Genderalisations

Something else I've missed during my time out in the big bad world of no internets is the blog over at RoughKut. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks too hard about fedding. Of the blogs I missed while I was away, one jumped out at me on the grounds of it being on a subject near and dear to my heart: women's wrestling. People think of me as a big fan of women's wrestling; really, I'm just a wrestling fan, but unlike many wrestling fans - so it seems - I consider women's wrestling equal to men's. Even though Kut's blog on playing female characters is a few months old now, I can't not respond to it. Go read his excellent blog, as well as Sky's equally excellent reply in the comments field, then come back and read the rest of this, biznitches :p

To clarify, first off, I am a man. I have played a number of characters over the years, both male and female, but far and away my most successful was female. I don't think this is weird at all - what I'm interested in is a character's personality, and gender is just another small part of the myriad things which make up one's personality. Playing someone of a different gender to oneself needn't be any more of a problem than playing someone of a different age, nationality or socioeconomic background. In fact most fedders of my acquaintance, male or female, have played characters of both genders. It's not just in fedding; I have two current characters for pen-and-paper roleplay games, one of whom is male and the other of whom is female, and again, I'm in games with both women who play men and men who play women.

Kut's blog focuses on the question of intergender combat - and lawdy, is this a contentious subject. The first point which always comes up is the physical mechanics - the question of whether or not men are physically capable of fighting women. Kut and Sky weigh up the two sides pretty effectively in the linked blog. I have to say, I agree with Sky over Kut. To my mind, the idea that women can't fight is ridiculous. In a lot of martial arts, intergender combat is an accepted part of the sport, and IRL I've fought women and won, and I've fought women and lost. Neither gives me any shame at all, and I don't care who thinks it should.

However, it's a clouded issue in wrestling somewhat, because wrestling - as a martial art - is based around weight and upper body strength, where men have the undeniable advantage. The average woman isn't going to be able to take on Kurt Angle on his terms. The answer to that is, naturally, to not go on his terms. Size is one thing which can be used as a physical advantage. So, if you know how to use it, is being small. In general smaller people are harder to hit, faster, and have better conditioning and thus more stamina. Remember, fights are won in the mind, and it's how you use your own strengths and your opponent's weaknesses that matter.

All that is only one part of the debate, however. From those who don't know combat well, there are some darker stock responses to intergender combat. First, it's some kind of dirty sexual thing. It's for people who want to see someone dominate another person. And sadly, while I know that I don't have any sexual interest in intergender combat, and nor do most of the handlers I know, I can't deny that a handful do. All I can say to those people is: please respect that some of us just like to portray two fighters competing, and don't care about their genders.

The other is that it's sexist, or that it's promoting violence against women. Here, I disagree entirely. People too often confuse 'violence against women' with domestic violence. Domestic violence is abhorrent, no matter what the genders of the respective parties. But two adults competing in a fair fight is not domestic violence. What's sexist, to my mind, is telling women that because of their gender, they shouldn't be allowed to compete if they want to. But of course, there are certain branches of feminism which aren't actually interested in equality - just in making a stink about any vaguely related issue they can find. Same as anything, really.

The other big area Kut touches on is allowing women to compete for men's titles. Those who know me personally will know that I have always, always opposed gender-based titles in fedding, as well as titles segregated by weight category and nationality. This is as much about practicality as anything else; it's often hard enough getting enough people interested in chasing titles as it is without imposing restrictions which are based along fundamentally arbitrary lines. I understand the realism question - WWE and TNA keep things separated, so feds should too - but you know something? As far as I'm concerned, it's WWE and TNA who need to catch up there.

But then we're getting into the question of 'wrestling logic' where what happens in the world of pro wrestling, no matter how unrealistic, is accepted as the correct reality for fedding. I've been thinking about that one for some time, and there will be a post coming about it. For now, if you want to test 'wrestling logic' for yourself, here's an experiment: Try doing a front suplex on someone, then try doing a fisherman's suplex on someone, and decide which was easier.*


*Don't actually do that :p. Y'know - don't try this at blah blah blah whatever.

I'm back, and I'm better than ever! Got a knack for making things better.

Actually, I'm not better at all, medically speaking. If anything I'm worse. But on the plus side: I HAS INTERNET NAO. Again. So whooo! *does Flair Flop* Ow, my chest.

Thanks to my tricky internet situation I've been out of the fedding loop since early autumn last year, meaning I've missed some developments. I've also realised how much I've not missed all-nighters working on results, unreadable contract apps, and wrangling people's match ideas into a workable card without relieving oneself on anyone's dreams too much. But that's fedding for you! We do it because we love it, and not because we're all hopeless addicts. No sir.

