Thursday, February 16, 2006

Looking into the future [FW.com]

Sean Williams, handler of Seymour Almasy among others, recently applied to NEW. One of the reasons why he joined was to "get back to the roots" of the hobby, ie, short, "wrestling promo" styled RPs rather than the 10-page novellas that he normally writes for GCW PPVs or for tourney matches like in GTT5. When I asked for feedback about my Suleimon RP for the next AWC's Bloodlust PPV, and Josh Young, handler of Red Rock, said that he liked the RP because it focused on wrestling, and "not many people these days focus on the wrestling part of EW." In the same token, when I first showed up to PTC and showed the kind of work I had been doing in other feds, people remarked that it was "what the hobby used to be to them."

I'm concerned with what I was hearing/reading. If the FW.com/A1Wrestling/ENN multi-verse of e-fedding was the "past" to those in the PTC world, does that mean we're destined to become what PTC and PTC feds have become now? I wonder if it's a natural evolution of the hobby or whether it's another sign of the slow death that professional wrestling and the online culture it supports seems to be undergoing.

Either way, it scares the shit out of me.

I mean, don't get me wrong... I love being a part of AWC and the greater PTC community. I wouldn't try to be an integral part of it if I didn't, but a part of me can't understand how people can post RPs that have nothing to do with wrestling there or try to run angles that have nothing to do with wrestling. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you want to be in e-fedding, you should like to both write and like wrestling and doing wrestling angles. I don't think it's too hard to combine them if you're truly passionate about wrestling.

I can never understand how someone can come into a tournament and write an RP for said tournament that didn't a) mention the tournament, b) mention the opponent, or c) even mention wrestling at all. Virgil Ambrosi's first offering in GTT5 hit that trifecta. And he still advanced over Maggot.

I know now that my RP was kinda shitty. It was the first one I had done in that sort of style. But at least I had a wrestling mindset.

But the thing with GTT5 is that it's not really a wrestling tournament. It's an RPing tournament at heart, because they don't even provide the results in any kind of wrestling format. The results are the judges' detailed explanations of why they picked the match they picked.

So I guess the format fits. But it distresses me that it's that way.

But I won't sit here and tell the folks over there how to do things. It still makes me uneasy, but they do what they do, and people like to do it that way.

I still shirk at the thought of there not being a place on the Internet where we do things the A1/FW way. To have no place on the web where people cut wrestling promos or do old school wrestling angles would be criminal.

I don't want our little corner of the e-wrestling world to change too much. No change is bad. So's drastic change. If we can change in different ways that wouldn't affect our basic style, I'd love it. But I don't want us to be another PTC.

See, I have a very strict yet very broad view about what I think e-fedding should be like. It's strict in the fact that I think it should be run much in the same way a real-life wrestling fed is run. But it's broad in that we need feds run like A1E and like NFW and like AWC and like ACW all at the same time.

So what can I do to preserve this? Well, I will continue to mark for folks who do wrestling. I will continue to run all my characters with an emphasis on wrestling, no matter where they are.

And hopefully, this blog has a little something to do with keeping people in-line with wrestling.

Either way though, I am only one person. I can't change the future by myself.

So I can only hope that things at least stay somewhat similar to the way they are now.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

To address the natural evolution aspect of your post: I don't think that's accurate honestly, in my opinion. If it was a natural progression of the hobby, I would have "evolved" a long time ago. I've been doing this almost 17 years now. Same deal with Paul Miller, Chad Merritt, and so on. I simply believe that there comes a point in a handler's e-fedding life where he hits a peak at this style, and is presented with a possible alternative. He will either choose to pursue a line of roleplay such as AWC uses, or he will continue to consider our style his "thing" and stay with that. Some people simply don't like that other style. I'm one of them. Some of us like it to a degree. I'd put people like Steve Thomas in that group. He does both styles. Same with Katz. Some of us jump all the way over for the most part. I'd say Russo is a good example, though he still does RP feds on a smaller scale.

It's just a preference thing, in my opinion. But hey, it's just an opinion.

Anonymous said...

You and I have spoken about this a bit on AIM, but I have to reiterate that I couldn't agree with you more. BOO 10 page novels about international superspy assassin vampire characters who were raped by their babysitters, turned to pro wrestling, then murdered the promotion's world champion, YAY the up-and-coming blue chipper trying to scrape his way into the main event because he knows he can take out the old guys that stand above him.

Anonymous said...

http://gtt5.primetimecentral.net/index.php?id=35&rpid=236

There is a great arguement on what I feel you talked about.

"How anything so numbingly tedious and disconnected can be celebrated ties my brain in knots. Has mindless melodrama become the standard we champion? When did presentation, period, begin to overrule presentation of character? How did addressing an undistinguishing audience take precedence over addressing the situation?"

If that doesn't put it best, I dunno what does. Hats off to Jeff, who was in NFW, for putting it best.