in pro wrestling, great female athletes wouldn't get involved in pro wrestling, because the message they were getting was "pro wrestling doesn't want you (unless you're willing to be arm candy)". There were always exceptions, but they were just that, exceptions. Again, though, recent history has begun to buck that trend; smaller companies like Shimmer got off the ground in the mid-to-late 00s, TNA's Knockouts division had some very high highs (but also a ton of inconsistency and some low lows), and WWE only started building a serious women's division within the last decade. The end result is that there's a new class of very talented women, but there's not a lot of depth and not a ton of history behind them yet. This has created a situation that I think a lot of people would agree is true of Raw, Smackdown, and AEW: you've got pretty top-heavy women's divisions in terms of wrestlers who can readily walk out and main event or give a really great title match on a PPV card, but then a noticeable dip in terms of wrestlers who can match that level, whether due to simply not being quite on that level or due to inexperience. This leaves you with two main options on how to handle the situation, and I think it's really as simple a situation as WWE and AEW choosing two different roads. Neither road, to me, is ideal, each has its benefits and its drawbacks, but it's what I think we've got: -The approach WWE has largely taken is not worrying much about the gap that exists between their top women and the rest of their division; they'll have most of them on the show in some capacity, nonetheless, whether in short matches, longer feuds, comedy segments, etc. You'll get matches where someone like Becky wrestles lower card wrestlers on Raw, and sometimes those matches end up being done on PPV, as well, while the bigger cards (Rumble, WM, Summerslam, etc.) get the marquee women's matchups. Positive to this: more women get featured on the main shows, get a chance to connect with the crowd and TV audiences, and you hope through that experience some of them will grow to the upper echelon of the division. Negative to this: you have a number of women who aren't really going out there and performing on a level you'd want to see on a major national broadcast. This makes it hard to mask the weaknesses some members of the division might have, and further emphasizes the big gap that exists between those at the top of the division and those towards the middle/bottom. -The approach AEW has mostly taken is that they know they have a top-heavy division, and don't want to burn through the same matchups of those top level women too often. At the same time, most of the rest of the division is younger, less experienced, or simply not at that same level. They'll cycle through who gets featured; you'll still get a women's match on every show (and the number of women's matches a week is pretty proportional to the number of women to men on the roster), feuds will mostly revolve around who's chasing one of the women's titles. Positive to this: the lower card women get their reps on Elevation or Dark without getting overexposed on the main shows. AEW markets itself (to networks and advertisers, not just fans) in large part by the quality of their matches and long term booking, and it's harder to have that with a top-heavy division and a lot of wrestler still growing. Top women's matchups stay fresh, the newbies get to grow at their own pace. Negative to this: Too many big gaps of time where some women don't appear on the main TV shows, including their upper level women. They've had some bad luck in this regard with things like injuries (e.g. Rosa, Riho, and Hirsch being hurt right now), but you still get long stretches where some people just aren't on the big cards, and it makes it harder to get the crowd to care when they do end up getting featured there. Again, I don't think one approach is necessarily superior to the other; WWE probably has more women who can go out and put on a huge PPV card style main event, but they also have a massive issue with roster depth and, again, that gap between their main eventers and everyone else, and it just gets driven home worse with their approach. AEW is allowing people to improve without throwing them to the sharks, but it's hard to avoid the drumbeat of "Where's Shida/Nyla/Deeb/etc.?" on a pretty regular basis. I don't blame them for featuring Baker as they do, her act clicked with the audience and when you're trying to build a division that's worth its weight in gold, but other wrestlers need the opportunity she got to get over like that. The third thing I'll hear sometimes is "Why don't WWE and AEW just book their women's division like Impact?", and the unfortunate answer, I think, is that Impact can afford to feature less experienced wrestlers or put on matches that are good, but arguably not "prime time on mainstream cable" good. They're on a channel owned by their parent company and draw 100,000 viewers; they don't have the multi-million dollar stakes involved that WWE and AEW have, so giving people time on TV to go out and learn by doing isn't the end of the world, while the bigger companies can't really go for that. Credit to them for working to make sure their women have defined gimmicks and get featured more consistently, but it's not a 1:1 comparison with the bigger companies. All of this needs to be stated with an obvious caveat: women's wrestling 100% can be as great or better than men's wrestling, and sell tons of tickets in the process. All anyone has to do is watch 1980s-90s joshi matches and cards, or even watch the way that STARDOM is growing by leaps and bounds these days, but much of the Japanese scene also has a long-established system of training and developing women wrestlers with all the seriousness and emphasis on fundamentals that the men get. Simply put, we're not going to have that in the US for awhile; we're fighting against decades and decades of negative history leading to negative perceptions, and one markedly improved decade, the 2010s, won't undo all of that right away. None of this means you can't criticize WWE or AEW's choices or creative decisions, of course; each could do a lot to improve things, I'm sure. But the problems facing American women's wrestling are very structural at this point, and structures don't get changed overnight; I'm hopeful we're going to get there now, given how much progress has been made in the last decade, but it's not necessarily a straight road to get there. We've also been fighting Fabulous Moolah's stranglehold on the women's wrestling industry. Where any decent woman wrestler was fed to her and anyone who didn't fall in line was blackballed. She did tremendous damage to women's wrestling in America.