While I was away, a number of interesting feds have sprung up. Prime among them is True Glory Wrestling, which made RoughKut's top ten e-feds a couple of months ago and is recommended by my buddy James, former owner of the much-missed Phoenix Wrestling Enterprise, which is good enough for me. TGW runs a weekly show and monthly PPVs and the front end is incredibly slick, with an easy-on-the-eyes colour scheme, simple and effective graphics and a great, easily navigable layout. There looks to be a decent range of talent there, and results are fairly well written, although the matches are a little on the short side. Overall it's a very stylish promotion and while it's not doing anything especially new, it does what it does well.

In the spirit of the aforementioned late Phoenix Wrestling Enterprise as well as the short-lived, Chikara-influenced New Revolution Wrestling Association, comes the excellently monickered Death Company Wrestling. It's still building to its first show, and already has a great OOC community going. Fedhead Boomtax is never short of inspired, unique ideas, and DCW promises to be crazy, anarchic and very funny. Not everybody will 'get' DCW, but those who do should have a blast. Also hosted on the DCW board is another promotion, Nic Cage Championship Wrestling. Mere words can't be employed in the expression of how much PURE CONCENTRATED AWESOME is in NCCW but suffice to say, it supplies over 250% of your RDA of Nic Cage.

One very intriguing fed which both opened and closed during my time away was Virtue, brainchild of noted hyperweirdo Ripplemagne (I mean that in a loving way, Ripp) which is every bit as unique as its progenitor. It's set in 1985 which already makes it genius, with all of the trappings that entails - small arenas, no Tron or pyro, terrible mullets and sweet electronic entrance music. It's currently out of commission as Ripplemagne has computer issues, but if it comes back (as is threatened), it has the potential to be truly radical to the max, as I believe was the vernacular in the mid eighties.

Another fed with a great gimmick is Unleashed. It's all based around underground, unsanctioned fighting with more influence from MMA than wrestling, with win/loss records kept on display and match cards presented like a genuine company. It has a tremendous sense of style and professionalism and is also possibly the fed with the highest overall level of writing talent within its membership I've ever seen - it seems to be a magnet for the most scarily awesome roleplayers I've ever had the fortune to get my ass handed to me by.

Femme Fatale Wrestling shares a lot of the same handlers as Unleashed, meaning the overall quality should be high. As the name implies, this one is all about the ladies, and while I've never exactly been noted as a fan of character segregation in e-fedding, I thoroughly applaud any fed which encourages people to break out of the 'white 20-something American male' default character in any regard. They're currently seeking tag teams, so those of you with any all-female teams should very definitely check it out. If I had the time, I'd be signing up for sure.

Finally, a real wrestler fed to close us out. ECW Hardcore Revolution has a pretty unique approach for a real wrestler fed, in that it's indy - specifically, a modern update of the pre-Invasion ECW of old, with a roster featuring some true hardcore legends (including Iron Shiek, Terry Funk, New Jack, Mayumi Ozaki, Steve Corino and... er... Colin Delaney). Shows are wild, free and untamed, much like the hair of current ECW Champion Brian Kendrick. God he's sexy.

Selecting The Theme Song That's Right For You

The hardest part of coming up with a new fedding character is of course deciding on their entrance music. It can be intimidating to look down a list of claimed songs and see that everything you wanted to use has already been taken. But fear not! I have compiled this guide to help you through the process of selecting a song which says absolutely nothing about your character, which is how it's supposed to work.


1. METAL

The default. Ideally, it should be New Wave American Heavy Metal. The more generic the better. Yeah, you COULD use some other kind of metal, but even with relatively standard stuff like Coal Chamber or Fear Factory, people would almost certainly look at you funny, like they think you’re gay. Do you want them to think you’re gay?


Even more ideally than that, it should be by a band who currently perform theme music for a WWE Superstar. Godsmack, Killswitch Engage and Alter Bridge are good places to start, but only use songs which have been released as singles and/or used in WWE video packages. In fact, if you’re really trying to go for the song which stands out the absolute least, just use Voices by Rev Theory.


Almost anyone can (and should) use metal, but if your character is young, white, male and American, then there’s really no point in looking any further, with a couple of exceptions I’ll come to shortly. If your character is British and/or over the age of thirty-five, you may select from the following additional bands: AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, The Quireboys, Saxon. No, you can’t have Def Leppard or Girlschool. Nor can you have Guns ‘n’ Roses, Van Halen or Aerosmith. With the exception of Metallica (who only got good from the Black Album onwards anyway), hard rock and metal didn’t exist in America before Trent Reznor rearranged his old, scratched Depeche Mode, Gary Numan and The Cure albums.


