Sunday, April 7, 2024

#AsForDynamite: What Are We Doing Here?

Well friends, how are we doing?

I said on Twitter yesterday that I didn’t think that these #AsForDynamite posts were necessarily getting over, and since then -- happily -- we’ve seen a small but substantial uptick in readership. I mean, I’m still not sure that the world needs yet more bullshit in the pro-wrestling space, nor I am about to quit my day job to create yet another pro-wrestling YouTube channel. However, enough folks tuned into the last two articles to make me feel comfortable at least writing a mission statement for what we're now calling #AsForDynamite.



Looking back through the archives, we've actually done quite a few of these. You'll find the archive below, and if you're wondering, yes, the new-new blog redesign attempts to make the earlier editions of this very project more accessible. I didn't love the previous "new" look on mobile, and here we are. The blog also now has an #AsForDynamite tab, though unfortunately, this particular template puts the tabs in the sidebar rather than along the top.

What can you do?

If I could do literally anything with this column, I'd make it a Quick Thoughts style fan experience analysis of AEW's live shows under the company's official banner. AEW would send me to events and pay me something like $.06/word, and I'd give them maybe 1500 words quarterly covering what it feels like to be live in the building for some of their bigger events. Not that I think this is at all likely, but just so you know, that's what I'd want in an ideal world. 

We'd call the series, "The View from the Cheap Seats."

Alas, since that seems exceedingly unlikely, we're left to try to carve a different niche out among the interwebs. 

The one thing that I definitely DO NOT want to do is recap shows. First, because every fool on Earth is already recapping shows. Second, why would you read a recap of a show you already watched? 

So. This leaves us to do what I hope will be AFF-style analysis of what we see on TV, i.e. "Why do things happen?" and "What do these things mean?" 

Is that worth doing? 

I honestly don't know. But I keep doing it for whatever reason, and at least so far, I haven't seen a lot of other folks with anything like most of the takes from this series. Granted, we noted in the opening that the series itself hasn't really gotten over. Still, hope springs eternal.

At the end of the day, I'm the kind of pro-wrestling fan who likes sports first, who therefore likes a more sports-based presentation of pro-wrestling. I honestly do not give two fucks about "story". As I've said elsewhere, I'm convinced that most of these "story" merchants never lettered in shit and don't get why sports are cool. 

Fuck them. When did we start allowing the biggest dorks on the planet to be the world's bullies?

I grew up watching a lot of WCW on the various Turner networks. Not so much because I was some huge wrestling fan but because my dad's parents lived right outside of Atlanta, so TBS and TNT were always on TV. I watched Sting's Night of Champions match back in the 80s solely because I happened to be flipping through the channels at my grandmother's house, and there it was! 

Later, having gotten myself into a marriage that wasn't working, my soon-to-be ex-wife and I found at least some common ground watching pro-wrestling just as the late-90s boom period hit. I fell in love with WCW's Cruiserweight Division and became one of those guys who'd sit through an entire Pay-Per-View just to see Chris Jericho wrestle Juventud Guerrera. Granted, everyone eventually learned to love Stone Cold Steve Austin. However, I'm telling you right now that I'd never have put myself in position to discover Austin were it not for guys like Jericho and Billy Kidman.

Let me tell you, no one can hold a marriage together based solely on sex and a shared love of pro-wrestling. Not even when one of you is a former collegiate swimming champion and the other is both horny and down for literally anything.

We did give it an honest try, though.

Unfortunately, we live in a world toxic fandom. The Star Wars fandom is probably the absolute worst, but the pro-wrestling fandom is bad enough that most folks would probably enjoy wrestling more in a vacuum rather than with other pro-wrestling fans. That is nuts! This column therefore needs to find a way to keep it more positive going forward, which is a challenge in that I've now talked about the fandom's toxicity three times in this space the last two weeks.

Friends, we have GOT to do better than that.

Thanks. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. 

Next time you come to this space, I promise we'll be on point and keeping it positive.

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