Random Wrasslin' thoughts.....

Vision of Disorder

Eire-Dearg wrote: »

He'd probably get lost in the shuffle at WWE though.

He pretty much got lost in the shuffle in TNA. I agree he's a super talent though, my brother has only the most casual interest in wrestling but he marks out for Aries.

CSF

leggo wrote: »

??? How do you think storylines get written? Just because there's TV time to fill doesn't mean there's production time to fill. So, at its most basic, you'd be using a production meeting to spend time writing and developing Cameron/Naomi that could be used to develop Roman Reigns' WrestleMania plans. The latter is going to be directly responsible for ratings, ticket sales and Network subs, whereas the former might only have the Divas' family and friends tuning in alone.

So let Cameron and Naomi have their feud with a skeleton storyline, see if they add to it with their own innovations and can back it up in the ring and go from there instead of wasting time writing them an odyssey that still manages to let people down when it turns out they'll have a bad match anyway.

You say this as if the typical main event storyline is ever particularly complex or something that would take a huge amount of time to formulate.

leggo

CSF wrote: »

You say this as if the typical main event storyline is ever particularly complex or something that would take a huge amount of time to formulate.

To be fair, writing what, 8 hours of TV per week, an extra 3 hours for a PPV per month, storyboarding angles over months, scripting individual promos then dealing with last minute re-writes to cater for injuries, unforeseen circumstances and Vince's indecisiveness (not to mention additional bits like pre-shows, WWE.com features etc) is not something that can just be written off as something that's just tossed together in a matter of minutes.

The reason stuff may feel half-arsed is that I'd say they're already up to their neck with work as is. Writers who have time on their hands, if anything, would make storylines overly-complicated and detailed. So saying the solution is that they need to write more is self-defeating.

Jester252

leggo wrote: »

??? How do you think storylines get written? Just because there's TV time to fill doesn't mean there's production time to fill. So, at its most basic, you'd be using a production meeting to spend time writing and developing Cameron/Naomi that could be used to develop Roman Reigns' WrestleMania plans. The latter is going to be directly responsible for ratings, ticket sales and Network subs, whereas the former might only have the Divas' family and friends tuning in alone.

So let Cameron and Naomi have their feud with a skeleton storyline, see if they add to it with their own innovations and can back it up in the ring and go from there instead of wasting time writing them an odyssey that still manages to let people down when it turns out they'll have a bad match anyway.

Roman Reigns doesn't need a whole department to write about his six man tag match for the main event of Raw ft. Cena and Orton that ends dust or in a beat down.

What you are failing to see is that with a tiny extra bit of work the divas can relate to the main story.
Why is Steph not giving the heels divas a title shot as a reward for beating up Brie? Surely the authority with rather have someone who is faithful to them as the head of the female division of the WWE.

How can you expect a feud to get over when the people involved get no interview spots and around five minutes a match.

WWE had a great story with 3.5MB and Los Matadores. Why was it great because the WWE got behind it.

Can you explain why the US title hasn't had a feud tied to it in a while now or for the second time in a few months the intercontinental championship seen is just full of random wrestlers? Why has HHH let the Usos keep the tag titles even though they fight the authority?

Pure lazy writing.

leggo

But stuff like the 'evil heel authority stable holds all the titles' has been done to death. It was even done in this current angle last year when The Shield held the belts and were working for The Authority. So why would they do that when they can have The Usos and AJ hold the titles and keep some angles on the show not Authority-centric?

Jester252

leggo wrote: »

But stuff like the 'evil heel authority stable holds all the titles' has been done to death. It was even done in this current angle last year when The Shield held the belts and were working for The Authority. So why would they do that when they can have The Usos and AJ hold the titles and keep some angles on the show not Authority-centric?

The Usos have no angle and the AJ/Paige angle made both of them look weak.

