ACW: The good and the bad (no ugly)

I was over my neighbor's house for Thanksgiving today, and they have a non-piece of shit computer. So I was surfing the web there and checking up on all the cool e-fed related stuff that I just haven't been looking at because my video card at home has been shot and I didn't feel like scrolling massively.

I checked in on All-Star Championship Wrestling, a fed I've been trying to follow as of late. I didn't get a chance to read their latest PPV, Ready or Not until today. I was glad to know that they didn't really progress much after that right now. Only one other show was put up after that, so I was able to catch up easily.

I have to say that I was halfway thoroughly impressed with it. The character building pieces are brilliant. They have a lot of talented writers who really get wrestling storylines. The best was the Seymour Almasy/Andy Sharp/Khristain Keller arc where Sharp beat Almasy for the TV Title in what was considered a fluke; Almasy's body was so beaten down by his hyperactive schedule that it just gave out and Sharp got the much-too-easy victory. Their rematch was at the PPV, but there was a catch; if Almasy won, he also got to pick the stip for his title match at their flagship PPV Legends against World Champ Keller (Almasy won their Royal Rumble-esque event, End Game, to earn the shot), but if Sharp retained, Keller got to name the stip. Plus there was the inherent tension between Almasy and Sharp. Sharp needing to prove that he was indeed as good or better than his friend and didn't need to take advantage of his weakened state to win the match.

But then we got to the actual match itself, and I really couldn't be bothered to read it fully. It's just... I can't really explain it. I can't get into the way that the match was written. And mostly every match I've seen is written like the math was.

Basically, ACW matches are written in narrative form, which isn't bad in and of itself, but there's a lot of flowery prose, a little omniscience from the narrator... I don't think it works for a wrestling match. Now, I think that it's just a matter of personal taste, but still, it's a big thing for me to overcome.

I guess I'm used to seeing wrestling matches either be written in straight PBP, PBP with dry narrative mixed in, or in dry narrative (which is how we wrote matches for UXW... we didn't have announcers because in storyline, we couldn't afford them). But that's how I think wrestling should be presented. Especially if you make a big deal about your announcers.

I'm totally not knocking ACW though, because I did apply there, and I still might be joining soon. But I guess I'm gonna have to start training myself to read their style of matches if I do choose to join.

Because you can miss a whole lot if you skim through a match.