2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by cero2k » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01

XIV wrote: Mar 2nd, '21, 12:02
Booker of the year this year? Probably for me? Hunter Johnston / Delirious.

I don’t think ROH TV is the best most watchable show out there BUT, find me reasons why he’s not Booker of the year. Most stories have made sense, he hasn’t booked any murder mysteries, he hasn’t booked a guy fighting himself street fighter style and hasn’t booked every world title match as a gimmick match.

He booked a very competitive and competent Pure Title picture and generally the shows make a decent amount of sense as build from the start to the end in the way a good show should.

So that’s some of my reasoning, so please, counter this as to why Tony Khan is a better Booker. Also, you should leave Omega v Page booking out, seeing as that hasn’t actually really happened and they’ve dropped the ball on Page.
Delirious only booked 4 months in 2020, two of which were a tournament that you book in one sitting, at least Gedo booked 4 different tournaments and they weren't single elimination. He only booked ONE big show all 2020, because Scurll booked Jan-February. Incredibly lackluster considering what Khan, HHH, Rossy Ogawa, Sanshiro Takagi, Emi Sakura, NOSAWA, Gedo, even Joey Janela's GCW booked throughout the year. Hell, one month of Genki Horiguchi's Dragon Gate this year trumps everything Delirious did most of his 2010's.

Dropped the ball on Page!? He's one of the biggest babyfaces in the company! And did you miss Omega and Page's story? that lasted for months and months? Just because it's not basic single matches one after the other, it doesn't mean there wasn't a huge story there.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01

NWK2000 wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 08:53
Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 08:21
NWK2000 wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 01:55 Meltzer is an incredibly hard working, thorough journalist. However, when he reports *his own opinions* that's just what they are, opinions. Wrestling fans are so horny to stan one promotion or another that they'll dogpile on anyone for expressing their opinions to a wide spread audience. The flip side to this is, why treat Meltzer's opinions like they're gospel. People are allowed to have their own.
The problem is that people do treat Dave's opinions like they're gospel.
But I'm asking, why? Like any other human being, Dave is prone to bias and just being incorrect despite his best observation. I think the controversy this has caused is less a reflection on Meltzer and more on the lack of critical thinking and the increase of tribalism amongst the people who read his publications.
You're not wrong, but it's also a reflection of Meltzer's own lack of critical thinking skills (i.e. double standards). People don't talk this way about Wade Keller because
1) Wade IS more balanced
2) When someone calls Wade out on it, he will pretty publicaly reflect or explain his reasoning, and it often makes sense. With Dave... not so much.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by cero2k » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:02

Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 2nd, '21, 20:43
But the difference between us and Dave is that Dave has sway. If Dave started talking about All Japan or NXT UK or CMLL every week, people would watch them more. And especially for stuff that he apparently was watching but not talking about, like 205 Live. It would have been five extra minutes out of his day to just include it in the damn radio show, but he never did.
The other difference is that he is selling a product, he needs to address the things that his fanbase wants to hear about. If he only talked about CMLL, half of his subs would start to leave.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:24

cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01
XIV wrote: Mar 2nd, '21, 12:02
Booker of the year this year? Probably for me? Hunter Johnston / Delirious.

I don’t think ROH TV is the best most watchable show out there BUT, find me reasons why he’s not Booker of the year. Most stories have made sense, he hasn’t booked any murder mysteries, he hasn’t booked a guy fighting himself street fighter style and hasn’t booked every world title match as a gimmick match.

He booked a very competitive and competent Pure Title picture and generally the shows make a decent amount of sense as build from the start to the end in the way a good show should.