On that note, industrial and electronic metal are okay provided your character is dark and gothic (and preferably got abused as a kid) and it’s something well-known like White Zombie, Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson or that one KMFDM song everyone knows but can’t place. Nothing borderline industrial like Combichrist or Chiasm please, and NDH is completely out, even for German characters. It’s unknown whether or not Ministry and Skinny Puppy are allowed as theme music, since nobody is recorded as having ever tried.


Avoid bands which sing in languages other than English. All German and Benelux bands are Nazis, all Scandinavian bands are communist collaborators, and there’s no such thing as a good French band. The only bands in Spain and Portugal are punk, and who the hell listens to any punk other than the Misfits? The only good Italian bands have female vocals, and let’s be honest, all bands with female vocalists are probably Wiccans or something.


2. RAP / HIP-HOP

Permissible as an alternative to metal for black men or white women. If you’re a black woman, or Latin of either gender, then you have to use hip-hop, or an R&B song featuring at least one verse guest-rapped by a successful MC. White men may use rap under one of two circumstances: Firstly, if they’re extremely wealthy. Perhaps a playboy heir, or the CEO of a successful company. Basically, if they could appear on a rich list or in Forbes, then you can use either A: Something in the style of Cash Money Records, or B: Something by Eminem. The other group of white men allowed to use rap is Juggalos who must use Insane Clown Posse for at the least their first five years and then may branch out to Twiztid or Blaze Ya Dead Homie. This caveat is simplified by the fact that all Juggalos must be white and male.


3. DANCE / TECHNO

Only permissible if the band in question is either Prodigy or Pendulum, and even then, only if the song is Breathe, Firestarter or Smack My Bitch Up in the former case, or Propane Nightmares in the latter.


4. OTHER MUSIC

Foreign characters can use their home nation’s national anthem, or if they’re from the southern hemisphere, generic tribal music. Japanese characters get an anime theme. But otherwise, just use an American band for your foreign character anyway, nobody will care. Dark goth characters may use Carmina Burana, but nothing else classical is allowed. Country is only for characters over the age of 45 if male or 30 if female, and even then, it should be country with a rock twist. No jazz, no pop, no punk, no funk, no folk. As for indie? Don’t be ridiculous. Come on, who actually listens to Animal Collective or Xiu Xiu? Pasty, Pitchfork-reading New England hipster posers, that’s who.


FINAL TOUCHES

You're almost done, there's just a couple more steps to follow. Be sure not to list the name of the song correctly, and misspell the name of the band for good measure. That way people will know you just ripped it from Limewire. Some examples to get you started:

Bodies = Let The Bodies Hit The Floor

Killing In The Name = Killing In The Name Of

Chop Suey = Self Righteous Suicide

Down With The Sickness = Who cares what Disturbed songs are called?

But wait! People must hear your song! Linking to it is helpful for the fed’s staff, but there are rules here too. The absolute best thing to link to is a thirty second extract of the middle eight on Last.fm, but failing that, go for a Harry/Draco fan video on Youtube which uses your song as the soundtrack. For bonus points, link to a video which is unavailable in the fedhead’s nation of residence.


Follow all these simple steps, and you too can have a theme song with no originality, uniqueness or relevance to your character!

You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.

Hey kids. Sorry for the big gap in updates. You'd be amazed how much costochondritis can jerk around your passion for things.

So. Guessing game time. Guess what annoys me most on a new contract. Using the entrance music of whoever happens to be popular in WWE right now? Nope. One of the same handful of picbases every fed seems to be clogged up with? Nope. Yet another psycho heel promising to cleanse the promotion of the scum inhabiting it? Nope. A 400lb guy pulling moonsaults and planchas as regular moves? No, not even that.

Annoying as all of that stuff is, what's really guaranteed to kill my interest in a contract is being told about how the character is a huge deal, a million-time hall of famer, a trillion-time world champion, courted by major sponsors, a worldwide legend the fans will clamour for and opponents will fall weak at the knees just thinking about.

