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I haven’t engaged with WWE since WrestleMania 36, exhausted by the concept of empty arena wrestling and the unending parade of decisions that, even for a company as brutal and ruthless as the worldwide leader in sports entertainment is, seemed extraordinarily cruel and tin-eared. How do you watch a wrestling promotion that’s not only…
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Richard Wayne Penniman, who revolutionized American music and culture as Little Richard, passed away yesterday at the age of 87. I am nowhere near knowledgeable enough about the history of rock and roll to eulogize him, nor is that my function as a wrestling critic, but when someone of the stature and influence of…
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Welcome to Let’s Pretend It’s Any Year Other Than 2020, where the Fanfyte crew talks about wrestling from May in other, better years. There’s been a lot of Atsushi Onita coverage on Fanfyte lately. I wrote about his exploding ring death match against Terry Funk as an example of the tenderness I’d like to…
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I miss professional wrestling terribly. I know that it’s still out there, plumbing the depths of human morality, bleeding viewers and endangering labor while declaring itself essential, but how can you miss a houseguest who won’t fucking leave? I miss the real thing, y’all—125 people packed in a barn that just housed a chicken…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the human voice lately, about how pared back my experience of it has been over the last month and a half. When I’m not writing about professional wrestling and when I’m not a poet, I’m the manager of a record store. Before my store closed down last month,…
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You may not know this from Fanfyte VCR or any of the non-COVID-19 related wrestling coverage I’ve done during These Uncertain Times, but I feel like my enjoyment of professional wrestling—current American professional wrestling at least—is at an inflection point. WWE isn’t just bad—they’re an active blight on American culture. AEW is dealing with…
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I want to start by going back to 2018, when World Wrestling Entertainment was last the center of national and international scorn. You may remember 2018’s Crown Jewel event, broadcast live from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia exactly one month after the state carried out the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in their embassy…
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WrestleMania 36, the collective fever dream of a world hungry for live entertainment and yet somehow sick to death of the WWE’s signature brand of live entertainment, took place last week, forever altering many fans’ perception of what wrestling is—what wrestling is capable of being—through its presentation of the Undertaker/AJ Styles Boneyard Match and…
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Previously: WrestleMania 36 Part One At last, wrestling can sleep. It won’t, of course—as a long-running metaphor for the strength and endurance of America(n capitalism), there’s more Raw, NXT, SmackDown, and AEW to come—but it could. And if it did, what strange new territory it’d have to explore upon waking. AJ Styles is canonically dead.…
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WrestleMania shouldn’t have happened this year, but it did. Pre-taped in the WWE Performance center from the hours of 11:00pm to 5:00am and with a card heavily altered due either to talent being ill in an undisclosed fashion or being immunocompromised, WrestleMania defied logic and safety, practically spit in God’s eye, and happened. Beyond…