So that’s some of my reasoning, so please, counter this as to why Tony Khan is a better Booker. Also, you should leave Omega v Page booking out, seeing as that hasn’t actually really happened and they’ve dropped the ball on Page.
Delirious only booked 4 months in 2020, two of which were a tournament that you book in one sitting, at least Gedo booked 4 different tournaments and they weren't single elimination. He only booked ONE big show all 2020, because Scurll booked Jan-February. Incredibly lackluster considering what Khan, HHH, Rossy Ogawa, Sanshiro Takagi, Emi Sakura, NOSAWA, Gedo, even Joey Janela's GCW booked throughout the year. Hell, one month of Genki Horiguchi's Dragon Gate this year trumps everything Delirious did most of his 2010's.
I agree that lack of sample size hurts Delirious, but just because Gedo booked more doesn't mean too much if the more he booked was significantly worse (and Gedo's tournament booking over the past few years- and especially outside of the New Japan Cup, the only single elimination tournament) has been pretty crappy due to lack of follow-up.
What Delirious deserves credit for is
1) Booking a product that stands out from others by taking a different rout (i.e. long character packages followed by wrestling, with no bullsh*t and almost all clean finishes)
2)Adjusting to the realities of the pandemic well (he has set up a product where the lack of crowd actually enhances things by letting us hear the important things the wrestlers are saying (this is especially evident in Foundation matches, but happens in most matches. He's using the lack of crowd to help the wrestlers get their characters over (as opposed to WWE, whose plan was to fill the blank space by having their wrestlers make random noise).
cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01 Dropped the ball on Page!? He's one of the biggest babyfaces in the company! And did you miss Omega and Page's story? that lasted for months and months? Just because it's not basic single matches one after the other, it doesn't mean there wasn't a huge story there.
You mean the story where they build up to their big singles match with Page cutting this promo about how if he didn't beat Omega ti would consume him inside and hinted that he'd slip into a drunken depression... and then he lost to Kenny Omega and just moved on to the next hing like the loss had never happened?

Page isn't a top babyface because of anything AEW did. He's a top babyface because he accidentally stumbled on a catchphrase once by saying "cowboy sh*t," (if the fans in that building don't start chanting that, he's nowhere near as over) and because the fans thinks his alcoholism is funny (which I really hope wasn't Tony Khan's intention with this story).
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:25

cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:02
Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 2nd, '21, 20:43
But the difference between us and Dave is that Dave has sway. If Dave started talking about All Japan or NXT UK or CMLL every week, people would watch them more. And especially for stuff that he apparently was watching but not talking about, like 205 Live. It would have been five extra minutes out of his day to just include it in the damn radio show, but he never did.
The other difference is that he is selling a product, he needs to address the things that his fanbase wants to hear about. If he only talked about CMLL, half of his subs would start to leave.
I agree with that, but I don't see it as an "only" thing. If he's already watching the product anyway (like he does for CMLL and supposedly did for 205 Live, why not spend the ten minutes to talk about it?
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by cero2k » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:30

Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 2nd, '21, 20:54
I'm going to deal with the other paragraph in a separate post because that's a big thing right there, but as for this, all of those 500,000 or so people from the first few months were potential fans who were turned off by what they saw. I think it would behoove AEW to ask themselves "why?" Those were people willing to give a non-WWE product a chance, but they decided not to keep watching, and AEW doesn't have any of the usual excuses to fall back on like a lack of known stars or subpar production values or lack of a big, hot crowd that someone ROH or MLW or TNA have. These people were turned off by something/s that AEW did. If you fix whatever their problems were (and they have friends or a reviewer they like or whatever who is still watching to tell them that things have been fixed), they'll give you another chance.
You don't know that, I wasn't turned off by the program at all, I just don't have the bandwidth to watch it, I take a class at the same time and I don't have a TV to watch it in, nor I'm a big fan of watching wrestling at a specific hour. Consider that for many weeks, AEW's rating has surpassed 1M when considering the DVR numbers, meaning fans like me that just don't watch on TV during the specific time.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:43

cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:30
Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 2nd, '21, 20:54
I'm going to deal with the other paragraph in a separate post because that's a big thing right there, but as for this, all of those 500,000 or so people from the first few months were potential fans who were turned off by what they saw. I think it would behoove AEW to ask themselves "why?" Those were people willing to give a non-WWE product a chance, but they decided not to keep watching, and AEW doesn't have any of the usual excuses to fall back on like a lack of known stars or subpar production values or lack of a big, hot crowd that someone ROH or MLW or TNA have. These people were turned off by something/s that AEW did. If you fix whatever their problems were (and they have friends or a reviewer they like or whatever who is still watching to tell them that things have been fixed), they'll give you another chance.
You don't know that, I wasn't turned off by the program at all, I just don't have the bandwidth to watch it, I take a class at the same time and I don't have a TV to watch it in, nor I'm a big fan of watching wrestling at a specific hour. Consider that for many weeks, AEW's rating has surpassed 1M when considering the DVR numbers, meaning fans like me that just don't watch on TV during the specific time.
In that case
1. Dave, Wade, Johnson, etc. should be talking about the DVR numbers more (I think Keller is the only one who normally mentions them, and then usually only in regard to SD)
2. That number needs to be compared against the DVR number of people watching the first week, not the live viewership.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by cero2k » Mar 3rd, '21, 10:57

Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:24
I agree that lack of sample size hurts Delirious, but just because Gedo booked more doesn't mean too much if the more he booked was significantly worse (and Gedo's tournament booking over the past few years- and especially outside of the New Japan Cup, the only single elimination tournament) has been pretty crappy due to lack of follow-up.
What Delirious deserves credit for is
1) Booking a product that stands out from others by taking a different rout (i.e. long character packages followed by wrestling, with no bullsh*t and almost all clean finishes)
2)Adjusting to the realities of the pandemic well (he has set up a product where the lack of crowd actually enhances things by letting us hear the important things the wrestlers are saying (this is especially evident in Foundation matches, but happens in most matches. He's using the lack of crowd to help the wrestlers get their characters over (as opposed to WWE, whose plan was to fill the blank space by having their wrestlers make random noise).
Say what you will about your Gedo bias, booking one G1 is far more work than a single elimination match with an obvious winner.
(1) That was Jay Lethal's doing, not Delirious
(2) Doing the thing that a bunch of promotions had already been doing for months? Nope
Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:24
cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01 Dropped the ball on Page!? He's one of the biggest babyfaces in the company! And did you miss Omega and Page's story? that lasted for months and months? Just because it's not basic single matches one after the other, it doesn't mean there wasn't a huge story there.
You mean the story where they build up to their big singles match with Page cutting this promo about how if he didn't beat Omega ti would consume him inside and hinted that he'd slip into a drunken depression... and then he lost to Kenny Omega and just moved on to the next hing like the loss had never happened?

Page isn't a top babyface because of anything AEW did. He's a top babyface because he accidentally stumbled on a catchphrase once by saying "cowboy sh*t," (if the fans in that building don't start chanting that, he's nowhere near as over) and because the fans thinks his alcoholism is funny (which I really hope wasn't Tony Khan's intention with this story).
Is he not still i a drunken depression? Just because he's not IMMEDIATLY following up, doesn't mean that it's done and over, again, you're expecting WWE booking where things need to be followed up on the spot, or forgotten after a week.
I can't even begin to count the amount of time someone had an accidental 'phrase' that made them huge and were not able to keep the momentum, if you think that Page is only big because of an accidental catchphrase, then you're completely missing it and discrediting what he has been doing.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by cero2k » Mar 3rd, '21, 11:08

Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:43
In that case
1. Dave, Wade, Johnson, etc. should be talking about the DVR numbers more (I think Keller is the only one who normally mentions them, and then usually only in regard to SD)
2. That number needs to be compared against the DVR number of people watching the first week, not the live viewership.
1. it's irrelevant to them, they're focused on ratings and demos because that's when commercials run.
2. Sure, but the argument still holds, people didn't just leave because of booking.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 3rd, '21, 11:26

cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:57
Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:24
I agree that lack of sample size hurts Delirious, but just because Gedo booked more doesn't mean too much if the more he booked was significantly worse (and Gedo's tournament booking over the past few years- and especially outside of the New Japan Cup, the only single elimination tournament) has been pretty crappy due to lack of follow-up.
What Delirious deserves credit for is
1) Booking a product that stands out from others by taking a different rout (i.e. long character packages followed by wrestling, with no bullsh*t and almost all clean finishes)
2)Adjusting to the realities of the pandemic well (he has set up a product where the lack of crowd actually enhances things by letting us hear the important things the wrestlers are saying (this is especially evident in Foundation matches, but happens in most matches. He's using the lack of crowd to help the wrestlers get their characters over (as opposed to WWE, whose plan was to fill the blank space by having their wrestlers make random noise).
Say what you will about your Gedo bias, booking one G1 is far more work than a single elimination match with an obvious winner.
(1) That was Jay Lethal's doing, not Delirious
(2) Doing the thing that a bunch of promotions had already been doing for months? Nope
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.


cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:57
Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:24
cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01 Dropped the ball on Page!? He's one of the biggest babyfaces in the company! And did you miss Omega and Page's story? that lasted for months and months? Just because it's not basic single matches one after the other, it doesn't mean there wasn't a huge story there.
You mean the story where they build up to their big singles match with Page cutting this promo about how if he didn't beat Omega ti would consume him inside and hinted that he'd slip into a drunken depression... and then he lost to Kenny Omega and just moved on to the next hing like the loss had never happened?

