The Impression That I Get, As A Non-Wrestling Fan

Hey everyone. Been a minute. Let me start off by apologizing for my absence. I have been dealing with some pretty bad mental health stuff since moving to minneapolis— every problem I had bottled up, pushed temporarily aside while I could distract myself with the move, has finally come home to roost, and I’ve spent the last few months in a sort of a paralyzing anxiety spiral. It’s been hard to muster the energy to do anything other than the basest acts of self-maintainence and indulgence, which in turn only creates more anxiety— is this really how I’m going to waste the last few years of my youth? Worrying about the future? If only it were so easy to turn off. I can scarcely speak plainly about my life, (during smalltalk, for example) without beginning to cry. I won’t prattle on anymore here; suffice it to say, I feel I’ve failed to meet the expectations of my patrons, and I’m sorry for that— the last 3 months or so have felt like an extended cut of that scene from The Conversation where Gene Hackman defeatedly plays the sax in the middle of a completely destroyed room. But I’m doing better, now, maybe, probably. 

 Anyhoo— let’s get into the meat and potatoes of the matter. 

Something happened within the last decade or so, where pro wrestling seems to have largely exited the domain of white-trash conservatives and become a staple crop among vaguely left-aligned nerds. I remember when I first saw it happening— hearing Anthony Burch talk about some fuckin wrestling show on an old episode of Podtoid, back in high school or maybe college, and thinking to myself pfft. Okay pal. What are we doing here. Who are we trying to impress here. Even to this day, my gut reaction is that all the hullabaloo around it feels performative, put-upon— and I’d almost believe it, too, if the enthusiasm among fans and wrestlers alike didn’t seem so earnest and widespread. It’d be like waking up tomorrow to see cavalcades of redditors tell you, in total earnesty and in these exact terms, that they actually all love ‘sportsball’ now. For me, it was simply never able to break it’s image as lowest-common-denominator-jingling-a-pair-of-truck-nuts-like-they’re-car-keys simpleton fuel. 

In reality, however, it’s much more akin to drag for straight men. A buddy of mine dragged me to a local show here in MN a few months ago, and admittedly, its as excellent as a special-occasion third-space/excuse to go somewhere and drink beers with friends as just about anything could be. Against my own will, I found myself ooing and ahhing to various acts of hokey stage combat, booing and cheering on command for the various heels and babyfaces (my friend informed me that a lot of this boils down to “he’s from a different part of the midwest, so we don’t like him, but we’re all midwesterners so it’s not that big of a deal”) and just generally vibing with the energy of the crowd. It was fun, to be sure, but also made me pause and reassess how much of an easy mark I would have been for, e.g. , Hitler. 

Anyhow, I realize that the archetypes in this comic are nowadays incredibly dated— particularly with the rise of companies like AEW, which seem to favor a less glammed-up and roided-out class of wrestler. But this new breed hasn’t been around long enough to get the Iron Claw treatment (Great movie. Zac Efron… the council of lads has finally accepted you. Go stand over there next to Robert Pattinson, you sausagoidal pimp.) so we’re just going to allow ourselves to ignore that fact. 

Ultimately, it’s not for me. It never will be, and whether I say it or not, I’m probably always going to hold some little nugget of unwarranted smug superiority about that fact, somewhere deep (but not that deep…) in the cockles of my being. Nonetheless, it is undeniably respectable as a craft; these fools are really out here combining schoolyard “I be Goku, you be Vegeta”-ass playfighting with a level of busterkeatonesque pratfallery, as dangerous as it is theatric, that  simply cannot be found anywhere else these days. 

I don’t really know much about Japanese wrestling. It’s probably fucking insane