this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
385 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
55744 readers
3550 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
WWE? Lol they think that's must have TV?
5 billion for ten years? Lolol. Oh my sides. It's not even an acquisition. It's 500 million a year for fake wrestling.
Nitpicking, but it's meant to be entertainment. You don't call HBO shows fake drama.
That's one of the reasons wrestling fans prefer the term scripted or staged as opposed to fake. It still requires tons of athleticism, and lots of wrestlers are still taking very real hits and injuries despite trying to minimize the impacts of them.
Pro wrestling has always been theater's weird cousin from the other side of the tracks. They're more alike than fans of either are willing to admit.
Do the people who go "you know that stuffs fake right?" actually think that there are people who think it's real?
The best response to that is to pretend like you are just discovering that for the first time.
Explain how you believed this entire time a man could summon fire with a wave of his hand, or even come back from the dead, and that they have ruined your worldview.
When you point out how stupid the question is, makes the conversation short.
Lol, I like the way you think.
Well I can't call it wrestling, because then what would we call wrestling.
Angry grab ass time
The same thing MMA calls it: catch wrestling.
They're all linked. They have an evolutionary track.
Fun fact: wrestling started off as a show before it became a sport.
Untrue. Vastly untrue.
What we know as wrestling started off in civil war camps (between battles, Irish soldiers would wrestle each other while the other soldiers would bet on the matches), which eventually turned into a legitimate sport, who's first World Champion was a man called William Muldoon. Also known as "the solid man".
What we know as professional wrestling today can be traced back to 1909 with a match between Frank Gotch and George Hackenschmidt, which is considered to be the last legitimate contest for a world title under the banner of "professional wrestling".
After that we get the rise of the Gold Dust Trio and what we know as "sports entertainment".
Some people LOVE wrestling.
And it’s a pretty massive audience. This could officially be the end of Netflix as a movie powerhouse, but it isn’t a bad business strategy. Especially with how much they’re raking in from people paying for ads on top of the advertising dollars they’re earning from running them in the first place. They’re phasing out the cheapest ad free option. It’s a big gamble. And, honestly? Fuck ‘em if it doesn’t work. I mean, fuck ‘em if it does work too. I know I don’t personally give a shit about wrestling. (I don’t give a shit about their profits either. They’re not getting my booty. Yo-ho.)
I mean, as shitty as it is, there's a decent sized market for it. Probably worth it to them to overpay so much for it to hurt the current streaming provider, Peacock.
I think it's ignorant to call it "shitty" or "fake wrestling".
Pro-wrestling entertainment is a form of camp theater, like drag shows. It's an old, cherished artform with a wide, passionate audience that outsiders routinely dismiss because they don't get it.
I don't watch it. It doesn't appeal to me. But I know people who love it. I think it's largely class elitism that perpetuates the misconception that this form of performance art is somehow unrespectable. It's not, it's challenging, dangerous, physically demanding theater.
Edit: For those confused or skeptical, check out Super Eyepatch Wolf's captivating media analysis "The Undertaker: Long term story telling in wrestling"
Hella based take.
Attitude was the best era also
Just like in nineteen ninety-eight when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table?
I would call WWE shitty because of what they do to their performers. The performers are artists and deserve our respect tho.
?
Can't we have one thread on the Internet where we take the piss out of "manly" men in full costume including tights and makeup throwing each other around and performing "manly" acrobatics / gymnastics without having to bend over for the sanctity of the viewing audience?
I guess not, I guess we have to have a (righteous) turd in every punch bowl.
I mean, you're trying to shit on an entire form of art and diminish people's enjoyment of it.
There are countless threads on the internet tearing down wrestling and those who like it. Very few actually have responses like the one you're replying to.
yawn it's "art" primarily made for people who take daily shits on art being for pussies or pansies or worthless
I understand that there are some versions of it that don't suck and that not all of the fans are like that...but this is a situation akin to mainstream country music...the current mainstream incarnations of this thing (i.e. the WWE, which is such an impoverished "artist" that it just inked a multi-billion dollar deal with Netflix) are so far removed from the "art" version of the thing that we might as well be talking about different things.
As for "diminishing people's enjoyment of it"...if you cannot enjoy something despite very mild criticisms of it...you probably didn't enjoy it that much to begin with. This is Lemmy so I don't think the two dozen views my posts get will make a big cosmic difference.
Doubt
I come from Twitter. I'm not sure what your social media background is but there they have a "leave no opportunity for sanctimonious bullshit unexplored" policy.
Look, I don't want to bicker, because you seem kind of sensitive about all this, but I just want to point out for anyone unaware, pro wresting is popular with a lot of queer and counterculture folks.
