BRM Reviews ROH/NJPW Honor Rising 2018: Night 1 (skippable)

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Big Red Machine
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Re: BRM Reviews ROH/NJPW Honor Rising 2018: Night 1 (skippable)

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 3rd, '18, 19:45

cero2k wrote: Mar 2nd, '18, 16:25
Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 2nd, '18, 13:51
The difference is that this has to do with the fundamental presentation of the show changing mid-presentation (lacking a better term). It's not about the show being fake or not. It's about how the fakeness is presented. If a TV show were shot entirely like a regular show and then suddenly, for five minutes, people started talking to the camera like a documentary, then went back to ignoring the camera, wouldn't you be confused?
In WWE (and LU, and on Being The Elite, and other places) we are asked to just pretend that the camera isn't there. Similarly, for the purposes of Bray Wyatt, Matt Hardy, Undertaker, Sting, Kane, etc. we are asked to accept that they have magical powers. I can think it's stupid. for anyone to have magical powers, but that is what WWE wants us to accept about their universe when these characters are involved. That's why it's not an issue when one of those guys take over the TitanTron, but when, say, Marius Al-Ani randomly did it in wXw last month, it was a problem, or why these guys can magically make the lights turn out, but Gabe felt the need to explain how the Age of the Fall or the Rotweillers were able to do so when it was convenient for them. With MMA fighters, the idea is that MMA and pro wrestling are kayfabe two different spots. MMA takes skill and thus we know that these people are very dangerous (especially ones like Ronda and Brock with excellent records), but their presence is not an issue unless you have some idiot like Taz on commentary telling us that these guys are "legit."
The fact that Being The Elite is show WWE-style while ROH and New Japan are shot in the more "real sports" "we need to explain why the camera is here to see this" style creates a disconnect because the way things are shot is suddenly changing. It'd be like Dario turning and talking to the camera in the middle of an LU segment as if there was an actual cameraman filming the conversation he was having. It's the same reason I get annoyed when someone in a backstage segment on Raw will be having a conversation on speaker-phone and then suddenly switch to regular mode for no reason other than so that we, the camera that they supposedly don't know is there won't hear it and spoil the plan to us viewers.


Quite frankly, they shouldn't be expecting fans to go to YouTube to figure out what's going on. We all only have so much time in our day, and I don't want to sit through fifteen minutes of bullsh*t to see three storyline-relevant minutes of Being The Elite.
Post-shows are nice and all, but they don't help me understand what is happening there in that moment, and I would much rather have a pre-match video package to bring me up to speed then getting a post-match show to explain what happened and then having to wait three weeks to the next show for that all to become relevant.
The fact that you can follow everything that happens in a promotion via YouTube for a promotion that runs TV like WWE, NJPW, or TNA, is quite frankly, a huge mistake on their part because it makes the TV show skippable. Compare that to PROGRESS or EVOLVE or wXw, where you need to watch each show.
that is honestly really nitpicky, but if it matters, then it's as easy as Being The Elite has always been about a camera crew following The Bucks, Kenny, and company. You're trying to encapsulate this storyline as a ROH/NJPW story and it SHOULD be like all their stories. It's a Bullet Club story, it goes beyond how ROH and NJPW present their stuff.
Except that doesn't explain why they act like the camera isn't there or the camera guys don't clear things up to them, or why are they in position for surprising things? It creates a disconnect.
Also, it can't be a "Bullet Club" storyline if they need ROH, New Japan, or anyone else's shows to make it work. If it exists within the ROH and New Japan worlds then it is an ROH and New Japan storyline.
cero2k wrote: Mar 2nd, '18, 16:25 I bring up the WWE thing because even if the fans accept that magic exists in the WWE universe, you're also being told that Stephanie is both a heel and a revolutionary woman, you're being told that Lesnar is a legit fighter that fights a guy that has a demon inside him and comes out in the form of face paint. Talk about consistency in your product. But anyway, that is irrelevant in this conversation
And how many times have we all complained about WWE's inability to reconcile the two Stephanie's they want to portray to the public being detrimental to their product? Pretty much every time she has appeared since the Divas'/Women's R/Evolution began.
I dispute the assertion that we have ever been told that Brock is "legit" in a way that makes everyone else "fake" within kayfabe.
cero2k wrote: Mar 2nd, '18, 16:25 no one really expects you to watch all the content, you can easily enjoy the story without every little single detail as why Cody was smiling and not frowning in that particular move on such and such promo, but if you really want to cover every single detail, then i think you should at least put in that effort to make sure that after watching all the content, it's still not there. Even in the most abstract way of things, the story we've seen is that Cody and Omega had problems back in dominion, Cody failed to achieve the things that Omega could, Cody failed to defeat Omega's former friend and in return, Cody eventually attacked Kenny. We saw Kenny accidentally hit one of the Bucks thus they're not seeing eye to eye and we see Kenny go with Ibushi while some of the BC are still conflicted and some aren't, and there you go, not a single reference to ROH or BTE.
Which would be a great angle except that:
1. You can't ignore Cody's ROH World Title win (something Omega hasn't done) if Cody is going to be defending the belt on New Japan shows
2. What, other than winning the US Title, has Kenny done that Cody hasn't? They both failed to beat Okada. Omega never beat Ibushi, either. They both beat Suzuki. Cody never got the chance to be in the G1 or really had shots at any belts other than Okada's. If they had put more effort into setting this all up in the preceding six months, that would be one thing, but they didn't. They're rushing it all between the Dome and Supercard of Honor.

