#made respect to people who build cosplay shit regularly

[giganotus]

making prop weapons is hard I’ve been agonizing over my attempt at making the Dread for several weeks and now I gotta haul ass to finish it on time

[buttdawg]

I'm still pissed about Jim Cornette, so I guess I'll write about it here.

I listened to his podcast yesterday to see if there would be any contrition over his Ethiopia joke, and there really wasn't. The closest he got was to express regret for distracting attention away from NWA, which he seems to sincerrly wish to support. Then he offered this conditional apology based on how people reacted to what he said:

1) If you disliked his joke and thought it was in poor taste, he apologizes for what he said.

2) If you're Black and found it offensive, he didn't intend for it to be racist.

3) If you're outraged by what he said, beyond what he thinks is reasonable for a situation like this, then you can fuck off, because he never cared what you think of him anyway.

That's just bullshit, and I'm gonna tell you why. In the same podcast, he admits that he has anger management issues. He's gone on record as saying that if there was a way to do it legally, he would murder Vince Russo in cold blood. He carries a lifelong grudge against Kenny Omega because he wrestled an inflatable doll in Japan several years ago. And yet this guy has the temerity to complain when he thinks people are overreacting to him. "Whoa, whoa, come on, people, it was just a joke. Why are you so bent out of shape over this?" Well the blow up doll was a joke too, but you still want Kenny Omega run out of the wrestling business for it.

I've been listening to a few Cornette podcasts since AEW started, mostly because they were free on YouTube, and because Corny's a lot easier to listen to than the schmucks at Wrestling Observer. I found a lot of his hatred towards AEW unfair, but occasionally he made some valid points. Like the Cody/Dustin vs Young Bucks match going too long. He said it felt like they did three shorter matches in one, and the first leg was the best of the three, so they would have been smarter to wrap it up early and end on a high note. When he said that, I was like "Hey yeah," because I felt the same way but I couldn't put it into words at the time.

But mostly he just hates AEW for the unforgivable crime of existing in spite of his complaints. He respects and likes maybe a third of its talent, but he can't seem to fathom why those guys put up with the two-thirds that he hates. Maybe it's because guys like Cody and Jericho and Hangman Page are smart enough to understand that they're good for business, even if they have different styles in the ring. Cornette's problem is that he's too brittle.

That, and he's a hypocrite. He keeps ragging on wrestlers for exposing the business and not looking enough like real athletes. He craps on guys like Joey Janela for not looking muscular enough, sort of like how he crapped on Kevin Steen before he went to WWE and became a multi-time champion. I'm sure Joey's terrified of suffering the same fate. One of Cornette's talking points is how they don't just sign anyone for the NBA, and they don't just bring fans in to play the Super Bowl because they want to. But that's stupid. Joey and Marko Stunt got signed to AEW. They're legit members of the roster, and they're over. The only downside to these guys is that they don't look like football players, except nobody cares about that, so it isn't a problem at all.

Cornette gripes and gripes about professionalism in wrestling, and how there's no room for cheap gimmicks or bad comedy, except his entire decades-long career in wrestling has been spent acting as an insult comic with a loud suit and a tennis racket. He's probably mad at Kenny Omega for wrestling the blow-up doll because he kind of looks like a blow-up doll, so maybe he took it personally. He cries about kayfabe and protecting the business at all costs, and then he uses every opportunity he has to bury wrestlers and air all the dirty laundry from backstage. Every episode of NWA Powerrr had at least one instance of him bashing AEW as "cosplay" wrestling, which doesn't help anybody. If you don't watch AEW, you wouldn't know what he's talking about, and if you watch NWA and AEW, then he's insulting your taste. It's bad announcing, pure and simple. He's only out there to push his own agenda, not the wrestlers.