No, you're not.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but a hobby as loose and informal as e-fedding doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter how big you are, how much you've accomplished - pick a random startup fed from Chris Hart's, and chances are nobody there will have heard of you. If Edge or Cena joined TNA tomorrow, they'd start at the top, but all of TNA's fans will instantly recognise them. Much of the time in fedding, that ain't gonna happen - you're only known to the people you've shared a fed with. Why should bookers make you a main eventer right from the off when they haven't even seen your writing? How are your opponents supposed to respond to a Hogan-level superstar, about whom they know absolutely nothing? This comes back to the unified canon thing; being a world champion basically means nothing in e-fedding, outside of one fed and its circle of affiliates. I don't mean that to denigrate titles within that context, but pretty much every character who's been around more than a couple of years has been a world champion somewhere.

Okay, look at Asylum or Magnum's list of accomplishments, and you can't help but be impressed. These are guys who've almost never been without a title, who've held literally scores of honours over their careers. Clearly, you don't get that much without experience and talent. But that doesn't mean that when someone as good as Asylum or Magnum walks into a random fed, they're automatically pushed to the top of the card. Yet I see no end of people with less than a quarter of those achievements expecting exactly that to happen to them. Sorry, but just no.

Did Gangrel ever play Vampire?

Random bored Google and Wikipedia trawling turned up something very strange: tabletop wrestling roleplaying games, both card games and pen and paper.

I vaguely remember the old WWE card game, Raw Deal, WWE's attempt to cash in on the booming (circa-2000) collectible card game industry. In fairness I never actually played it, and maybe it's really good. Maybe it's the best wrestling-based card game ever, in the crowded field of two. Legends of Wrestling comes in full boxed sets, has quite charming black and white ink drawings as opposed to Raw Deal's glossy full photos and, like the terrible GameCube game of the same name, isn't tied to one particular period or promotion so the biggest hook is in putting together dream matches - Antonio Inoki vs. Steve Corino? King Kong Bundy vs. Tiger Mask? The Missing Link vs. The Mountie? Sherri Martel vs. Bobby Heenan? The Valentine Brothers vs. The Voodoo Kin Mafia? If only I knew anyone who was into both card gaming and wrestling, I'd get this and try it out, especially given that the transatlantic handling and shipping charges are less than five bucks.

I might end up getting it anyway since the company who publish the game, Filsinger Games, also publish a pen-and-paper wrestling roleplaying game - in space! For such is the utterly insane but surprisingly well-reviewed Champions of the Galaxy, which looks to be a mixture of WWF's late eighties/early nineties "We'll make a gimmick of out of anything!" bombast with a kind of spacefaring fantasy superhero galactic civil war saga that would bring George Lucas out in envious hives. This looks so legendarily insane I just have to try it. There's also an online version which looks kinda like a cross between a traditional online card game such as Pox Nora, Magic: the Gathering Online or Armageddon Empires, with Adam Ryland's wrestling management sims. I might try investigating further, if I do I'll post back with my thoughts.

Also well-received was Errant Knight Games' Kayfabe, an altogether more grounded simulation which seems to focus less on in-ring competition and more on backstage relationships and politics. Again I'd love to try it out at some point, but I'm lacking wrestling fans to play with in my area. I'm also aware of a more combat-oriented game called Wrestling Warriors by one Walt Spafford, and a White Wolf release entitled Streetfighter RPG, but more information is eluding me on both of them at present. Supposedly Streetfighter is about shoot fighting but I suspect the source I read might be a little confused, as I'm positive White Wolf had the license to the Street Fighter beat-em-up series for a while...

Of course as with the Raw Deal card game, where there's money to be had WWE will jump on it. The WWF Adventure Game was an early nineties attempt to let people be their favourite superstars in the comfort of their own living rooms - y'know, before wrestling videogames were any good. It was moderately well received by critics of the era but has not aged well apparently, not least because most of the biggest stars in it have long since moved on. Might be worth a try if I ever see a cheap copy somewhere - I can't see it being a collector's item somehow.

That all this stuff exists shouldn't really surprise me as much as it does. For one thing, people will make a game out of anything, and for another I'm still waiting on trying out some of the stuff in XWF, the almost-shoot wrestling supplement for White Wolf's dark superheroes setting, Aberrant - the first game since Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door to have me truly excited about the prospect of playing a jobber...

Who's The Beatdown?

Bear with me. Game strategist and theorist Mike Flores once wrote a seminal article on high-level play of the card game Magic: The Gathering entitled Who's The Beatdown? (link, for those who know the game) in which he defined the two roles in a 1-versus-1 match of that game: beatdown and control. In a nutshell, the beatdown player wants to be as aggressive as possible, with the intent of winning the game as quickly as possible. The control player, meanwhile, wants to stem the assault of the beatdown player through more defensive tactics, and win once the beatdown player's resources are depleted. The most common mistake ("yet subtle, yet disastrous" according to Flores) in competitive Magic is failure to understand your role. Think that you're the beatdown when you'd be better suited to control, or vice-versa, and you've more-than-likely lost.

