The Worst Criticism of E-Fedding Ever

Oooh, a post!

As many of you know, my love for wrestling has been rekindled in the last two years, so much so that it's grown my interests past the WWE and the other company masquerading as a major wrestling promotion (TNA for the rubes out there). Chikara is pretty much my favorite fed going right now. With their comic lucharesu stylings, it's hard not to see why. Their message board can be rough sometimes. It's a great read for the most part, but when they start getting on the hate train, well, game over, man, game over.

One such example of this came in about e-fedding. Look on Page 3 and get this nugget of blissful ignorance:

if you want to pretend to be a wrestler find a shitty wrestling school and train. or find a good wrestling school and train.

dont sit in your house typing about how hardcore your imaginary personality is...

There's training centers all over --- if you live in the north east theres litterally 100's of places you can learn, and im sure a smattering everywhere else as well. Some you can get good deals at.

Just become a wrestler. even if its for a little bit.

Oooh, where to start.

For one, most people who participate in e-fedding, at least in the FW/PTC corner, can't just pick up and go to wrestling school. For some, they can't afford it. For others, they're too entrenched in their real careers and just do e-fedding as a game or *shudder* hobby. For some others, health concerns get in the way. It's way easier said than done, people.

Two, wrestling is a fucked up business. Let me repeat that, wrestling is a fucked up business. You take body-degrading bumps every night you work. You travel long distances in cramped cars, or have to end up spending all your purse if you want to fly to where you're going. You work for sleazy promoters. You may end up getting addicted to painkillers just to deal with the aches and pains. You share a locker room with some of the most depraved individuals ever (I've heard the stories, they're not pretty). I mean, God bless people who have the mental constitution to enter the business, but it's not for everyone. Why should people who want to express their fandom by pretending to be a wrestler compromise their relatively normal lives for the freakshow that is professional wrestling?

Three, people e-fed to express their creativity (or try to at least). In wrestling, even at the low indie level, your creativity is stifled from the very start. You have bookers and writers telling you what your gimmick is and what you're supposed to say. Granted, there's way more freedom at the indie level than there is in the terribly-scripted WWE or TNA, but still, a lot of times, you don't have control over your content. Screw that, unless the fedhead you're working for is a total douche, you have complete freedom. No restraints at all. Sometimes, this can be a bad thing, but I'd rather err on the side of letting people be free rather than restricting them.

Honestly, this criticism of e-fedding smacks of ignorant elitism. Oooh, let's make fun of the roleplayers! They're D&D nerds! My response? So fucking what? Everyone has their nerdy side, and if they don't, well, they probably have anuses tighter than an infant's belly button. Next thing you know, they'll be saying you can't play fantasy football unless you try out for the NFL, or that you can't criticize actors unless you were in a school play. Total and complete horsecrap.

There's no better way to express your fandom for wrestling than to pretend that you're a wrestler. Live vicariously through e-fedding (and through Smackdown vs. RAW or other video games). Keep your health and your creativity intact. This is a great game. Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Unfamiliarity Breeds Contempt

What is it about tournaments that gets everyone's panties in an uproar? Christ, you would think that we'd all have learned our lessons by now... tournaments where diverse crowds come together and mesh are recipes for disaster. A lot of times, you get guys who think their shit doesn't stink coming into a tournament, posting something that is unfamiliar to the tournament administration and then ends up losing. Then, afterwards, there's some kind of stink. This time, it wasn't so much raised publicly in the area of e-fedding by the guy who felt he was wronged, but it by two of my other fellow bloggers, Billy Ferraro and Dave Brunk.

The incident happened in something called the Total J Cup Tournament, which was entered by a bunch of people from feds that I don't know... and then Pete Russo, who entered Impulse/Randall Knox. Apparently, he got jobbed in the first round to a guy who broke some of the cardinal rules of e-fedding, some real asshole n00b shit. I read the excerpt of the RP that this guy wrote and actually bete Impulse with. He basically rewrote history for Impulse's character to retrofit the promo he had in mind for whatever opponent he had going for him. It's one thing to put on the no-sell for a guy you don't know about (one of the more annoying techniques I come across in my travels), but it's downright unfair to write someone else's character, especially someone foreign to the community.

Billy was the first to speak out, and he tore the whole operation, the organizer, the RPer (whom I wouldn't let within a 5-website radius of any tournament or fed I would theoretically run), Ben Halkum for associating with them and trying to bring them into the FW fold... Brunk then followed up with a scathing tome of isolationism, with Katz following up in the comments that the reason why it happened was because folks like me and Halkum are too nice.

Let's face it... it's basically the kind of thing that I took the WfWA to task for. The fact that objectively, Pete's beef is way, way, way, WAY more legit than the assfucks at the WfWA who bitched about Nova's talent amounting to that of a midcarder in their feds beating out the "stellar" writing of their luminaries like Khalid Jad, really doesn't make much of a difference. On the surface it's bush league, but not because they're complaining about this kind of shabby treatment.

