Saturday, November 19, 2005

Finish him!

This entry inspired by this thread over at PTC.

In the vast world of e-fedding, there are going to be hundreds, maybe even thousands of different, unique characters, and all of them are going to have their own, maybe unique, maybe not so unique finishers. It's only inevitable that people are going to have duplicate finishers. The SpoilerBomb (WHAM!) and the Humility Bomb are for all intensive purposes, the same move (and basically, they're the same move as Undertaker's Last Ride... which is a cool finisher, but not for Taker... he needs to stick with the Tombstone, dammit!). It's much like Sting and Bret Hart both finishing matches with the Scorpion Death Lock/Sharpshooter. It's only natural when you only have a limited amount of finisher-caliber moves. No one really will buy moves like a normal dragon suplex being a be-all, end-all finisher (although it is a very credible match finisher in the right context). So you have to stick with heavy hitters/traditional finishers.

However, I've noticed a tendency for many handlers to gravitate towards a small enclave of moves that includes Ace Crusher, Shooting Star Press, Superkick, Crippler Crossface, Powerbomb (without any further specification), Figure Four, Burning Hammer, Emerald Fusion, STF, Sharpshooter and not much else. Talk about not broadening the selection process.

It's good for a few characters in any circuit to have moves like that as their finisher. But when you have a few characters per fed with the same finisher from that pool or from any pool of moves really, it just hurts the fed in question.

Much like a good theme song can help identify your character, a good, unique finisher can help define him/her even more, especially given that while you may change a theme song several times during your career, it's much rarer to change a finisher during your career.

The move you choose doesn't even have to be a SUPER MEGA DEATH HEAD DROPPING DESTROYER like you see in the unlockable section of moves in your PlayStation wrestling game. Although it's boss to see people use stuff like the Karelin Driver (shameless plug ), the Candadian Destroyer or the Ganso Bomb, I think it's even cooler to see old school stuff as a finisher. Take Craig Miles, whose finisher is a Randy Savage elbow drop. In the day when people try to make their aerial finishers as CAH-RAAAAAZY as possible, seeing someone use the Savage elbow drop is markout-worthy. I'd love to see someone come in and use the Heart Punch or the Iron Claw as their finisher. I'd mark out for days.

But the moral of the story here is, it doesn't matter how fancy or simple your finisher is. It's just a matter of it being unique, or not ubiquitous in your environment. If you think about it, there are probably thousands and thousands of variations on all holds, so you can probably get in the hundreds on unique finishing caliber moves. Just don't gravitate to the same ol' same ol'.

5 comments:

Josh Ray said...

My finisher for "The Sergeant" is called "Corrective Training" and it's a reverse guillotine where the opponent is put into a reverse DDT but instead, Sergeant's legs wrap around the opponent and it is turned into a submission. I actually use this as a submission in real life, haha... I just made a name up for it. I don't think it's used in Pro Wrestling.

Anonymous said...

I've always been a fan of the Northern Lights Suplex (w/ bridge of course...)

-edmunds

Anonymous said...

I think part of the problem is people take the finishers from their favourites when they start. That's why I use a variation of the Implant DDT (Dragon's Bite), combination of a neckbreaker and the Doomsday Device (Blitzkrieg), and Doug William's Chaos Theory (That's Entertainment!) - they're tno the type of move you expect to see everyone pulling off, and the Dragon's Bite and That's Entertainment could be used by anyone as either finishers or transitional, but Brown and Mr Entertainment have them perfected.

-Karl

Jeffrey Paternostro said...

The fact that you wrote an entire piece on finishers without including the most noteworthy finisher of all time makes Baby Jesus cry.

TH said...

You're right. Next time, I'll be more careful and be sure to mention the mighty fury of the move known only as THE SLICERFIRE~!