The theory is pretty detailed in relation Magic, but the basic idea - the importance of recognising the dichotomy between aggressive and defensive play, and which one you're better suited to in a given situation - is applicable to many games, from real-time strategy (building walls and defensive turrets versus early tank rushes) to online shooters (sneaky, hit-and-run guerrilla warfare versus frontal assaults) to even backgammon (pushing to get all of your counters to your home board versus denying your opponent the ability to do the same). And guess what? I'm fairly certain the same thing can be applied to wrestling. When commentators talk about grounding or slowing down an opponent, they're talking about one competitor taking over the role of the control player.

One of the most common mistakes I see in match writing is a failure to take the participants' fighting styles into account. Even people with a good understanding of storytelling, ring positioning and psychology can often end up writing every match as if it was Triple H versus Edge, all strikes and clotheslines and brawling. Part of this, I'm sure, is simple unfamiliarity with fighting styles not common on WWE or TNA programming, which is fair enough. But it's definitely something worth learning if you want your matches to be as good as the can be. Watch different promotions from around the world and find out how people with different backgrounds fight. Learn whether luchadors favour kicks or punches, how a small high-flier sets up for their big moves, or how a British technician and a Canadian technician will differ in how they escape a hold.

More than just moveset, one's fighting style affects one's approach to combat. Another key term in Magic: The Gathering theory which I'm going to borrow is tempo, or the pace of the contest. It's difficult to define easily, but at heart, a beatdown player wants to speed up the pace of the game and the control player wants to slow it down. Translated to wrestling, the beatdown wrestler wants to speed up the pace of the match and the control wrestler wants to slow it down. Fliers with a lot of high-damage, high-risk diving or jumping attacks are looking to speed up the pace of a match, keeping the opponent out of breath and unable to catch up with the assault. By contrast, a technician with good conditioning wants to slow down the match, letting the opponent wear themselves out, before taking control.

A key attribute of many great wrestlers from Ric Flair to Triple H to Eddie Guerrero is the ability to change their pace to suit the match. Against large, slow, physically dominant people like Big Show or Kevin Nash, guys like this would speed up their assault, understanding that their role here is the aggressor - the beatdown. Against fast, tricky opponents like Jeff Hardy or
Shelton Benjamin, they'll become much slower and more defensive - the control - understanding that their role is to weather the assault and let the match run to a point when they can take over safely.

Extend this concept and in each match, one competitor becomes the beatdown and the other, the control. Think about the characters' movesets, country of origin, background and fighting styles, and try to work out who wants to be the early aggressor and who wants to be the defender taking the match to the long game. Please not this doesn't just mean one wrestler gets all the early offence in and the other turns round and dominates later on - individual exchanges can (and should) go either way. What I mean is to pay attention to what each participant's overall strategy ought to be. Get it right, and your match will flow much more smoothly as a believable contest.

The Size Advantage

A big barometer of success in running an e-fedding seems to be the size of your fed - the number of weekly shows you produce, the number of members you have. The larger the better. RoughKut definitely works on this principle. Something occurred to me about that recently - it's bullshit. I've been on feds with 200+ members and you know something? I hated them. They're impersonal and cliquey. More members means you're less likely to go under but it also means that newer or less active members are more likely to be marginalised.

I can see the counter-argument to that; newer and less active members ought to have an incentive to become an active part of the community and get further up the card. The larger a roster is, the tougher the field is, the harder the glass ceiling is to break, and that stimulates members to work harder. Those who aren't interested in pushing themselves that hard shouldn't have joined in the first place.

This makes the mistake of assuming everyone wants the same thing, that everyone wants to be the most successful wrestler, and every fed ought to want to be the most successful - what about those who just want to hang out and have fun? It's a chicken/egg situation - on large feds, very often, only established veterans become big players - but only big players become established veterans. Furthermore, I for one have always found storytelling less involved in any fed of about 100+ members; there's so much going on you're expected to keep track of and so few people are interested in anyone else's storylines.

Now, I'm not saying that all large feds ought to keel over and die. Promotions like Pro Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. have their place, no doubt, and there's nothing wrong with being competitive. But there's also nothing wrong with NOT being so competitive. But personally when I want to get to know a bunch of people, kick back and have a laugh, and more than anything really roleplay with others rather than just compete for championships, I'm going to go to a smaller and more intimate place.

I'm stopping now before this devolves into ludology versus narratology - don't worry, I'm sure that one will come too at some point. :P