Sirsok

leggo wrote: »

To be fair, writing what, 8 hours of TV per week, an extra 3 hours for a PPV per month, storyboarding angles over months, scripting individual promos then dealing with last minute re-writes to cater for injuries, unforeseen circumstances and Vince's indecisiveness (not to mention additional bits like pre-shows, WWE.com features etc) is not something that can just be written off as something that's just tossed together in a matter of minutes.

The reason stuff may feel half-arsed is that I'd say they're already up to their neck with work as is. Writers who have time on their hands, if anything, would make storylines overly-complicated and detailed. So saying the solution is that they need to write more is self-defeating.

How hard can it be to have writers for specific set of wrestlers, you have your mid card writers who can try an flesh out the midcard, your lower tier writers, your diva writer and then main event writers.

That would give the talents something that is for them in particular and the writers striving to be a top writers. For all the flack Russo used to get everyone in the attitude era had a distinguishable gimmick and a story.

You make it out to be such a hard process but even allowing some of the backstage stuff that goes up on wwe.com to be shown on raw as oppose To really really crappy raw segments would really flesh out some characters.

Vince being the main man nowadays, a 70 year old man dictating what our demographic wants is ridiculous. If punk can drop a pipe bomb talking about how bad the company is run and Vince have it the all clear, then surely they must feel like they have a problem.

leggo

Where are people getting their whole notion that 'It's easy to write wrestling'? I hate to do this because it's fun to have these hypothetical debates, but if people are gonna throw out these notions, I'm gonna need to start asking to see some writing credits...

Wrestling is actually one of the toughest things I've had to ever write for, because at least with fiction you invent the characters but with wrestling you're considering 1001 things such as the characters' own plans, ambitions and notions about their directions, management's thoughts on the same subject etc. While you're also trying to balance 'getting **** in', i.e. fitting everyone you want on a card and making them go in a direction you want, and making a coherent show that doesn't look like you're just getting **** in. It's a massive balancing act. You change one thing and it means changing another. You start with 10 plan A's then end on 6 plan B's and 4 plans C's.

I'm not saying that the way WWE's system is setup is the best possible system, certainly it seems to be suffering from Vince being too hands-on (I've written for wrestling and dealt with a ton of TV pitches and productions and have often dealt with people like Vince is described by many; you work your arse off putting together a tight, coherent script and get told "No, change that" casually to individual ideas that are integral to tying things together without a thought, to the point nothing makes sense and you have to re-write), but it's a system that has clearly evolved out of necessity incorporating new demands etc.

gnfnrhead

leggo wrote: »

Where are people getting their whole notion that 'It's easy to write wrestling'? I hate to do this because it's fun to have these hypothetical debates, but if people are gonna throw out these notions, I'm gonna need to start asking to see some writing credits...

Wrestling is actually one of the toughest things I've had to ever write for, because at least with fiction you invent the characters but with wrestling you're considering 1001 things such as the characters' own plans, ambitions and notions about their directions, management's thoughts on the same subject etc. While you're also trying to balance 'getting **** in', i.e. fitting everyone you want on a card and making them go in a direction you want, and making a coherent show that doesn't look like you're just getting **** in. It's a massive balancing act. You change one thing and it means changing another. You start with 10 plan A's then end on 6 plan B's and 4 plans C's.

I'm not saying that the way WWE's system is setup is the best possible system, certainly it seems to be suffering from Vince being too hands-on (I've written for wrestling and dealt with a ton of TV pitches and productions and have often dealt with people like Vince is described by many; you work your arse off putting together a tight, coherent script and get told "No, change that" casually to individual ideas that are integral to tying things together without a thought, to the point nothing makes sense and you have to re-write), but it's a system that has clearly evolved out of necessity incorporating new demands etc.

