"Everyone knows wrestling is fake"

a little thread on my post-mortem thoughts on Lucha Underground

"Everyone knows wrestling is fake". "Fake" is, of course, not really the right word, is it? Wrestling is "fixed", for sure. "Scripted". The athletic displays are real; the stories are not, they are built up around the wrestling and draped over top.

I started watching Lucha Underground in January, and it was the first time I really took an interest in professional wrestling https://twitter.com/JenKatWrites/status/1354500767378497537?s=20

I've joked a lot in the past few months that starting with Lucha Underground has spoiled me or ruined me for other promotions - the quality of the wrestling and the quality of the storytelling are, to me, unparalleled.

One really fun side effect of this, as I started to livetweet my reactions to the show, was how many other fans came out of the woodwork to talk to me about it - people I knew, but didn't know liked wrestling; people I didn't know were specifically LU fans, etc.

A LOT of TTRPG folks are into wrestling, as it turns out; more than I ever knew. I knew there were a handful of wrestling RPGs out there, but I mean - you start searching around, you'll find a TTRPG about literally anything, I'm sure.

"Everyone knows wrestling is fake"

Shortly thereafter (late Jan? early Feb?), I also started watching AEW's weekly shows, and interacting in some of their fan spaces as well.

I hear fans throw around terms like "mark" - someone who loses sight of the fact that it's all fixed, or at the very least behaves as though it were "real". It's a pejorative - an insult to throw at someone willfully suspending disbelief.

"Everyone knows wrestling is fake"

...but at the same time, everyone wants to believe. I legitimately, sincerely do not think most wrestling fans would be there if there was not a part of them that wants to believe.

In Lucha Underground, they use a cinematic promo structure to weave a story about the ancient Aztec gods and those who would destroy them; they refer to their set as "the temple"; and perhaps most crucially, they refer to the fans - in the temple and at home - as "the believers".

Lucha Underground embraces the blend of unreality in a way that no other wrestling promotion (that I've seen or heard of) does. The wrestler Fenix is not simply a luchador from Mexico with a mythical gimmick - he literally dies and is rebirthed through ancient magics.

Drago and Aero Star are not two men using the gimmicks of a dragon and a time traveler - they literally are a dragon and a time traveler. Their fantastical powers are critical to the story of the show, and you are expected to buy in fully.

Some characters - Cage, most notably - themselves question the strange fantastical elements of their world and are ALWAYS shown as heels for it.

If you can believe for 45 minutes that the Aztec gods have literally bestowed magical powers upon the Gift of the Gods champion, why can't you believe that the match wasn't scripted, that the winner wasn't pre-chosen by the bookers?

And if you can't believe any of it, why is that so different from any other scripted show? I don't believe that the events of The Witcher were factual, but I still enjoyed the story I was being told.

"Everyone knows wrestling is fake"

...but some promotions pretend to be realer than others.

I have always been thrown by the pretense of the rankings system in AEW, that you can't go for the championship unless you're number one ranked or that you need to squash 15 jobbers in a row to "earn it" or something.

AEW is not less fixed than other professional wrestling shows. But pretending to be less fixed has locked them into something less fun and less enjoyable than "our promoter is a capricious bloodthirsty rich guy and if he says we fight, well, he signs all our checks, so we fight."

(Dario Cueto deserves his own thread, but I will say here that the invention of a fictional promoter who can behave in absolutely unhinged ways and who is played by an actual actor, allowing your actual staff to continue to be, you know, professional businessmen, was genius)

"Everyone knows wrestling is fake"

...but Lucha Underground embraces those who want to believe, rather than spitting on them.

The reason, of course, that so many people in the TTRPG sphere also enjoy professional wrestling, is that we are also professional suspenders of disbelief.

And specifically, as game designers, we are in the business of creating the circumstances for others to suspend disbelief. When I design a game, I am not telling you a story, but I am giving you the tools to tell your own story and - I hope - to buy into it emotionally.

I want you to care about the stakes for your characters and your world, even if you never believe that it's real. I want you to believe that what happens to them matters, and I want it to matter to you.

When other promotions pretend to be unscripted, spontaneous, "real" - it feels like a self-conscious reflex, a kind of "we know what we're doing is silly, but bear with us" (not dissimilar to Disney's "haha aren't fairy tales dumb" era).

Lucha Underground is not self-conscious.

"Everyone knows wrestling is fake"

...but Lucha Underground is the only thing I've seen that views that as an opportunity rather than a limitation.

And in RPGs, where we're all marks, I think a lot of people would really find resonance with the show.