Oh, how pleased I am to have new material for Quoth Bray Wyatt! Months have passed since he has said anything worth writing down, but this one is sublime in its simplicity. Here’s what he said at Fastlane when he entered in a coffin to Undertaker’s music, and soon I’ll transcribe for the annals his promo from RAW. In the past his monologues have smacked of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams — what does this one…
Category: Wrestling Theory & Criticism
True kayfabe is a rare bird at this stage of history on wrestling’s timeline. The fact that it is a scripted performance is now firmly a “no duh”. Or maybe a “yeah, and?” We all think about the meta in wrestling now, considering it in terms of storyline, product, and character development. We are completely aware that we cheer and boo for quality of performance, intensity of presence, and for surprises we weren’t expecting. It’s…
I’m seriously working on push ups; I want to master this as a yoga pose. But DDP challenges his yogis to do them in a most difficult sequence: set up in plank pose, then take the push up down on a three count, then hold for three hovering just off the floor — and here’s the hard part — then back up on a three count! I can almost never pull this off. I can…
I seem to have become a go-to internet source for the thing Rusev says at the beginning of his entrance music, and the posts I’ve written about Lana’s general linguistic curiosities get a fair number of hits as well. But it turns out I have neglected to translate for you, not-so-gentle readers, the thing Lana always says in Russian as she begins her promos. I was perusing the google search terms that have brought people…
After I tweeted my last post On Heels That Should Be Faces and Faces That Should Be Heels, Twitter user @StigsVegCousin asked me to explain how I would book a Cena/Rusev double turn — Cena to heel and Rusev to face — which I alluded to in my post. I appreciated the challenge because really I’m just a chick who shoots my mouth off over here, throwing out my literary ideas about wrestling to see…
Is anybody doing analytics on the number of cell phone lighter apps people are putting up for Bray Wyatt? Some nights it’s stunning. Doesn’t this count for something? Bray Wyatt is amazing. Can we set him up on some kind of sensible narrative trajectory? Couldn’t he aim toward a Jake the Snake-style babyface run? I remember the Jake the Snake of my junior high years was the same exact crazy dark madman as babyface or…
We call Mizdow a stunt double, but in fact isn’t how he achieves his character more like that of a silent film leading man? Think of Mizdow’s exaggerated gestures, facial expressions, and voiceless speaking as you watch Charley Chase in Mighty Like a Moose from 1926: If you can’t hang in there the entire 22 minutes, drop in around 15:00 and follow the build-up to the scene where he pretends he’s two of himself, one…
Miz and Mizdow are over like crazy as heels. That’s right — I’m suggesting that Mizdow has been playing a co-heel all this time. Because at this point we don’t think such a delightful wrestler as Damien Sandow should be forced to continue taking part in such a humiliating dog and pony show as has become being Miz’s stunt double. Isn’t this what you think? Miz is actually quite over as a douchebag as well,…
The other weird thing for me about the Twitter Rumble riots is that all the complaints I’m reading, without many exceptions, seem to be based on the idea that the wrestler who won the Royal Rumble should have been based solely on how much he was over with the fans. That is an important factor, yes. And we have been burned a lot lately. I am no fan of the company these days and I…