One of the worst decisions i’ve ever made was watching Everything, Everywhere, All At Once before bed. I can’t think of a worse movie to watch before bed than a movie that is inherently existential and exists to make you feel very, very small. I lay in bed and nearly sobbed at the mixed emotions of dread and love for people in my life. It’s a movie that has made me think a lot about who I am and who i’ve become, and while i’m very happy with who I am and the person i’m becoming, the place where I feel the most self conscious is my relationship with others. I’m guilty of not reaching out to family and friends as often as I should, and since moving out of my family’s home with my girlfriend i’ve had to make a point to reach out more, and i’m trying to be less cynical and bitter to my friends and people I talk to. I don’t always do a good job, but, i’m trying, and I hope people can see that. Anyways, this is a post about wrestling if you can’t tell.
For most people, the pandemic era of wrestling was a terrible nightmare that everybody wants to forget, but for me, in many ways, it was one of the greatest periods. For one, it forced me to reckon with what it is I watch wrestling for, because without the pseudo-social element of the crowd to obscure holes in work, I had to actually learn what I like to watch and what parts of wrestling I think are solely geared towards the live crowd that don’t work for me at home. Two, it helped me realize what it is about wrestling that keeps people watching when it’s bad. I’ve never been an especially social person, things like empathy and social graces are very much a learned trait rather than a natural part of my brain, so my likes and dislikes have never been particularly geared towards socializing - when I play Dark Souls, it’s never online and it was never to talk to people about it. When I play Melee, having to play another human is the worst part of my experience because i’m exposed tot he worst people i’ve ever met. I don’t use my hobbies to socialize, I use my hobbies to entertain myself, and social aspects are a bonus. Then, in 2021, I realized that I felt very alone - while I was enjoying the wrestling I was watching (more on that later), I realized that not only did I have almost nobody to share that with, nobody else was talking about it; I considered watching New Japan Pro Wrestling again just so I could feel the touch of social interaction again, even if it was often combative or steeped in disagreement over the direction of the company, because at least that was something. It was then I realized that’s what keeps people watching companies like the WWE - while i had always exclusively attributed it to a sunk cost fallacy, wher epeople had watched for years and felt like they couldn’t stop now (I still think this is part of it), the truth is that people keep watching so that they can be around people. Even if the interaction is negative, they are complaining about the wwe, there is a sense of community and togetherness that bonds them with a common understanding. It’s something that I realized that I had missed because that isn’t my goal with enjoying things. With all of that said, I didn’t waver in what I was enjoying, because the third part of the pandemic era of wrestling that has actually stuck with me for so long to the point that i think it has permanently warped my brain and ability to see wrestling the same way I had before is what I was watching.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know that I have made no secrets about how good I think 2021 Ring of Honor was, but it wasn’t until recently that I Came to terms with it being unsustainable. 2021 Ring of Honor was very much a promotion made for me and people like me - it was created specifically for people at home, a pure vision of wrestling without needing to appeal to crowd reactions, and while that strips away something, the actual content that was created was second to none. Storylines and characters were cohesive, they were carefully crafted and edited, their ability to create supplemental content and introduce tangible elements that all felt like they mattered were unbelievable. It’s a wrestling product that seems stuck out of time with how good it is, but there’s a reason for that; it very much was stuck out of time. The truth is that 2021 ROH were able to craft these experiences because they were isolated from the world - they bulk filmed a month or two of tv at a time, they could wrestle strange matches and angles without worrying about how a crowd would react, things having the perception of working or not working wasn’t dependent on the que of the audience, but whether or not they were entertaining which just doesn’t exist… but to me, it should. It’s a belief i’ve held in my core because of the way that I am, but all pandemic era wrestling did was reinforce it, and it’s left me completely isolated from everybody who watches wrestling.
I’ve never cared about the crowd in wrestling, I think that something that the crowd likes can be bad (Someone like SANADA in New Japan, liked by the crowd, pure liquid shit to me), and vice versa (Jay White vs Hangman Page in the US in 2018, crowd was dead silent, match is amazing), but I also understand that the crowd is part of the show. I guess i’ve always viewed the audience as a bonus; a bad match doesn’t become a good match because the crowd is into it, but if a good match has a hot crowd, that makes the atmosphere feel better, and I think that this is a pretty good middle ground between accepting the crowd is part of it and maintaining my own opinions on something and not sacrificing it because people who happened to be there enjoyed it… only to learn that not only is that too extreme an opinion, but that so many wrestling fans are willing to take their entire que from the audience. Most of these people are just reddit NPC types who just don’t want to really rock the boat - New Japan has no crowd and there’s a bad match, they blame the lack of crowd for why the match doesn’t work instead of making observations about why the match doesn’t work, but it’s also just the reality that 99% of wrestling is formatted as a live show first and a tv product second - in fact, the WWE is heavily criticized for even leaning more towards a 50/50 split of Live Show/TV Product (They are still like 75/25 towards live show, but most wrestling is way closer to 100/0). Wrestling fans get mad about pumping in crowd sounds, they make fun of Jericho for saying to the crowd on commercial to cheer for them so they feel like a big deal (A clear reaction que but also a tongue in cheek joke for the live crowd), they make fun of WWE training wrestlers to work for the hard cam, the list goes on pretty deep, and it really gets to the core issue of “WWE feels fake because they are producing it less like a wrestling show and more like a tv show” that they feel takes wrestling away from the people who make it work, the fans… and I detest this mindset because of how antiquated and, if i’m being honest, selfish it is. I don’t think it’s actively selfish, I think it’s wrestling fans attempting to keep their agency by emphasizing the audience interaction portion of shows because, without that, they have no feeling of leverage and corporate interests take over and nobody wants 2012 WWE back, but the insistence on gearing wrestling towards live crowds EXCLUSIVELY to preserve some idea of the soul of wrestling is genuinely a thing that I think holds wrestling back, just based on the sheer numbers of it. Counting literally every wrestling show, the most attended wrestling show in history was Collision in Korea, with 150-165k people (There are extenuating circumstances, shut up, not the point). That’s a shitload of people - the lowest total people who have ever watched an episode of Monday Night Raw is 1.35 million, a little less than 10 times the amount of people in attendance at the most attended wrestling show ever. There’s an independent wrestling match from 2022, Josh Woods vs Silas Young for the ROH Pure Championship (This was when ROH was pretty much dead) - it’s a 30 minute-ish match that is very good, and it has like 30 people in attendance, but it has 639 views on youtube, which is about 20 times as many people who saw it happen. There is no wrestling in 2023 where the majority of people seeing it are in attendance live, so why do we insist on building wrestling around the dramatic minority and treating their voices and reactions as sacrosanct? I don’t know. I think it should change, but I get why it doesn’t - people who are there are going to feel like the whole world while hypothetical eyeballs you can’t see and connect with are never going to trump human connection, but I think that i’m never going to be able to get over the fact that my input or feelings on something is never going to matter more than people who are in attendance because they’re there. It’s not something that works in my brain, and it’s not something I can accept and understand.
Liking Pandemic Era wrestling completely changed the way that I think about wrestling because I had to think about why I liked wrestling, and that’s not something that most people did. I’m not saying that i’m better for thinking about it, it’s just what my journey was, but for most, they just looked forward to when it ended - I used the gap to ponder what I enjoyed, and found that I loved it more than I knew I could… and then it ended, and i’ve never been the same. I don’t know if I would want it to go back to the way that it was because I think regretting the past is something i’m trying to do less of, but I guess this is just me talking my feelings through on coming to terms with the fact that I will never like wrestling the same way other people do… and that’s fine, I think.
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