As I said back in this thread ( http://www.thewrestlingrevolution.com/f ... 92#p101548) I disagree that we have actually seen those things. Throughout most of this, Cody hasn't come off to me as jealous so much as just power-hungry. If Cody is jealous, then make sure we've seen what he has to be jealous of. I'm not saying you have to have the announcers spell it out and beat you over the head with it WWE-style, but you need to make sure that the pieces are there so that when someone finally throws the accusation out there, we can look back and see what Cody would be jealous of.
cero2k wrote: Mar 2nd, '18, 16:25 CHIKARA expected me to read blogs, read! Gabe used to expect me to watch a bunch of ROH house shows, and now he expects me to watch his whole WWN programming to understand what the hell does that title that Keith Lee has means. And let's not even talk about WWE expectations. And you can't compare wXw, PROGRESS, or EVOLVE to NJPW, WWE, ROH, or even Impact because the prior have no TV deals, they literally exist based on selling the show via VOD or DVD or tickets.
I never found that reason the CHIKARA blogs or even watching the ROH VideoWires took anywhere near as long as watching Being The Elite, and the WWN-family promotions have storylines that are almost always self-contained, with any rare exception being something like "Wrestler X beat the champion of Promotion X during a Style Battle so therefore he's getting a title shot at Promotion X's next show." Lee's belt is just a belt that he defends pretty much exclusively in EVOLVE. Riddle occasionally took it to the other promotions, but even the stories were purely "Wrestler X earned a shot at this title by winning some matches."

Yes, Gabe used to want you to buy all of the DVDs, but once you hit, like, late 2005 where they really start upping the number of shows, there wasn't ever a storyline that required you to buy every single one for a long period of time. Even the ROH/CZW feud only featured on 15 of the 20 shows during its run, and most of those altercations were relatively small. For example, on a bunch of the early ones, all you had to know was that CZW shows showed up in the crowd and there was some yelling back and forth, which the announcers would be sure to tell you about on the DVD of the next big show you got.
Something else that both Gabe Era and Pearce Era ROH as well as CHIKARA did very well was that they made sure you could get detailed results easily, and soon afterwards. ROH was more open with giving away details, but that's because they were really selling the DVDs off of workrate. Everything you needed to know for an upcoming show was contained in the VideoWire that would be released before the show, and they always put the VideoWire on the DVD with the show, with the opening of the show always having a big reminder to go watch the VideoWire first. They made sure you would get the relevant info, even if you didn't see the previous shows.

You can say it's not fair to compare those promotions, but I actually think that wXw is the most analogous to New Japan in terms of the way they structure their schedule. PROGRESS and wXw are both on-demand services (and WWN is too, but they're just delayed by two weeks), which means they don't actually need you to buy every show so much as they just need to convince you that the total action you get for the month is worth the price your paying. They need you to feel that every other show or every third show is worth it.
But my point is that the episodic nature of those promotions make them feel more important. It's something that could easily be adopted to a televised promotion if they were willing to put in the effort to plan things out in advance, but aside from NXT, they're not. Something like the fantasy booking I have in that above thread is an example of how New Japan could do an angle like this one episodically while still sticking to their regular schedule.
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