BWE is written almost once a week and by one person. WWE would have a lot more than that working on the writing side of things. The difference in numbers between the WWE crew and the BWE crew would make up for the fact that the wrestlers don't talk back in BWE.

jaykhunter

leggo wrote: »

if people are gonna throw out these notions, I'm gonna need to start asking to see some writing credits

Jaysus Leggo, this is real "unless you've laced up a pair of boots, shut up" stock wrestler response to any type of criticism. You're also talking about running a wrestling company (i.e. being a promoter), as opposed to making changes for a single storyline (which should be largely self-contained), i.e. altering the finish for a Divas match shouldn't affect your main event. Yes it's a balancing act, but just because Vince squanders his time making constant revisions until air-time doesn't give his bad storylines a pass.

leggo

jaykhunter wrote: »

Jaysus Leggo, this is real "unless you've laced up a pair of boots, shut up" stock wrestler response to any type of criticism. You're also talking about running a wrestling company (i.e. being a promoter), as opposed to making changes for a single storyline (which should be largely self-contained), i.e. altering the finish for a Divas match shouldn't affect your main event. Yes it's a balancing act, but just because Vince squanders his time making constant revisions until air-time doesn't give his bad storylines a pass.

I've spent post-after-post trying to set up scenarios to demonstrate why certain things may be difficult to give people an idea of the obstacles that may face writers and give them a realistic scenario so we can have a good hypothetical conversation. But when people then ignore them and cross the line by saying, "How hard can it be to...?" or "It's not hard to..." then they're going to have qualify those statements. If you say something isn't difficult, you're going to get asked how you know that to be the case because you've just claimed to know how difficult something is or isn't. Often the answer is, "Very hard, so much so that why would you think that the people who spend their entire lives doing this may have thought of it and realised it didn't work?" It's fair to ask someone to give some kind of qualification when they make sweeping comments during a debate.

Coming up with ideas is relatively easy, coming up with ideas that'd work and get past higher ups (in wrestling or any industry) isn't. I'm trying to give people a flavour of those barriers, not just to sound dismissive but because that's what'd happen if they pitched something like that IRL.

Same reason movie reviewers don't tend to tell moviemakers how they should've made their movies and hold back their criticism at that juncture. But I'm actually a big proponent that fans who've never been in the business still have a valid opinion and think you can get some great ideas and discussion going by taking in outside opinions and ideas. That's why I'm trying to set up a realistic scenario to explain why things might be the way they are and then we can work around those confines and develop the conversation. But if people aren't willing to go that extra mile and accept those confines as legitimate we're gonna reach the impasse we're reaching here.

jaykhunter

I understand where you're coming from. However this barrier/impasse/extra mile for discussion is one set up by you. Perhaps demanding that people's booking suggestions be able to be easily implemented in current WWE creative is unreasonable. Where that line is is also debatable and something none of us can actually answer, so you might be hitting your head against a wall trying to force a rigid conversation.

Responding to "How hard can it be to have writers for specific set of wrestlers, you have your mid card writers who can try an flesh out the midcard, your lower tier writers, your diva writer and then main event writers" with "I'm gonna need to start asking to see some writing credits..." will only annoy others. Especially since that's the formula WWE use for the run up to WrestleMania (divide the writing staff into teams, which is why Mania storylines are generally more coherent than the rest of the year). Even if Sirsok didn't know that, you should be attacking the point, not the poster.

leggo

Look lads, I'm not trying to be a dick here, genuinely. And I also wasn't responding to that individual point with that...I was responding to phrases like 'How hard can it be'. Whether you know it or not, that's going to make someone who knows how hard it can be's blood boil (and it's not as if I've even worked for WWE, so times that by a thousand for them) as much as what I said.

It was just an attempt to spark an interesting debate. Put your ideas forward and have them treated like they'd actually be treated IRL, then see if we can use that elevated standard to create great ideas. But hey, I don't want boards drama so if it upsets people I'm more than happy to put it to bed.

Raven Runner

I hate the wrestlers court they have over trivial matters which in the real world seem so stupid
I was thinking of going to see Roddy Piper at one of his shows in Ireland but he seems full of crap a lot of the times
for grown men to behave like bullies is deplorable

jaykhunter

BotchedSpot must've heard the conversation today!

