Onomatopoeia for glass shattering
I’ve fairly recently (i.e. in the last couple of years) gained a newfound love for professional wrestling, and sometimes it’s just nice to talk about things that are fun.
I grew up watching wrestling . Of course I did. It was the late 90s to early 2000s, when Stone Cold was the coolest sumbitch under the sun, and the Rock was already the most electrifying man in all of entertainment. Who wasn’t watching wrestling? But catching Raw early on Tuesday mornings when it aired live or late at night for its reruns grew to be too much effort, so I fell off over time. I’m fairly sure free TV doesn’t even air WWE anymore. (Although I can watch cable now, so it’s a moot point personally.)
Yes, I know it’s fake. People don’t run back into your fist after you launch them at ropes. So is Game of Thrones, and that’s still compelling television. That’s the first hurdle I find many have to clear, because until relatively recently, the wrestling industry operated under a veil of bullshittery, where all the talent had to pretend it was real all the time, even off the clock. These days, we have Terry Bollea claiming in court that while Hulk Hogan had a ten-inch dick, that doesn’t mean he has to as well, so we’re clearly in a much better place.
Many wrestlers still live by those rules. When John Cena makes the talk show rounds, he never breaks character. He says “I’m going to fight [person],” not “we’re not to put on a good facsimile of a fight.” The Undertaker, the most old school of old school wrestlers, never did talk shows. We still don’t know if he’s properly retired because he never broke character long enough to say so. I’ve seen some people claim that this makes the product better for them, because when there’s no barrier between actor and character, you can buy into the blood feuds on screen a little better. You don’t suddenly remember that picture on Instagram of Darth Vader going fishing with Luke while they’re trying to beat each other to death.
While that’s not the primary appeal of wrestling to me, it’s hard to deny that there’s a certain genuine reaction that’s been lost now that the curtain’s been pulled back forever. I’ve read stories of how wrestlers would have knives pulled on them, or how old grannies would cuss them out after particularly dastardly acts. What we have now is probably better, but I think any creator of entertainment would be lying if they said they didn’t want their fans to have the kind of passion that threatens to boil over into the occasional riot. That means you’ve reached the status of football!
It may seem strange to anyone outside of the wrestling fandom, but the fans of wrestling are a big part of why I like wrestling. It may be the only good fandom in the world. I don’t mean that they’re especially polite and pleasant on internet forums — they’re the same as everyone else there. What I mean is that wrestling leans into its fans in a way that very little else on TV does. There’s a lot of cheering, booing, and silly chanting in any given show, and the performers and bookers, at least the good ones, play into it. Messing with the crowd is a cornerstone of professional wrestling, and it’s really quite great.
When the millions (AND MILLIONS) of the Rock’s fans scream out loud together, for that brief moment, everyone is on the same page. There’s a magical sense of belonging that comes with just being part of being in that wall of noise. Anyone who loves real sports (as opposed to a soap opera about a fake sport) should know that feeling too.
But the wrestling crowd is even more powerful than the sports crowd, because wrestling is scripted. The people in the ring and in the back hear that earth-shaking roar of appreciation, or the deafening boos too, and at least when they’re doing their jobs right, that makes all the difference. Home field advantage exists in sports, it’s true, part of which is that having the crowd support a team tends to make them play better, but I think coaches would rather this not be the case. They would rather have their players doing the same, perfect game every time. Hulk Hogan had his old routine of getting beaten up for a while, then when crowd support hit its peak, “Hulk up” and become practically invincible for his comeback victory. Daniel Bryan’s ascent to the world championship was, by all accounts, also to do with crowd support that got so overwhelming it couldn’t be ignored. By feeding on the crowd’s energy, the wrestling show encourages it in a very direct way. Your noise matters, it changes what happens in the ring. So they cheer harder, boo louder, and it creates an infinite loop of hype that feeds into itself until that legendary moment when everything is so loud, so overwhelming, that everyone has to stop and just take in that noise. There’s really nothing like it.
I’ve also developed a fascination with how wrestlers pretend to fight, especially in an era where CGI and camera tricks have come to replace practical effects. Some of it seems obvious: They don’t lean fully into each punch, stamping the ground to make a big loud sound to make it feel like a meatier blow. But for a lot of it, especially the slams and flips, there’s very little real defense for them. They try not to land on your head or neck so they don’t get concussed or break anything, but when anyone drops eight feet, even onto a padded ring, it has to hurt. Then I found out that actually, there’s no way to make a dropkick not painful, that you can’t actually gimmick a steel chair to be anything but a steel chair and the only way to get a good sound out of it is to give a good hard smack. Honestly, I’d probably curl up into a ball and cry a lot if somebody laid into me with a kendo stick, so I can’t imagine waking up one day for work and seeing half a dozen shots on your schedule, followed by a full course of thumb tacks into the arm. So while not all of them would be good fighters, I have to respect these wrestlers who do absolutely crazy things for our entertainment, and gasp in awe at the athleticism and toughness that they display every time they step through those ropes.
Really though, there’s just something really cathartic about watching people absolutely lay into each other. It’s the cornerstone for a lot of cinema, television, and gaming. I’ve seen studies that suggest it acts as a valve for letting off steam, and keeps people from picking bar fights or whatever stupid risky shit people do for kicks.
Why not MMA though? That’s more realistic, and the athletes are even tougher! For me personally, I don’t really enjoy seeing people getting injured for real, and people getting legitimately knocked out will fuck them up eventually. Boxer brain is a well-documented issue, and even wrestling has only fairly recently put its foot down on preventing concussions. But much less nobly, I’m simply not terribly interested in working myself up with hype and then watching a fight end in eighteen seconds because whoops, turns out it wasn’t such a good match after all.
Basically, KERANG! NANANANANANA, WAAAAAH etc.
