cero2k wrote: ↑Mar 3rd, '21, 15:28
Big Red Machine wrote: ↑Mar 3rd, '21, 11:26
Booking a G1 is only hard if you're trying to book actual stories within it (like the guy who starts hot and then peters out, for example) and are intent on following up on the consequence of the wins and losses (yeah, the winner defends the briefcase, but we've see champions do jobs and then not have to defend their titles pretty often over the past few years. And the G1 has also felt like it has had a pretty obvious winner for each block for the past few years.
1) This is the first I'm hearing of that. If true, he should be booking.
2) ROH's presenation of it has been MUCH better.
Just math alone, booking a G1 is harder than a single elimination tournament. This G1 alone told stories with Ospreay, White, Tanahashi, Ibushi, and SANADA off the top of my head, all followed up til WK.
(1) he should
(2) compared to wwe and aew, maybe, but not the best, AAA, DDT, and AJPW took advantage of the empty arena in many better ways. It's not a 'booker of the year' praise to be honest.
I'll defer to you a bit on the stories since I only watched Block A, but I don't remember any sort of story for Ospreay. He turned on Okada, but that's not a story; it's an angle. A story is something that moves forward and evolves over time. In New Japan, 99 times out of 100, we get the angle, then we get the match, and that's it. The time in between the singles matches in the feud- whether that is less than one tour or three month worth of tours- is filled with random and meaningless tags. If you watched just the initial angle and then the singles match, you wouldn't miss anything in the story, even if there were three months of tags in between them.
A G1 is only harder to book if
both who loses to who and when that loss happens in the course of the tournament matters. Otherwise it's no more difficult than booking a single elimination tournament. It might be more busywork, but there isn't really more brainpower involved, other than making sure that you don't accidentally book someone to have more points than the guy you want to win your block, but even then it's a pretty easy fix.
Compare the booking of any recent G1 to World Catch Grand Prix. It's not even close. Yes, the G1 has three more wrestlers per block, but the wXw crew found a way to give a story to pretty much every one of those fourteen wrestlers, and the few that didn't have stories got to have some sort of big moment, usually setting themselves up for a title match or something like that.
I haven't seen any AAA, but I have seen a little bit of DDT and AJPW, and I don't think either of them handled things as well as ROH. Maybe I would if spoke Japanese, but I think a lot of where ROH deserves credit is how they integrated the TV with the no-crowd format. They made their TV show different, and found a way to stretch each set of tapings across a lot more episodes than usual in a way that was actually productive (filling time with sorely-needed personality pieces).
I do agree that that alone isn't worthy of a Booker of the Year accolade (but then again, I didn't vote for Delirious, either). XIV, you'll have to defend yourself on this one.
cero2k wrote: ↑Mar 3rd, '21, 15:28
Big Red Machine wrote: ↑Mar 3rd, '21, 11:26
No, he's clearly not in a drunken depression right now. There aren't even hits that he's sadder than he is letting on. He also seems to have gone from a guy stumbling around the arena and making bad a choices to a completely functional alcoholic since the loss, which is the opposite of what logic would dictate.
And you talk about this idea that follow-up should be seen immediately as if it's some sort of low-attention-span WWE/Vince Russo invention. That's how stories work. Yeah, WWE does this and sucks at it, but promotions like CHIKARA and wXw and PROGRESS have done it and been great at it. The next time you see someone after a big thing happens to them, they are affected by that event. That's why those events have meaning! You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Page's performances have been great, but so have those of, say, Rey Fenix, and he isn't nearly as over as Page. I'm not saying Page hasn't help up his end of the bargain. I'm saying that the thing that really got fans to latch onto him was not what the booker(s) intended.
He's totally depressed! He's just not hanging out with toxic people like Omega anymore, he has people that care about him now, but he's still not allowing himself to be loved, that is 100% a sign of depression. It's been like two months now of the dark order trying to get to him and him slowly accepting them, he had that month in between losing to Omega and Omega wining the title that he was just lost between not being part of the Elite and not yet approaching the Dark Order.
Storytelling doesn't have to be immediate, it has to be progressive, with the pacing dictated by the story and the time allowed to tell it in. Wrestling is never ending and ongoing, you don't need to just do everything immediately and so in your face that there is no room for subtlety left.
Fenix is an amazing wrestler, but he's not an amazing character. If you can't see how this Dark Order thing is making Page into a huge babyface, then you're not getting it.
Page hadn't been part of The Elite for MONTHS. There are no differences between the Page we saw from All Out to Full Gear and the Page we have seen since Full Gear.
More evidence on this is that no announcer has brought up Page's alcoholism or theorized about any sort of depression as a reason for him not joining the Dark Order. And don't tell me they're "being subtle about it," because they haven't done so at any other point in this story.
As for why he wouldn't want to join the Dark Order:
1. Wasn't he feuding with them in the middle of the summer?
2. Aren't they an evil cult? Or are we just supposed to pretend that they've always been nice people now that the (lacking a better term) actor playing the role of their leader died?
3. It's entirely possible he just doesn't want to join another group now for reasons that have nothing to do with alcoholism. Page himself even told them that he likes hanging out with them, he specifically said that he just didn't want to be a part of a group.
Storytelling doesn't always have to be immediate, but one of the times when it does have to be immediate is when it makes logical sense that it would need to be. You can't do a match where you tell people that a loss for Page would have major mental consequences for him, then have him lose the match and be the same for three months and only then start to show those consequences and point to them and say "see: it's the fallout from losing to Omega" because the loss to Omega was THREE MONTHS AGO and he was fine in between.
A huge problem with AEW booking (and, to an extent, with New Japan booking and Delirious' booking) is that they (and their apologists) seem to think that you can just take a story and freeze it in place until you're ready to pay it off. You need to
create a reason for people to not do the natural thing, or you need to do something that changes what the natural thing would be (i.e. create a reason for them to put it on the back-burner until some other issue is solved).
It only makes Page into a babyface if you actually like the Dork Order. But for those of us who think they're stupid goofs or aren't willing to accept them as babyfaces just because their evil leader shoot died, this isn't helping Page, and being involved with a bunch of undercard loser goofs makes Page feel like less of a star than he did for almost all of 2020.