I won't take them to task for feeling the way they do, but I will say I told you so.

I was naive once, I thought I could invite people from different communities to partake in a TEAM event and judge it fairly enough that everyone would be happy, even if they didn't win. Hey, I had PTC guys in my tournaments and they adjusted fine. Of course, it didn't hurt that they were enough good e-wrestlers coming over to give the image that they'd be treated fairly, but I can't put over the maturity of their guys that came over and even didn't place well in events enough, the straggling Chris Bagwell aside (a straggler that actually didn't get disgruntled until I left my post, actually).

So I sought out more communities, which was a mistake. I had the luxury of going to a community that featured a lot of older handlers, a lot of handlers who knew FW personalities via the fWo and Katz's headway that he made shilling for NFW over there first. And I paid the price. It took a long time for me to get my enthusiasm back, and you could say that I never fully did maybe until now.

But the thing was that the lesson was mainly public. It was there plain as day - People fear what they don't understand, and they lash out at the stranger because it's the easy thing to do, especially when the people we're talking about are younger and more stubborn in what they think is good. A tactic that most sane people think is bushleague might be considered "taking the bull by the horns" or... wait for it... "avant-garde" by some other retarded communities where dick-measuring between characters is done mainly with banners and graphics rather than writing quality.

It's because of crap like that that I don't fully disagree with what Brunk had to say. Sure, e-fed isolationism is a sad thing to practice, but it's a very welcoming strategy to practice at times. In a world where every community is different and where partnerships like the one shared by FW and PTC are few and far between, it's not worth the effort to make a bridge so that testy armies can have chances to get at someone else's throats.

That's why I give this advice. If you want to try something new, go to a different community or the like, be prepared to take a lot of shit. Carry the burden silently. Don't bitch in public when you get beat on bullshit tactics. It's bullshit, but take it to the man, and if he doesn't listen to you, fuck, it's their loss, not yours. Know that you're going into hostile territory and that you may never be able to win anyone over with a style of writing that is unfamiliar.

This is still a game dominated by the immature and the insular. FW and PTC are the exceptions to the rule. We do this for fun, and I think that the options available to us are good enough to satisfy unless you're not a fan of delays between cards and want something more regular. It's not worth it to go somewhere where the kids rule the roost and just want more fresh meat to carve up and serve to their n00bish "main eventers".

El Plagiarismo

Most crimes are forgiveable. Most crimes are rehabilitatable [sic]. In the most general sense, if you screw up, you can be forgiven and reaccepted. There are exceptions, the most notable being those found dead to rights as being a plagiarist at PTC. Given that most PTC feds foster a different kind of writing than what you'd find at FW or other promo fed circuits, plagiarism is a much, much larger problem there.

When a plagiarist is brought to light, well, it can get ugly, quickly. More often than not, the plagiarist isn't really welcome in any PTC-related fed or event. Example, this thread where a returning guy by the handle "Educator" is trying to make friendly with the community. He was perhaps the most infamous plagiarist in AWC history, using stolen work to gain all the top titles in the fed.

So, no one should be surprised at the reception he's gotten thus far, and you know what? I don't blame them one bit. There are certain things you should understand about this game and about the environments it is played in. You don't go looking for a second chance at PTC if you've stolen someone's work. I mean, it doesn't matter if you've stolen it from a fellow e-wrestler (which to me, is the ultimate in unforgiveable crimes) or from some author on the Internet somewhere. Don't expect them to want to take you back if you've done that in the past.

I mean, to some it may seem irrational, but plagiarism isn't easily monitored. Once someone is found out to be a plagiarist, the fedheads and interfedheads have to now check every single one of his/her work against Google. Really, anything else, fed cancers, shooting, etc. is easily monitored, and it's easy to see if people change or not.

And for all those who think that plagiarism doesn't really hurt anyone, well, think again. The Jewish religion has been the center of a worldwide conspiracy because of a plagiarized work. Have you ever heard of the book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? It's a book that's regarded as the manifesto for Jewish world domination, trumpeted by anti-Semite groups everywhere. It's also a raging fake, a plagiarism of a satirical book about Napoleon III.

That is an outlandish example, but really, if I were running a PTC fed or a writing event at PTC, why the hell should I want a plagiarist involved? Regardless of what you think about the offense, PTC takes it seriously. If you don't like their stance, then go somewhere else and either try to start fresh or pull the wool over their eyes. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Wah, wah, I got sand in my e-box

One of the things about retiring from active e-fedding is that I really don't have any accountability to anyone anymore, so I don't have to watch what I say... well, that's a lie. I don't want to alienate people, but really I don't have to work with them either. That's why you shouldn't unbookmark this thing. In addition to Project Discovery Channel, I'll still have some goodies up here, mainly me reminiscing, ranting, raving or doing the fantasy-fantasy booker thing. Even if RPing isn't fun anymore, talking about it sure is!