There's this misconception that it's for people with confederate flags on the back of pickup trucks. In reality, women consistently make up about 40% of the audience for pro wrestling. They only make up 25% of the audience for MMA.
Also, viewership is about 25% black. That's a huge over representation compared to national demographics. And it's popular from Mexico to Japan!
It's flamboyant musclemen and women hamming it up. If you think that's all for people who don't like art and theater, you're sorely mistaken.
http://indeedwrestling.blogspot.com/2017/06/wwe-demographics-femalemale-split.html
https://playtoday.co/blog/stats/wwe-viewership-statistics/
https://wrestlenomics.com/2022/03/23/race-demographics-in-tv-wrestling-viewership-aew-is-still-behind-wwe-with-black-viewers/
I get that it's not all straight white cis christian males, pretty much nothing is. What I don't get is why we have to get all worked up about someone making fun of some silly, multi-billion dollar business.
Okay... have you ever heard of being the bigger person? And this in no way applies to everyone or even the majority of people who enjoy wrestling.
You sound like a grandpa trying to explain to teenagers why rap isn't music.
Sure, have you ever heard of being a killjoy?
I understand you have a sort of "not all men" thing going on in this thread because you're likely a fan of wrestling, but I don't care.
Maybe you and your friends love purely artisanal, organically grown, farm to table, backyard wrestling...but I've bumped into a metric shit ton of absolute douchenozzles that like mainstream wrestling (i.e. the WWE which is what is being discussed anyway) and I don't care about making fun of it or them for liking it a little.
It's possible to like something even if you know it sucks. I was a pretty big Coldplay fan for years...I still watch the NFL a bit despite it being basically eagle, beer, betting, army, trucks, Gillette (the best a man can get) for 3.5 hours interrupted by a few seconds of actual gameplay.
It's possible to see the bad sides of things you enjoy...it's actually healthy IMO.
You CAN take he piss out of anything you want. It's just that if your take is uninformed, don't grouse when someone says, 'Oh! Here's some context so you can know more about this thing! Enjoy knowing something new!'
The Internet is just full of annoying nags about every single issue. In one thread on here today I bumped into a guy who claimed to be pro-"eat the rich" at the same time as he was against asking them pointed questions. People just love to be holier than thou or contrarian or both I suppose. 🤷
Well it ain't wrestling, so it's fake wrestling. Those are the words I use to describe it. You may think it's "ignorant" to call it such, but I'm not ignorant of its history or how it's done (in fact I've always been impressed by the athleticism that's obviously required). So my label isn't from ignorance.
It's as lame as soap operas. And I do look down my nose at people who watch that garbage too, or the garbage of most "reality" TV, or melodrama.
It's all just trite and juvenile appeals to base emotion, nothing more.
There's not even a wink and a nudge from the actors to the audience.
Any other words you'd like to gatekeep?
You are definitely ignorant to it's history and execution. That's not an insult.
But you don't get to pretend you throughly understand something you admittedly don't even have any interest in, or have spent any time studying.
It's not gatekeeping. You're pretending to know things you don't have a basic understanding of.
You understand there are other people in the world besides yourself that have different interests than you, right?
You don't have to like it, but just FYI, the market doesn't care about your feelings. Professional wrestling is a worldwide phenomenon, especially in Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East.
The UFC merged with the WWE this year, and UFC fighters routinely show up to WWE events. Real professional fighters don't seem to care that it's scripted
Just because it's something you don't like, doesn't make it not worth an insane amount of money.
There's a reason why WWE is not only still around, but worth more today than it was in it's "heyday".
You're laughing because someone bought a proven market. It's literally the same as Marvel, Star Wars, or any other market.
That's nice you think you understand what a valuable acquisition is.
I think you're applying your own viewpoint here to the general public.
I don't enjoy wrestling. I also don't enjoy reality TV, teen dramas, horror shows, or European Football. But that doesn't mean they don't have value.
If TV needs to provide some infallible, logical benefit to be worth something, then every show is in trouble. It's practically all made up stories about nothing that matters.
This is one of the narrow times that "the customer is always right" applies correctly. It doesn't matter if it's "good" by any one person's definition. If people watch, it has value.
I'd pay good money to see high quality Starcraft 2 tournaments on TV. I doubt many other people would. That's how value is determined.
"IT'S STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT"
https://youtu.be/Yvd3aEsThbc?si=Zjmv2ww5Jnz_zrR8
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Yvd3aEsThbc?si=Zjmv2ww5Jnz_zrR8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.