Since Wrestlemania there’s been nothing but stories about John Cena winning an amazing 17th title, blah blah blah… It’s a “History making moment”, yadda yadda yadda…

Like…of course he did. It’s the storyline. It’s quite literally “in the script”.

This isn’t an achievement. Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

I get it. I loved Wrestling growing up. Back when we all WERE pretending it was real; Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker, etc… But I thought at some point they steered into the whole “entertainment” aspect when most of us grew the hell up and clued into the absurdity of it all.

  • vxx@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 days ago

    It’s a soap opera with fighting. Of course fans are talking about the characters and the story. Nobody talking about anything that happens in a soap Opera will add that it’s just fiction, they’re talking about the events.

  • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    We’ve regressed into believing a lot of imaginary things are real.

    Wrestling is the least of our worries.

    • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      Since when is that allowed!? /s

      I’m fine with that. My bigger question was simply why am I seeing it in sports news instead of entertainment news all of a sudden? It’s not a sport. it’s a variety show sponsored by the makers of steroids.

  • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Yeah, that’s kinda silly. I can see an argument that WWE wrestlers are athletes, no problems there. But they don’t actually perform in any sort of athletic competition, which makes thinking of it as a “sport” a little weird. If WWE is a sport, then so is ballet.

  • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Counterpoint- all sports are silly. That’s why they are called games.

    I don’t dunk on wrestling fans anymore because people are free to enjoy whatever they want. But it’s always been like this. It didn’t change - you did. Personal growth!

    • Goretantath@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      Not all sports are games, if you cant quickly grab some friends and head out to play it, its not a game.

        • hobovision@lemm.ee
          0·
          8 days ago

          What athletic competition would not be a game if all sports are games? I mean, honestly, what is the difference you see between “sport” and “athletic competition”?

          You can extend or contract “game” as much as you want, but I can’t think of a definition of game that would encompass all sports but not all athletic competitions (if there really is a difference).

          • ExtantHuman@lemm.ee
            0·
            8 days ago

            Track and field events are not games.

            Gymnastics or any kind of event involving a choreographed routine. Diving. Really any kind of race.

            I don’t consider all athletic competitions to be sports.

            • hobovision@lemm.ee
              0·
              7 days ago

              Why track and field events not games? They have rules, can be won or lost, and can be played casually if you think that is a requirment.

              Take shot put, hammer throw, and javelin, for example. The game is who can throw the object in a certain way the furtherest. I could play a shot put game with some friends at a river bank by drawing a line in the sand and seeing who can huck the heaviest rock on the shore the furthest.

              There’s a reason they call them Olympic Games.

              Really any activity with some structure is a game if it is play and not “real”, even better if it can help practice a skill useful in life. There is a difference between a running race (a game) and running for your life from a bear (not a game). Between MMA and a street fight. Between war games and a shooting war.

              • ExtantHuman@lemm.ee
                0·
                7 days ago

                Nah. Those aren’t games. The rules are often quite loose. You’re often not even directly competing with anyone else. Like, one person acts, and later another person acts and the results are compared. Your opponent’s actions don’t affect your results. Those field events don’t even necessarily have a set order to act on… people just wander in and out making their attempts, it’s mostly them competing with themselves.

                You could run a race asynchronously as well, but time constraints prevent that.

                Games have action, AND reaction. They have strategy. Throw things harder isn’t a strategy. Run faster longer isn’t a strategy.

                • hobovision@lemm.ee
                  0·
                  7 days ago

                  The rules are quite loose? Why else would they have eagle eyed officials watching closely to disqualify athletes for infractions.

                  Games can absolutely be played asynchronously. Games can have scoring systems instead of head-to-head.

                  Would you say pinball is not a game?

                  I didn’t think I needed to get out the dictionary definition of game, but I hope this clears it up… Definitions from Oxford Languages: “noun, a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.”

        • hobovision@lemm.ee
          0·
          8 days ago

          If your game doesn’t involve traveling above 100mph and pulling more than 2g it’s not a sport 😤

      • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 days ago

        That’s not the definition of a game, though.

        Loads of games need co-ordinated access to specific resources, from chess to the 2001 release of Halo. Doesn’t mean they’re not games.

        The line between games and sports is entirely arbitrary, and changes from person to person.

    • moonlight@fedia.io
      0·
      8 days ago

      I agree to some extent, but there’s an important difference between sport and performance. WWE is categorically separate from say, BJJ. Sure, they both have guys rolling around on the floor, and they’re both kinda silly, but one is a real competition with rules and skill while the other is a predetermined show.

      • faythofdragons@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        Okay, so as a teenager I was a super nerd and got into swords. I took olympic style fencing lessons first, then got into the ren faire and also did some stage combat. Sadly, I have health problems and I couldn’t keep my knees in place, and had to quit. The difference between those is probably the same difference between WWE style wrestling, and BJJ. One is done with choreography, one is a competition.

        They’re both sports. I don’t understand why people think the choreography somehow means it doesn’t have skills or rules? It was the same skillset, different rules. Stage combat was unpadded and used heavier weapons that left more bruises when we fucked up the choreography. They’re different, sure, but the amount of overlap is underappreciated.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        there’s an important difference between sport and performance

        Sure. Namely, that sports tend to be “competitive” while performances tend to be entirely about spectacle. But to claim that Simone Biles is a Real Athlete while Britt Baker isn’t, because one of them does her leaps and tumbles and flexibility stunts at Olympic sanctioned events and the other does it during AEW matches… you’re really ignoring the substance for the pastiche.

