Matt D

I would argue that the hardcore mentality that existed before the internet could still be the mentality of the historical IWC. It's just the hardcores plus the kids who stumbled into their mentality once the means to stumble in on a broader level existed.

This is pretty much the only sentence anyone has ever had to write on this board. Well done. I'm staggered.

That never was the case. In RSPW, you had WCW Fans who hated the WWF, WWF Fans who hated WCW, and ECW Fans who hated the other two. There were puro fans who liked garbage, there were ones who liked All Japan, there were those who liked joshi, there were those who liked Juniors. Folks don't want to believe that, but my girlfriend never cared much for All Japan, never really cared for joshi but loved the Juniors in New Japan and MPro. My friend Scott Lacy was more a Juniors and Joshi guy, and not so high on All Japan. There never was one big group of hippy IWC folks who loved everything and all got along. It was exactly like the real world of fandom: different people liked different things, while some liked a lot of things. John, I get that it may not be historically accurate. I do think that it works as a useful term to describe some broad trends that a lot of people did have back then. Maybe there's no need for a phrase like that, even if it's not necessarily historically accurate, but I can think of situations where it'd be useful. The symbol means more than the actual truth in this case? Could be someone started to use it and then people realized it was a useful and appropriate term?

But it's totally irrelevant even if that's the case. The terms shouldn't necessarily come from the wrestlers, anyway, because they're not doing what we're doing when we try to analyze matches. Creator intent is important in understanding art, just like context is, but, when you're pulling patterns and trying to analyze the text itself, you shouldn't be beholden to it. Going "Hoo hoo, you're thinking about this way more than they ever did, you nerd!" which is my impression of that nasally voice Johnny makes sometimes when he's ridiculing something, if you didn't pick up on that, is actually probably true. That doesn't change that there's something out there to think about.

Chad, Parv, Kelly, Martin, and I (and maybe one of the many Petes) will work together on a lexicon in 2015. It'll be like Ray's old Big, Big Book of Wrestling Moves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Enlightenment#The_Romantic_revolt_against_the_eighteenth_century

A lot of times it's all about the set up. I think Sheamus (from what i remember. I haven't seen a ton of him this year, actually) is fairly decent at working things like the apron forearms in different ways in different matches. Like the 619 and often times it ends up being fairly clever how he does it. I could be wrong on that. EDIT: OR you know, what Dylan just said.

A lot of my enjoyment of wrestling is in trying to understand it.

My problem with this is that not all match layouts have to be formulaic or meet certain pre-defined criteria. Yes, but if you watch thirty matches, you're going to find common traits between many of them. It's not about establishing rules about things matches have to have or even necessarily what makes them good or bad. It's about finding commonalities in them to better understand how pro wrestling works. There'll always be exceptions, but I think finding and defining patterns is the bread and butter of any sort of analysis. Now, what you say about there being differing uses of these terms by different people is definitely an issue, but I think it's an insurmountable one.

One thing about WWE and how much TV they have is that after a while, everyone has history with everyone else. I was thinking about that when Del Rio was wrestling Ziggler in another match with no build on Raw. It was there to set up the Main Event match, and even more so, to set up a future Ziggler vs Fandango match, but it was very easy to go back and think about the concussion and double turn from last year.

A lot of it is a matter of classification. When you go through hundreds of matches and try to break them down to common elements, you need terms to define what you're seeing. One of the trickier parts of our community here is that we often define things different ways, leading to more explanation being necessary, so these terms end up being tools that we use personally for our own purposes. I don't think we could easily agree on a common set of terms though.

I'm still pretty certain I mainly use it when we have a situation where one wrestler is basically only containing the other. The strategy isn't wearing down or damaging a body part or even establishing dominance but just containing a force that would otherwise overwhelm them. In a shine situation, the babyface has more dominance of the situation.

To further clarify, it's not necessarily a literal term. The Republicans aren't necessarily more republican. The Democrats aren't necessarily more democratic. "Liberal" means something different in the States than it does in Europe. It's more of a political party from a certain time, or a cultural movement than an actual all-consuming Internet Wrestling Community, but it was a prevailing one in a lot of ways, and one that has legacy today. I think you can draw a fairly straight line between those people and a relative large and noisy minority today that complain about Dolph Ziggler being held down and Cena being terrible and what not. That becomes a bit more of a slippery slope because things are so broken up today relative to 1998.

I think there were a large majority of everyone who felt pretty much the same about this stuff. Looking at Kunze's old posts sum it all up pretty well. Maybe it was "A" IWC and not "the" entirety of the internet or whatever, but I think it sums up 90% of the people I remember dealing with at the time. A major, major majority who would take a massive offense at the Vanilla Midgets comment and all that.

To repeat, I think IWC is a very useful historical tool to describe things from the Monday Night War era, though of course even then it wasn't homogeneous, but it was much, much, much more so than it is today. I find it less useful in other usages.