#wrestling is a story about love told through a medium of violence and that makes it a tragedy

[rustchild]

can you elaborate on the idea that “the only way to win wrestling is to stop wrestling“?

Loooove your analysis <3

Thank you!!

This is going to be a very long ramble while i try to get my ideas together, bear with me.

So, when I say that the only way to win wrestling is to stop wrestling, what i mean is like... fundamentally, in my opinion, wrestling is a tragedy. as a whole, the basic narrative plot of professional wrestling is extremely simple: a lot of people all want the same thing, and only one person(/team) can have it. So one of the rules of the fictional space, in kayfabe, is that the wrestlers will work their assess off trying to get something that most of them will probably never get (a prominent title reign), losing friendships and experiencing horrifying agony in the process.

Then, if you get it, it's inevitable that you'll lose it again. Part of why wrestling is a tragedy is that once a champion gets a belt, the tension underlying their story immediately switches to 'when are they going to lose the belt?' and that builds up until the point when they, yeah, lose the belt and have to start all over again. It's sisyphean. there's no win state where you get what you want and get to keep it.

And then.... career babyfaces who never turn heel are rare. So the chances that you'll make it through that process, over and over again, without losing your integrity and selling part of yourself to the devil are pretty slim! chances are a wrestler will face multiple betrayals, and commit a betrayal or two themself, so you're also going to lose relationships. the narrative demands it. if your medium is fake violence, every story is going to be steered into the ring--which means that every relationship has a nascent potential match inside it. some of my favorite matches have been between people who on some level really don't want to hurt each other, but who have no choice, because the choices they've made and the narrative rules of the space demand it.

Also, in order to keep the tension high, heels have to win. a lot. So a hero, in wrestling, is fighting a losing battle because they have to be in order for the fictional space to stay the self-perpetuating laundry cycle of drama that it is.

And then what? You fight until your body gives out and you get worse and worse until you're forced to give up. You are chewed up over and over again by a story that demands pain in order to continue. The mode of your universe is violence, so the only way to find peace is to leave that universe.

Wrestling is a competition you never actually win, because winning would end the story, and the story is bigger than you and scarier than you and it is being created, constantly, all over the world, by the collective will of thousands of people who may at any point become your enemy. if the thing that the narrative demands you want is nigh untouchable and will be taken from you, the only way to win is to want something else.

There's an old adage about how wrestlers should retire "on their backs," giving the win to new talent and passing some of their collected audience goodwill over to a rising star. Which is really cool from an industry perspective! but also it hammers in that the inevitable end state of a wrestler's career is loss.

Obviously there are exceptions to this. AEW's mentor system is actually a really interesting and innovative way to gentle the end of a wrestling career and allow for interaction with the fictional space without the narrative pressure. Of course, because the story must go on, we're probably going to see a lot more betrayals of and by mentors in the coming years. it's what the story demands.

[rustchild]

love your wrestling as a tragedy post. wouldnt life too be a tragedy under this view though.

What defines life and wrestling to me isnt the inherent way that happiness or success will always end, but rather that as humans we have a neverending drive to seek and sacrifice for it that makes our triumphs worth fighting and losing over and over for.

Wrestling often ends in tragedy but the story it tells is of the triumphs, outnumbered by the failures and yet defined by our human nature to persevere, cause there may be no way to win but to leave, but you never truely leave wrestling. And you never truely win life. You just continue to strive for what gives you meaning

if that's how you enjoy wrestling, that's cool! i'm a big tragedy fan, so i'm definitely looking at it through my own lens. there's more than enough wrestling for multiple forms of engagement lol.

I think, for me, the thing that sets wrestling apart from life irt tragedy--other than all of the obvious things--is the fact that in wrestling a. everyone wants the same singular goal, b. only one person can have it at a time, and c. the pursuit of it is generally destructive to the body and mind. in real life, meaning is often found by diversifying your sources of joy, investing in what makes you happy and sharing it with other people. In wrestling, there is one (1) thing that everyone is going for, it probably will not actually make you happy, and one person having it means another person definitely cannot. It's a zero-sum game, in a way that life isn't, and it has to remain a zero-sum game in order for it to continue, because that's what keeps the stakes high.

My pat little maxim about wrestling is that it's a story about love told through a medium of violence. This is a gross generalization--obviously there's a lot of wrestling out there, about a lot of things--but in my opinion, the best wrestling stories are about people who deeply love something or someone and whose only way to engage with that love is violence, because violence is how stories are told in their universe. Which is tragic! When kevin owens screams at sami zayn to stay down because he doesn't want to hurt him, when mjf tortures cm punk while reciting back his own promo that mjf memorized as a child, when hangman adam page gets the title only to realize it doesn't solve the psychological damage that the rejection he faced from the elite did to him, that's tragic.

What i've realized while typing this out is that really, what i mean is that the best wrestling characters often have a central goal (be the best, win the title) that is actually incompatible with their underlying character motivations (love, be loved). and once that's true for even one character, they fuck it up for everyone around them. mjf can't just give cm punk a hug, he has to beat him, even if he makes both himself and punk miserable in attempting to do so. and that's going to keep being true, because it needs to be true in order for the matches to be interesting. the story incentivizes this discrepancy. if you learn to express your feelings in a healthy way and to put up emotional boundaries with people who can't, and to have a healthy perspective about how little winning a big belt actually means about you as a person, you become a less interesting wrestler.

Whereas in real life, yeah, suffering is inevitable! but it's not the meaning of life, or whatever. it's just a thing that happens, and you learn to avoid it when you can and deal with it when you can't. if there's a goal you're going after that's causing you untold harm to achieve, you can ultimately pick a different goal. and you can find joy and meaning in the trees changing color for the fall and in cooking a nice meal and in working a job that's just alright where you don't have to be the best at everything but you're making something you're proud of. if you want to compete over something, that's cool, but it's best not to stake your whole sense of being on it. Life's not a zero sum game. there's enough joy to go around, if we're willing to share it.

but like i said at the beginning--this is just my perspective, and i'm definitely confirmation bias-ing it! if you'd rather imagine Sisyphus happy, that's cool. we'll just enjoy our musclemen in sparky underpants fake punching each other in slightly different ways.

[rustchild]

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