And boy, do I love talking about things. Why else would I have started this if I didn't? Sure, I had the news and show-opinion hookup, but I really started this just to ruminate on abstract concepts and trends (or as Katz once said, comparing the pros and cons of kumquats). I wanted to talk about things that I liked and things that I didn't like. Today, I'm gonna talk about something that probably pisses me off the most of anything that can piss someone off in e-wrestling - publicly carrying on about results.

I had to deal with this in a BIG way back in 2007 with the WfWA's petty bitchiness about how their guys finished in the TEAM ToC. Honestly, if you were around for that, and most of the readership here was, you knew how big a clusterfuck it was. If not, well, basically it boiled down to that entire community pretty much bitching me and my judges out because their guys didn't finish 1-2-3 in the ToC. They blasted guys like Nova, Tchu and Ravager midcarders. The only person who was gracious about the whole thing was Christian Light's handler, and that was because he placed 4th. I was accused of playing favorites, only inviting them to make "my circle" look good (which was ludicrous because at heart, my "circle" is A1E, and the final didn't even have a FW-related handler in it), demanding privately that I give "valid reasoning" for why I ranked them so low, and then arguing with it when I gave it. It was a nightmare.

It would be nice if the people "buying into their own shit" was limited to communities that didn't have prior working relationships. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Honestly, I would have expected better, especially since the miserable in this situation was from the PTC circuit, but then again, the last time there was an all-out e-fed meltdown, it happened from someone who came from the FW/A1 side of things. It goes to show that there are assholes on both sides of the coin, right?

But just in case you've been living under a rock, which I admittedly have been doing for a couple of weeks, someone else, the handler of Chris Bagwell, just went off about losing in his TEAM Invitational Tournament match. It was in response to a light-hearted blog post by Billy Ferrero. It degenerated into basically the guy named Shane (why do all the people who blow up go by that name?) and all the FW heavyweights, Russo, Brunk, even Shinder himself. I responded too. It wasn't nice, and I'm not going to be nice here.

Basically, the worst thing you can do is bitch about your match publicly. For one, you're a bad sport if you do it. Why you'd want to be immature and ruin something that's supposed to be fun by throwing insults and accusations around is beyond me. Two, you put the booker on eggshells. You make them think that they're not being fair, and then it skews the results in the future. More future results are in doubt now because the booker is possibly influenced by your bitching. Three, it causes massive public dischord and people are then repulsed. Why should someone go to a place where people aren't happy with results?

Basically, what this Bagwell guy did was damage the integrity of TEAM. Even though I've retired and handed the keys over to Shinder, it still pisses me off that someone would have the gall to submarine the integrity of a place I helped build, especially over something as trivial as a tournament match. Here's a fucking newsflash. This is a competition. People win, people lose. This isn't a circle jerk. It's also subjective. One man's offal is another man's feast. If you lose, oh well. Put your big boy or big girl pants on and deal with it.

Am I saying you should be happy with losing? No, that would be hypocritical of me. I don't like losing, and there are times when I take it pretty hard. There were several times that I looked at a match result and I thought that there was no way I should have lost. It happened most of the time when I was up against Housefly in A1E battling for the A1E Championship or against Trip X in EPW. Did I complain about those losses in public in a way that was accusatory to the people deciding the matches? No, I didn't. I vented to friends, I inhaled and exhaled. I got over it, and I realized that the A1E voters and Brunk had their reasons for their decisions. And in the end, I was cool with it, because let's face it, it's not like Housefly or Stevens are slouchy characters, nor are their handlers bozos. They're two iconic characters handled by two talented men.

Why this prick can't realize the same for his match is beyond me. Why he couldn't have just vented to his friends who would have sympathized with him, I don't know. Why he couldn't have just left it to the PMs he sent back and forth with Shinder, I have no clue. But he had to go and take his beef public. What does that accomplish? Who does he get to rally to his side? The FW people who've been there before with the WfWA fiasco? The people there who've been in internal FW OOC dramas? People who actually thought that Duke Williams beat him, Duke Williams, who is handled by Al Larcher... hardly the picture of a FW stronghold? Please.

He says he's putting TEAM on ban. Yeah, okay, that's really going to hurt the fed. Seriously, TEAM doesn't need him, and really, if he's going to react to losing that badly, he doesn't need TEAM, because his blood pressure would rise every time he lost a match in TEAM. This game needs a lot fewer self-important douchebags like him and more people like Ryan Aston. Here's another guy who was unhappy with his loss in the first round of the same tournament, but outside of an offhand reply to the blog post in question, he took it in stride. That's the sign of a guy who gets it.

In the end, this isn't serious business. It's a fucking game. If you can't have fun playing a game, then you need to get your head checked. If you can't take losing to the point where you think it's a vast right-wing conspiracy if you don't win, you should hang up the e-boots and take up needlepoint, because this isn't for you.

In closing, Katz, I don't think you ever thought kumquats could get this vitriolic, could you? ;)