CSF

Raven Runner wrote: »

I hate the wrestlers court they have over trivial matters which in the real world seem so stupid
I was thinking of going to see Roddy Piper at one of his shows in Ireland but he seems full of crap a lot of the times
for grown men to behave like bullies is deplorable

Just horrible. The Benoit involvement is hardly surprising either.

Machismo Fan

TNA did a really awesome job building up the first Samoa Joe/Scott Steiner match:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hclT8KyFBxQ

Bounty Hunter

Was watching the RTE Notorious doc that I never got around to watching when it actually aired while I read here and now I can't get the idea of him (Conor McGregor) in the WWE out of my head. Not logical at all but him vs Devitt Wrestlemania 33 popping into my head def qualifies as a Ramdom Wrasslin thought

Agent Coulson

I wonder does HHH ever wonder will a wrestler in about 18/20 years try to marry into his family and take over the WWE from him.

rovert

edit

ShagNastii

When it comes to present movesets, I think Bray Wyatt probably has the best in WWE.

Moneymaker

Cesaro's fall from grace has less to do with Heyman, and more to do with WWE Creative yet again dropping the ball.

Jester252

Getting ready for work this morning and all I could think about was what happened to "Das Wunderkind" Alex Wright.

gerrybbadd

Jester252 wrote: »

Getting ready for work this morning and all I could think about was what happened to "Das Wunderkind" Alex Wright.

Was thinking the same thing the other day. He retired in 2003. Never realized it was him in the Berlyn gimmick

ShagNastii

Jester252 wrote: »

Getting ready for work this morning and all I could think about was what happened to "Das Wunderkind" Alex Wright.

He made a drastic change to Alexander “Berlyn” Wright. I thought the look and the gimmick were great.

With his new gothic look (dark glasses and long trench coat, black cane) he unfortunately got mentioned in the same light as the Columbine shooters which happen about the time as his change. Pretty much meant WCW had to “Muhammad Hassan” his career.

CSF

ShagNastii wrote: »

When it comes to present movesets, I think Bray Wyatt probably has the best in WWE.

Then why aren't his matches good..

leggo

CSF wrote: »

Then why aren't his matches good..

Bray's been involved in three of the best matches this year: with Daniel Bryan (at the Rumble), The Shield (Elimination Chamber) and Cena (Payback). The guy can work, this is just a random narrative people have picked up on for some reason. It's like everyone is punishing him because his promos are so good...

CSF

leggo wrote: »

Bray's been involved in three of the best matches this year: with Daniel Bryan (at the Rumble), The Shield (Elimination Chamber) and Cena (Payback). The guy can work, this is just a random narrative people have picked up on for some reason. It's like everyone is punishing him because his promos are so good...

1) Every match Bryan is in is one of the best matches of the year
2) he wasn't a very major reason in why that match was so good. Other guys shone instead.
3) Clearly your memory of that match is very different to mine.

Agent Coulson

Curtis Axel, Ryback & Cesaro failure to get over as Heyman Guy's is down to the McMahon's dislike of Heyman and not them or Heyman.

McMahon and WWE Creative dropping the ball to get a dig at Heyman for being so over without needing the WWE's help.

ShagNastii

Agent Coulson wrote: »

Curtis Axel, Ryback & Cesaro failure to get over as Heyman Guy's is down to the McMahon's dislike of Heyman and not them or Heyman.

McMahon and WWE Creative dropping the ball to get a dig at Heyman for being so over without needing the WWE's help.

I think it’s a lot down to the fact Heyman is a bit diluted in his latest run. The smarm and gloating is fantastic but let him go to ten and make him bit more Paul E. Dangerously. The pushes for Axel, Casero and Ryback lacked a certain amount of vigour or venom. Give him a gang of thugs with their own personalities' and it could be brilliant. Big bad Brock (top of the heap) flanked by a manic Heyman and a Horsemen-like posse would make them all look like superstars with that wrestling base, give it a bit of an old school feel.