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Apr 27, 2022 23:23:36 GMT -5
Long post ahead, sorry in advance.Ok, so this is a lot of stuff largely in character from Becky, but I think sometimes the discussions of the women's divisions in the mainstream US wrestling companies is a bit misplaced. The issues in place are very structural/institutional in nature, and it's going to take any mainstream US wrestling company time to get to a point even approaching parity because of it. Let's start with the history involved: the sad reality in much of North American pro wrestling is that women's wrestling has too often been treated as a secondary concern, or even a joke for stretches of time...hell, at the height of WWF's and WCW's mainstream popularity it hardly existed. This has created a negative feedback loop that only started to get broken during the 2000s: you wouldn't get a lot of women interested in pro wrestling, great female athletes wouldn't get involved in pro wrestling, because the message they were getting was "pro wrestling doesn't want you (unless you're willing to be arm candy)". There were always exceptions, but they were just that, exceptions. Again, though, recent history has begun to buck that trend; smaller companies like Shimmer got off the ground in the mid-to-late 00s, TNA's Knockouts division had some very high highs (but also a ton of inconsistency and some low lows), and WWE only started building a serious women's division within the last decade. The end result is that there's a new class of very talented women, but there's not a lot of depth and not a ton of history behind them yet. This has created a situation that I think a lot of people would agree is true of Raw, Smackdown, and AEW: you've got pretty top-heavy women's divisions in terms of wrestlers who can readily walk out and main event or give a really great title match on a PPV card, but then a noticeable dip in terms of wrestlers who can match that level, whether due to simply not being quite on that level or due to inexperience. This leaves you with two main options on how to handle the situation, and I think it's really as simple a situation as WWE and AEW choosing two different roads. Neither road, to me, is ideal, each has its benefits and its drawbacks, but it's what I think we've got: -The approach WWE has largely taken is not worrying much about the gap that exists between their top women and the rest of their division; they'll have most of them on the show in some capacity, nonetheless, whether in short matches, longer feuds, comedy segments, etc. You'll get matches where someone like Becky wrestles lower card wrestlers on Raw, and sometimes those matches end up being done on PPV, as well, while the bigger cards (Rumble, WM, Summerslam, etc.) get the marquee women's matchups. Positive to this: more women get featured on the main shows, get a chance to connect with the crowd and TV audiences, and you hope through that experience some of them will grow to the upper echelon of the division. Negative to this: you have a number of women who aren't really going out there and performing on a level you'd want to see on a major national broadcast. This makes it hard to mask the weaknesses some members of the division might have, and further emphasizes the big gap that exists between those at the top of the division and those towards the middle/bottom. -The approach AEW has mostly taken is that they know they have a top-heavy division, and don't want to burn through the same matchups of those top level women too often. At the same time, most of the rest of the division is younger, less experienced, or simply not at that same level. They'll cycle through who gets featured; you'll still get a women's match on every show (and the number of women's matches a week is pretty proportional to the number of women to men on the roster), feuds will mostly revolve around who's chasing one of the women's titles. Positive to this: the lower card women get their reps on Elevation or Dark without getting overexposed on the main shows. AEW markets itself (to networks and advertisers, not just fans) in large part by the quality of their matches and long term booking, and it's harder to have that with a top-heavy division and a lot of wrestler still growing. Top women's matchups stay fresh, the newbies get to grow at their own pace. Negative to this: Too many big gaps of time where some women don't appear on the main TV shows, including their upper level women. They've had some bad luck in