The Pro Wrasslin' Thread (WWE, WWF, WCW, TNA, ROH, NWA, NJPW, etc)

[Jumpin]

BasilZero said:

Dulfite said:

This may surprise some, but I used to be OBSESSED with wrestling back in like 2007-2011. Huge fan of the story telling component, of all things lol. I quit after getting way too into it. I mean, I used to watch every Raw, every Smackdown, some ECW, and I was reading behind the scenes details and rumors on some wrestling website I can't remember the name of all the time. It was bad, so I quit lol.

2007 to 2009 was good but after that I would say it got real bad until 2015 and 2016.

Its kind of bad right now but thankfully AEW exists so it balances out (that and now that there's potential of AEW stars going to WWE and vice versa which already has been happening).

WWE always seems to be interesting when there’s some kind of drive or struggle against common cultural expectations or rules going on. The main reason people loved it so much in the late 90s and early 2000s was because they were counterculture. They were doing stuff on TV you weren’t supposed to do. Yeah, you might see a lot of that stuff  in films, but that was a different world. Nowadays it’s flipped, anything goes on TV - LOTS of nudity and extreme violence - they even have rape and incest in TV shows now (that was an rarity in film, even in the 70s through 90s period) - but now, sex scenes in films won’t even show a tit anymore.

The women’s Revolution was another counterculture thing. WWE was going against the grain once again when you had rampant sexism permeating the culture. They’re like “Yeah, we’re going to make women 10 times more prominent on our shows” - it kind of felt like “Are they supposed to do that? Won’t the pro-wrestling market hate that?” And the opposite happened.

Off topic, but it’s why I loved Paul Verhoeven American films; even Showgirls - maybe especially Showgirls. They were doing violence and sex stuff that the general public hated. Showgirls was so far over that line that it’s become a massive cult classic even to this day - it was totally rejected by the press, bashed with every criticism under the sun when asked about it, bombed at the box office. Still one of MGMs highest selling films of all time thanks to rentals and home video sales :D