        What one might argue “ruins” wrestling is all the phoney accolades various performers receive. Claiming you’re “The Best Wrestler” in a staged performance is meaningless, because its clearly a scripted fight. At the same time, very few people showing up to a nationally televised event are anything less than exceptional in athletic talent. And the exceptions are primarily there for their exceptional comedic talents.

      • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        not disagreeing with you - I find performative “wrestle drama” absolutely, mind numbingly pointless. my preference is to participate in (and ocassionally watch) unscripted combat sport.

        however… I have trained competitive martial arts for decades (muay thai, bjj, others) and most of these “wrestling” participants are pretty skilled athletes. it takes training to turn combinations of techniques designed to injure into something reasonably harmless. there is a pretty fine line separating sparring from a fight.

        I know you know this, but its still useful to remember that these players are actors as well as athletes and that can obviously be pretty inviting for a lot of viewers.

      • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        I don’t think all sports need to be contests, that’s just the most common association people have. Surfing and rock-climbing are still sports even if you never enter a competition.

        • moonlight@fedia.io
          0·
          8 days ago

          There’s definitely a grey area. “Sports” is a spectrum from competitive team based games, to any recreational activity that requires athleticism.

          In this case my point is that wrestling presents itself as a competitive sport, while that aspect of it is fake.

  • tacosanonymous@lemm.ee
    0·
    8 days ago

    In a way, it is impressive. They make those decisions based on certain factors and his ability to draw crowds, attention, money has been sustained for a long time.

    I don’t think people are deluding themselves.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    0·
    8 days ago

    The audience participating in the performance by pretending that it’s real is central to the meaning of kayfabe. That never changed, even if it only recently expanded to some media that’s in your news feed.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Have you listened to any sports commentator? They all talk about <insert current game on tv> as if it’s the most important, world-changing event ever, and every little detail had some significance.

    My god, baseball is a game for (as Brits would say) boffins. Fans of the game could put meth-head ravers to sleep. I’ve worked on more exciting spreadsheets for business planning.

    And football has become just as bad, with the incessant pre-game/post-game commentary examining every nuance of a play - “I’m pretty sure if the inner aglet of his left shoe had moved the other way, we’d be talking about a completely different game”.

    Bread and circuses, appealing to our base nature.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
    0·
    8 days ago

    WWE is a special beast. They embraced The Internet a lot earlier than most media and their social media and astro turfing game is on point. It is why you’ll hear that every single wrestler on the planet’s life goal is to be in the WWE Hall of Fame ™ and why Roman “The Rock’s Cousin Who Was Such A Charisma Void That All His Lines In Hobbes And Shaw were cut” Reigns and whoever the hell is the greatest story ever told on television ™ and so forth.

    Spend a bit of time discussing wrestling and you rapidly realize you are talking to a “bot” in that different statements trigger the exact same response from different people.

    So it is less that The Fans think that cena taking time out of his busy schedule of caping for a rapist sex trafficker was truly amazing and more that people on twitter and PR folk on The Subreddit told them to think that and they are repeating it.

    As for the other aspect:

    Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

    Because wrestling is “event television” in a way that only sports really is anymore. Andor is one of the greatest shows of all time but, unless you are doing a Reaction podcast, it doesn’t matter if you watch that episode from Season 2 tonight or tomorrow or a week from now. Wrestling and sports? People DO still want to watch that “live” because they are afraid someone will spoil the score of the Bulls game (in large part because we grew up with sitcoms where that was the joke). So, in that regard, it makes more sense to cover it with sports rather than to cut into a movie review with how taylor swift’s boyfriend caught a ball real good.

    Which… gets to the last point that is not WWE specific. A lot of people don’t have the time or money to watch it live. This mostly goes back to when PPVs were 50-90 bucks and when all weekly shows were on TV that a lot of “cord cutters” didn’t have. But it also just speaks to the general lack of an attention span. A LOT of the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC)… don’t actually watch wrestling. They follow live threads or watch clips and then they wait for Dave “It’s cool, he just didn’t like her tits” Meltzer to give them a star rating.

    It has become a lot more prevalent in the AEW era where we have “something else” on weekly TV (no. TNA didn’t count. I loved TNA but that shit was the #4 promotion even when there were only two on TV in the US) and the “AEW style” is still heavily informed by The Indies and New Japan where people try to tell a self contained story in every match rather than relying on six months of promos on TV. You will RAPIDLY notice that the IWC will barely mention character work that is not part of a clip released by the company or one that was so good that wrestling twitter clipped it themselves. A live thread might lose their shit over how much rotation a tall lady got on a powerbomb spot and then immediately “forget it” because wrestling twitter didn’t care and the company didn’t bother to release a clip of it.

  • Lenny@lemmy.zip
    0·
    8 days ago

    I haven’t tuned into wresting since the NWO/Wolf Pack days, but I just assumed it was the next generation of naive kids keeping the business alive. In my mind the audience comprises of young boys (mostly) who can still believe it’s ‘real’, their parents who throw money at it because it makes their kid happy, and then of course the fringe set of “wrestling is totally real” guys who should know better but choose not to.