I love wrestling. I don’t know why exactly because it’s objectively bad for everyone involved. I stopped watching for a while after a lot of women started speaking out about sexual abuse and general assholery in the business. But eventually I started watching again because I guess I hate women. Then I stopped watching for a while again just because I had no way to watch because I gave up on cable and I don’t like streaming services.
But I finally broke down and got Peacock and now I’m watching wrestling again. The other day I watched Walter against Zach Sabre Jr at Progress 77 and was like “oh right, I love this”.
Which is a heartbreaking indictment of how much time I am wasting in my fleeting, ephemeral life watching grown men and women pretend to fight. I often wonder what kind of bizarre personal defect makes me a wrestling fan. What kind of a sociopath would watch this for fun? Answer: me, apparently.
The best I can come up with is that wrestling is a sad demonstration of the tribalistic bloodlust that permeates the baser elements of the human emotional spectrum.
Anyway, this is a preamble to me talking about the new extended trailer for the program Heels. There’s this guy call Stephen Amell. He was in the Green Arrow as the titular Green Arrow. Like me, he loves wrestling. He loves it so much he used all the clout that comes from being on the CW to be on wrestling shows sometimes – as a wrestler I mean, he wasn’t just hanging out like Jon Stewart. And now that Green Arrow is over, he’s used that clout to make a new show about wrestling called Heels. Also, I now think that show was maybe just called Arrow, not Green Arrow. But he played the Green Arrow as a kid or something.
Sidenote: one of my friends stood in line for hours to get Stephen Amell’s autograph for his daughter because he’s dreamy. I don’t know if he’ll ever stop being mad about that.
The Heels trailer looks pretty good but there’s one bit that really annoyed me. The show is about two wrestling brothers and they’re outside a bar and some dudes are like “wrestling is fake, we’re going to beat you up!” and so Stephen Amell and his brother are ready to throw down because you can’t let anyone call your fake sport fake. But before they can throw down, Stephen Amell’s brother’s girlfriend takes out one of the dudes in one move because she’s also a wrestler.
Nothing wrong with that conceptually, except the move she does is to jump on the guy, wrap her legs around his head, and backflip him to the ground – AKA the lady move that lady actioners do in every lady action thing ever. Because how else would a lady fight other than wrapping her legs around a guy’s head?
“But Jeremy that’s a wrestling move, it’s called a hurricanrana.”
Yes I know that. It’s one of the wrestling moves that is clearly two people working together and has nothing to do with real fighting. But that’s not really the point. It annoys me that in all action things, this is the lady action move. Flying genitals to the face.
Sidenote, does hurricanrana mean hurricane frog in Spanish?
Six blogs back, I ranted extensively about how much I hate the lady flying head scissors maneuver in movies and TV (I don’t love it in wrestling either, for the record) but I’m too lazy to go back and grab that and repost it here. Which is good news.
Remember when that lady on Heroes with the Taskmaster power to copy anything she sees does a Tiger Feint Kick to stop a robbery because she saw her son watching WrestleMania 22? Did she ever show up again? I give Lost a lot of crap for having a strong start and then seeming to be written with no plan at all, but Heroes was probably worse.
I feel like after the first couple of episodes, a writer would say “What if we had a character with this power?” and everyone would think it was cool and they’d show up for one episode and then the writers would be like “What’s the plot of this show again?” and everyone would shrug and go back to thinking up new characters.
Hey, that’s kind of like the comic book Ela blog that I’m writing. Oh no, I’ve been hoisted by my own petard!
A petard of course being a special outfit like a leotard, with a lot of fancy buckles and loops on it, that rich people would wear when they were feeling especially smug, but then poor people would tie a rope through one of the loops, and hoist them up a pole and then let them dangle there as punishment for being cocky.
One time there was a wrestler named Lita. She did the hurricanrana because she was one of the first women in the WWE that could do much of anything and they weren’t not going to have a lady throwing her stuff in people’s faces. That’s not fair actually, she was trained in Mexico and that’s just a standard move in Lucha Libre.
Anyway, one time she broke her neck and was out of action for a year and a half. I always assumed this was from wrestling, because that’s a thing that happens, but I just found out that instead, she was on that show Jessica Alba Wears Leather and Rides A Motorcycle, and she broke her neck doing that because a stunt woman dropped her on her head. Is wrestling safer than Hollywood stunts? I suppose if you count each move a wrestler does as a separate stunt, it probably is per capita. Huh.
I read a couple wrestling blogs on here and sometimes I go to leave a comment and they have the comments turned off. And I wonder why that is. Then I remember that most people that like wrestling and will go to the trouble of making a comment are going to say something mean or insulting.