this regard with things like injuries (e.g. Rosa, Riho, and Hirsch being hurt right now), but you still get long stretches where some people just aren't on the big cards, and it makes it harder to get the crowd to care when they do end up getting featured there. Again, I don't think one approach is necessarily superior to the other; WWE probably has more women who can go out and put on a huge PPV card style main event, but they also have a massive issue with roster depth and, again, that gap between their main eventers and everyone else, and it just gets driven home worse with their approach. AEW is allowing people to improve without throwing them to the sharks, but it's hard to avoid the drumbeat of "Where's Shida/Nyla/Deeb/etc.?" on a pretty regular basis. I don't blame them for featuring Baker as they do, her act clicked with the audience and when you're trying to build a division that's worth its weight in gold, but other wrestlers need the opportunity she got to get over like that. The third thing I'll hear sometimes is "Why don't WWE and AEW just book their women's division like Impact?", and the unfortunate answer, I think, is that Impact can afford to feature less experienced wrestlers or put on matches that are good, but arguably not "prime time on mainstream cable" good. They're on a channel owned by their parent company and draw 100,000 viewers; they don't have the multi-million dollar stakes involved that WWE and AEW have, so giving people time on TV to go out and learn by doing isn't the end of the world, while the bigger companies can't really go for that. Credit to them for working to make sure their women have defined gimmicks and get featured more consistently, but it's not a 1:1 comparison with the bigger companies. All of this needs to be stated with an obvious caveat: women's wrestling 100% can be as great or better than men's wrestling, and sell tons of tickets in the process. All anyone has to do is watch 1980s-90s joshi matches and cards, or even watch the way that STARDOM is growing by leaps and bounds these days, but much of the Japanese scene also has a long-established system of training and developing women wrestlers with all the seriousness and emphasis on fundamentals that the men get. Simply put, we're not going to have that in the US for awhile; we're fighting against decades and decades of negative history leading to negative perceptions, and one markedly improved decade, the 2010s, won't undo all of that right away. None of this means you can't criticize WWE or AEW's choices or creative decisions, of course; each could do a lot to improve things, I'm sure. But the problems facing American women's wrestling are very structural at this point, and structures don't get changed overnight; I'm hopeful we're going to get there now, given how much progress has been made in the last decade, but it's not necessarily a straight road to get there. We've also been fighting Fabulous Moolah's stranglehold on the women's wrestling industry. Where any decent woman wrestler was fed to her and anyone who didn't fall in line was blackballed. She did tremendous damage to women's wrestling in America. I thank Snickers a lot for making WWE change the Moolah Battle Royal name by force. Notice how after that, they basically stopped giving a shit about doing it and axed it after two years (yet they still trot the Andre out there every year). Like you could actively tell how much it pissed Stephanie off to rename it.
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Post by EoE: Well There's Your Problem on Apr 27, 2022 23:27:47 GMT -5
We've also been fighting Fabulous Moolah's stranglehold on the women's wrestling industry. Where any decent woman wrestler was fed to her and anyone who didn't fall in line was blackballed. She did tremendous damage to women's wrestling in America. I thank Snickers a lot for making WWE change the Moolah Battle Royal name by force. Notice how after that, they basically stopped giving a shit about doing it and axed it after two years (yet they still trot the Andre out there every year). Like you could actively tell how much it pissed Stephanie off to rename it. Well, that or a combination of the early unknown stages of the pandemic (they didn't do the Andre for WM36 either) and the fact that the numbers in the women's battle royals at WM37 and WM38 would barely reach double figures because they kept either cutting people or shoehorning them into the tag title match.
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