3 thoughts on “Is Quack a giant nerd? Yes.”

  1. The thing he seems to be overlooking is that kayfabe used to be an accepted part of the experience. And it was that way for a really long time.

    I don’t give a shit what people who don’t like wrestling think of it, whether it’s real or not. Aside from some nutjobs and grannies (back when grannies used to like wrestling) no one really believed what they were seeing was “real.” But part of the experience, of the fun of it, was pretending that it was.

    He did a nice job of assuring non-fans that we’re not a bunch of slack-jawed honyockers, but is this something we really need to see?

  2. It’s one of the more thought-provoking speeches on post-death of kayfabe wrestling I’ve heard. Probably the only one. 

    From a wrestling point of view, being able to stretch wrestling from ‘guys fighting over belt” to something like what Lucha Underground and Chikara are doing is immense for the fanbase of wrestling in general. Widening the net, so to speak, to allow fans of comic books, mythology and beyond to know that there can be wrestling for them.

    For a game like WWW, though, it shows that as long as you keep some of the familiar tropes (titles to win, solutions by violence), there’s no limit to what the promotions or storylines can be. Now that kayfabe is dead, you can now use kayfabe for so much more than you could before.

    tl;dr: Kayfabe is dead, long live (the new) kayfabe.

  3. Wrestling through other lenses is a great metaphor.

    Chikara (at its best) is wrestling through the lens of comic books.

    Lucha Underground is wrestling through the lens of telenovela.

    But they’re outliers – the vast majority of pro wrestling is still through the lens of legit sport competition, and it really doesn’t have to be!

    The athletic part keeps evolving and improving, but the storytelling part is basically the same it’s been since the 90s, which was only one or two steps outside of what it was in the 70s.

    I think it’s worth agitating for progressive visions of pro wrestling.

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