joe etten @joeetten - Bluesky Profile

(1) Occasionally, when I post about, let's say, selling or immersion, people come back at me and bring up that favorite tool of the internet sophist who wants to diminish even the potential of establishing (let alone maximizing) meaning in pro wrestling, the Irish Whip. It's the ultimate gotcha for such folk. "The Irish Whip would never happen in a real fight, so why does "X" matter?" Because this admittedly unrealistic normative, agreed-upon element exists in pro wrestling, anything goes and endless escalation and sensation is obviously the goal? Just shut up, shut your brain off, and try to enjoy whatever you're fed. Here's the thing though. It's not about realism. It's about consistency. It's about establishing accepted norms and then sticking to them, reinforcing their importance, using them as the structure that holds up the entire edifice, and then, only sparingly and when it matters most, choosing to deviate from them for creative and narrative effect. And why is that the case? Because wrestling isn't real. It isn't sports. It isn't athletics. It is fiction. It may be a live sort of fiction with interactive and improvisational elements, but it is fiction, and it follows the rules of fiction accordingly.

(2) It is, in specific, genre fiction. The genre is sports-based. More specifically, the genre is "pro wrestling." Maybe there are a series of sub-genres, like lucha (or more specifically, 1980s lucha title matches or mid-90s AAA atomicos matches, or 2010s CMLL Lightning matches). For the sake of this argument, that's what we're going with. You could instead classify pro wrestling as an artistic medium and that's interesting too, and maybe it can be both a medium and a genre full of sub-genres, but let's try to stay focused. There are accepted norms in almost any genre. In detective novels, the police are treated a certain way that is not at all realistic. The detective has to be allowed to act with autonomy and have the room to solve the crime working alongside of in parallel to law enforcement in a way that would never be tolerated in real life. When the storytelling is serialized, you often end up with a murder a week in a small town where, in real life, you'd get a murder once a decade. And of course, there's no longterm consequence to all this murder when it comes to the population or the federal government stepping in. Why? Because it's fiction and the norms are there to serve the needs of the storytelling and the trappings of the genre.

(3) It's true with wrestling as well. The goal is to maximize excitement, engagement, caring, to bring people back (either in person or on TV) week after week, to get them to pay for a ticket or a PPV. Certain norms are developed over time. Just like in the detective novels, when the police may have operated differently a hundred and fifty years ago than they do today, certain trappings remain, with some of their initial meaning jettisoned. The dropdown is a good example of that. It started as a trip attempt but evolved into a standard element of rope running that happens in most matches. As with any fictional norm, it would probably be best used if one did remember the purpose behind it (and you do see that sometimes), but it's valid and accepted as part of the syntax of a match. Sometimes we learn more about reality and that disrupts genres. Learning more about science had an impact on science fiction. We had more hard science fiction and less John Carter of Mars or Journey to the Center of the Earth. But that doesn't make them less enjoyable and it doesn't diminish things when someone does still write in that sort of science fantasy genre. Likewise with wrestling. We've learned more from MMA about what might work in real competitive fights and that helped to establish and refine shootstyle, but that doesn't make all other forms of pro wrestling less worthwhile as fictional art forms.

(4) Because at the end of the day, it's about consistency. It's about creating expecations, defining and establishing norms. It's about conditioning fans to care about certain things that happen, to understand a certain reasoning behind them happening, and then to use these series of narrative tools to tell a story in the ring. Fans are more than happy to suspend their disbelief with something that is entirely unrealistic so long as it is established, consistent, and sold as mattering by the wrestlers and the announcers. Where things become problematic is when that consistency does not exist. That could be within a match with escalation issues or dropped selling. It could be between matches if similar things are shown to have different effects without explanation. Nothing has to be real but everything has to be plausible within the confines of the rules established. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for fans to let go, to introduce as few disruptive elements as possible that will make them think twice. Occasionally, you'll want to shock the system (a one count kick up, an immediate pop up, the Irish Whip not working), but doing that too much introduces the risk of not just diminishing those shocks, but undermining the structural stability of the norms themselves. So yes, things do matter! But they matter because they are established and protected, not because they are "real."

On realism, consistency, and fictional norms within pro wrestling. Also, the pernicious fallacy behind the "irish whip" as some sort of argumentative spoiler for things mattering within wrestling.

17.11.2024 15:08 — 👍 17 🔁 9 💬 2 📌 1

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