I've been doing some scouting recently looking for talent outside of FWC and it seems like the ROH has created this whole generation of characters that are very dry and boring, 1980 IBM employee, like technical wrestlers. This always drove me nuts when I was RPing Marx because when I was in a league, because since Marx was a technical wrestler, he would get stereotyped and automatically get thrown into the ring with other technical wrestler on the planet. In hindsight, I really wish I didn't make Marx a technical wrestler. It is almost as bad as RPing a Japanese Wrestler because people don't understand how much wrestling and character over there have changed since the nineties, not that Meltzer helps that image any with his lack of proper coverage.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Dean Malenko in the nineties, but I wouldn't have wanted to RP him. There are promo on USA, which is the top rated cable network on the air today, which says "Characters so original, they stick with you."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71EHI55d1FQ
I think for a large part, this new generation has forgotten this or they are rebelling against the current WWE product by trying to go as much in the other direction as possible, either way, while their promos are technically FINE, they are lifeless. What makes a character stand out from the pack is being larger than life and take chances with your writing.
In college, you are told and taught to write like they want you to write and since they are the ones handing out the grades, they can do that. When you have the freedom to write however you want to want, you should relish the opportunity to do so. You don't get that opportunity in life very often.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Dean Malenko in the nineties, but I wouldn't have wanted to RP him. There are promo on USA, which is the top rated cable network on the air today, which says "Characters so original, they stick with you."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71EHI55d1FQ
I think for a large part, this new generation has forgotten this or they are rebelling against the current WWE product by trying to go as much in the other direction as possible, either way, while their promos are technically FINE, they are lifeless. What makes a character stand out from the pack is being larger than life and take chances with your writing.
In college, you are told and taught to write like they want you to write and since they are the ones handing out the grades, they can do that. When you have the freedom to write however you want to want, you should relish the opportunity to do so. You don't get that opportunity in life very often.
posted by Paul Miller at 11:34 AM
2 Comments:
I agree 100% I'm sick of bullshit "Harry Tom Anderson" gimmicks, instead of real characters. ROH...SUCKS, I'm sorry. The wrestling's good, but it's too self-masturbatory for my liking. Get some characters in there, make me care about your product. ECW was great because it had characters AND wrestling. Gimmicks aren't a bad thing; bad gimmicks are a bad thing. I like the fact that most of my characters are over-the-top (Castor Strife, Problem Child, J1D, etc). Even Layne Winters has a schtick. This is part of why I created NLW, because I wanted to see crazy ass gimmicks return to prominence. :-)
I don't think it's so much the matter of people not having over the top gimmicks as it is they don't give them realistic characterizations. If it IS over the top like your characters, Billy - then obviously that creative aspect is amplified. Some people are really good at that.
Speaking for myself - I've never really done "gimmick" wrestlers. However, although my guys would simply go by real names generally speaking, I've tried to go to great lengths to use realistic psychology to have them react, speak and live their careers the way a real person would. The problem that we run into though more often than not is that the people who write these "Harry Tom Anderson" type guys give them no gimmick AND no personality. They don't seem like real people. They seem like characters whose ego and psyche is an afterthought. I'm not sure they've spent much time thinking about their motivations, upbringing and psychological basis so that they can write them a proper, realistic people rather than two dimensional cardboard cutouts.
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