I can give him a modicum of respect for resigning from NWA. According to his podcast, he only worked for them to help support their product, because he believes so much in what they're doing. But it's become clear that the controversey he generates is distracting the public from NWA's brand. I read a tweet from Nick Aldis this week where he was very diplomatic and expressed great regret for what Cornette had said. He said it didn't represent what he wanted NWA to be. I like Nick Aldis, because I can tell that he's trying as hard as he can to carry himself like the "Real World's Chamion" in the tradition of Ric Flair and Harley Race. I don't know if he's succeeding or not, but I respect the effort he's putting in, because he wants to make NWA special and he wants to be a champion in a way that Chris Jericho and Brock Lesnar and Bray Wyatt aren't. But as long as Cornette was associated with the brand, his efforts would always be undercut by whatever whackamaroo nonsense he says next.

So maybe Cornette had that in mind when he quit, but from his podcast, I got the sense that it's not like he needed the job, and it wasn't fun anymore, and he was getting fed up with the PR headaches. That explains why he was so flippant on NWA Powerrr. He was showing up to have fun and relive the old days. Nick Aldis ain't there to screw around. He's trying to build a better career for himself and his co-workers.

And it's that flippancy that pisses me off. Cornette stopped giving a fuck years ago, I guess because he's got a successful business selling merch and dvds of old matches and public appearances and such. He doesn't need to "protect the business" anymore because he's got his own business separate from any promotion. His gigs with MLW and NWA are a way for him to promote his stuff, so if he says something shitty on their air, it just drives up hits on his website. That's the worst possible scenario for a color commentator. Cornette cries foul because Excalibur wears a mask on AEW Dynamite, but at least Ex is concentrating on making AEW talent look good. He's not telling racist jokes to fill dead air, or to get more eyeballs on his website.

It's impossible for me to express how stupid that Ethiopia joke was. The racism was so obvious that it makes all the defenses of it especially flimsy. Cornette insists he was mocking starving people, like that makes it okay. He told the story of how he invented the joke and Ray Traylor thought it was hilarious in 1985, and TBS and USA never got in trouble for it, so that somehow makes it okay forever. Cornette's fans talk about how they think the joke's okay, simply because they thought it was funny, like that makes a bit of difference in a PR situation like this.

Then you see people cry about how "sensitive" everyone is these days. Like, no shit, that's how public relations works. If your business does something offensive enough, it hurts your brand and your business suffers. So you have to be mindful of people's sensitivity. Complaining about it is useless. That'd be like going on Twitter after the Notre Dame fire and saying "Wood sure is flammable these days." Well how does that solve anything, dumbass?

It's all a bunch of bullshit. Cornette's using thirty-year old jokes because a dead guy laughed at it once and he's too arrogant to re-evaluate it for the present day. He's mad at wrestling fans for objecting to his behavior, except they're the customers, for fuck's sake. I've never seen anyone so obsessed with protecting the business and simultaneously so insulting towards the people who pay for the product. He hates AEW because he doesn't approve of their methods. Except they do good business and can sell out buildings pretty regularly. There's clearly an audience for how AEW does things. You tell him that, and he'll respond that their audience doesn't count, because they're all 30 or 40 something single men who are probably virgins or they're lose interest when the next fad comes along. So it's not enough to sell out a venue, you have to get x percent old people and y percent women and z percent children, or whatever they used to draw in Mid South in 1987. Dave Meltzer likes AEW, so Cornette now thinks he's an idiot too, even though he's been covering wrestling for decades. He's trapped himself in this binary mindset where the only real wrestling fans are the ones who agree with him and approve of his dated jokes and out-of touch worldview. Everyone else deserves to be shot.

That's why NWA is better off without Cornette. They may not realize it, but he was never on their side, not really. Sooner or later they would have offended his rigid, inflexible sense of What Wrestling Should Be, and he'd turn on them too. At least this way, it's a clean break, and they don't have him talking about fried chicken during Nick Aldis matches or how Trevor Murdoch's beer gut is somehow more athletic than Kenny Omega in a Street Fighter costume.