Page isn't a top babyface because of anything AEW did. He's a top babyface because he accidentally stumbled on a catchphrase once by saying "cowboy sh*t," (if the fans in that building don't start chanting that, he's nowhere near as over) and because the fans thinks his alcoholism is funny (which I really hope wasn't Tony Khan's intention with this story).
Is he not still i a drunken depression? Just because he's not IMMEDIATLY following up, doesn't mean that it's done and over, again, you're expecting WWE booking where things need to be followed up on the spot, or forgotten after a week.
I can't even begin to count the amount of time someone had an accidental 'phrase' that made them huge and were not able to keep the momentum, if you think that Page is only big because of an accidental catchphrase, then you're completely missing it and discrediting what he has been doing.
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.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by XIV » Mar 3rd, '21, 11:56

Big Red Machine wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:24
cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01
XIV wrote: Mar 2nd, '21, 12:02
Booker of the year this year? Probably for me? Hunter Johnston / Delirious.

I don’t think ROH TV is the best most watchable show out there BUT, find me reasons why he’s not Booker of the year. Most stories have made sense, he hasn’t booked any murder mysteries, he hasn’t booked a guy fighting himself street fighter style and hasn’t booked every world title match as a gimmick match.

He booked a very competitive and competent Pure Title picture and generally the shows make a decent amount of sense as build from the start to the end in the way a good show should.

So that’s some of my reasoning, so please, counter this as to why Tony Khan is a better Booker. Also, you should leave Omega v Page booking out, seeing as that hasn’t actually really happened and they’ve dropped the ball on Page.
Delirious only booked 4 months in 2020, two of which were a tournament that you book in one sitting, at least Gedo booked 4 different tournaments and they weren't single elimination. He only booked ONE big show all 2020, because Scurll booked Jan-February. Incredibly lackluster considering what Khan, HHH, Rossy Ogawa, Sanshiro Takagi, Emi Sakura, NOSAWA, Gedo, even Joey Janela's GCW booked throughout the year. Hell, one month of Genki Horiguchi's Dragon Gate this year trumps everything Delirious did most of his 2010's.
I agree that lack of sample size hurts Delirious, but just because Gedo booked more doesn't mean too much if the more he booked was significantly worse (and Gedo's tournament booking over the past few years- and especially outside of the New Japan Cup, the only single elimination tournament) has been pretty crappy due to lack of follow-up.
What Delirious deserves credit for is
1) Booking a product that stands out from others by taking a different rout (i.e. long character packages followed by wrestling, with no bullsh*t and almost all clean finishes)
2)Adjusting to the realities of the pandemic well (he has set up a product where the lack of crowd actually enhances things by letting us hear the important things the wrestlers are saying (this is especially evident in Foundation matches, but happens in most matches. He's using the lack of crowd to help the wrestlers get their characters over (as opposed to WWE, whose plan was to fill the blank space by having their wrestlers make random noise).
cero2k wrote: Mar 3rd, '21, 10:01 Dropped the ball on Page!? He's one of the biggest babyfaces in the company! And did you miss Omega and Page's story? that lasted for months and months? Just because it's not basic single matches one after the other, it doesn't mean there wasn't a huge story there.
You mean the story where they build up to their big singles match with Page cutting this promo about how if he didn't beat Omega ti would consume him inside and hinted that he'd slip into a drunken depression... and then he lost to Kenny Omega and just moved on to the next hing like the loss had never happened?

Page isn't a top babyface because of anything AEW did. He's a top babyface because he accidentally stumbled on a catchphrase once by saying "cowboy sh*t," (if the fans in that building don't start chanting that, he's nowhere near as over) and because the fans thinks his alcoholism is funny (which I really hope wasn't Tony Khan's intention with this story).
Well. I was gonna argue my point back to Cero, but BRM you basically managed it in this reply! No need to duplicate!

THIS.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by cero2k » 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.
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.
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Re: 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 3rd, '21, 23:23

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.
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