Board 8 > Scarlet Ranks 150 User-Nominated Wrestlers Part II

(+) Yeah! (+)

Thanks to everyone who followed along with this list. It certainly was a great time-killer at work. Special thanks to Lopen and Eddv and Tom who helped propel the conversation consistently. It really kept the topic going.

Now that it's finally finished, I'm probably going to post a topic looking for suggestions for another project, so if you're interested in helping alleviate my boredom some more, feel free to participate in that!
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Pillman is going to be where we disagree most.

The main thing he is remembered for is just basically being a shit CM Punk honestly.

Its hilarious that he got paid. But I just watched this angle and its just....better in a meta sense than it ever was in action.

He was a solid performer - I really enjoyed the war games where sid beat the ever loving snot out of him.
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Wow you just blew through those last few! I actually was pretty sure those would be the top 4 and I guess gun to my head I would've guessed DDP would be #1 but yeah. I guess when you're talking about your absolute favorites it's easier to find stuff to write about em.

Pillman I feel like could have been highly rated by me as well if he had more time as The Loose Cannon as it's a gimmick I feel has a lot of potential and he did well for what time he had with it. As it is he just didn't have enough longevity to leave anywhere near that impression on me, as I didn't have much fondness of the guy before that gimmick. He was good in the ring and all, and I guess he had that weird WCW feud with Kevin Sullivan but like... I dunno, that was more confusing than anything and despite showing shades of The Loose Cannon before WWF I can't say it ever appealed to me before WWF. He's the other guy with Arn that I was saying "two guys I was never really big on in the top 10" for for the record.

Now DDP is a weird one in that I disliked him at first-- and I'm gonna be honest I think it mostly just comes down to his look (he's one of those guys who looked like he was 50 back when he was 30 but then stopped aging-- also his ribs were taped so long it became almost like parody) but unlike with other guys I said this about he actually won me over at the time without me going back at a later date. I think it's because the Diamond Cutter was just a cool move to get behind with all the setups (even if they were basic compared to the contrived RKO setups we get sometimes, that almost made it better) and he just consistently had at least passable matches, even against guys who sucked.
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For me, Pillman was an evolution over time and in different companies, and that always resonates with me as "real" for the character. Much like AJ Styles in that regard. The fact that he was cut short makes him more endearing for me because I have that dream of what's to come.
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Didn't have anything to comment on unfortunately but I enjoyed lurking and reading this scarlet! Learned a good bit about wrestling here.
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Glad you followed along Snake!
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Yeah I definitely see a bit of a parallel there. Right down to both of them to some extent starting their careers as vanilla midgets.

But if AJ Styles died in like... 2012 (first glimpses of him showing a character I liked were around then), I wouldn't like him all that much either. Don't mean to be morbid or tasteless or anything, but that's just the way it is. In any case while I will 100% agree he died too early and that I saw the potential for an all time great there.
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Glad to lurk along to this topic. As a kid who worshiped at the heels of Savage and Hogan (mostly Savage) back in the day, to coming back in the late Attitude Era basically to hear The Rock's promos and ignoring a lot of the (non-Foley) wrestling content, to skipping most of the 2000's until the New Day piqued my interest and then diving back into the product retroactively to finally appreciate the whole "wrestling" content, this has really helped me fill in a lot of blanks and shown me an appreciation for the thing that isn't the usual wrestling smark stuff. Seeing guys like DiBiasse ranked so highly really makes me happy, as that kind of "pulling a great but not five-star match charged with enough emotion and character to make me care" is really what I love more than workrate, and that seems to be a hard opinion to find online past, like, Strowman in the last six months of 2017.

Don't totally agree with a lot, and the Savage fanboy in me can't entirely forgive him ONLY being 54 after watching his buildup to the Mania III match again and again, but this has been consistently enjoyable for a number of days, and thanks for it.
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It shouldn't be forgotten that Pillman also had amazing junior heavyweight matches and a fantastic run with Austin as the Blondes. There is still a lot there.
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Kamekguy posted...

Glad to lurk along to this topic. As a kid who worshiped at the heels of Savage and Hogan (mostly Savage) back in the day, to coming back in the late Attitude Era basically to hear The Rock's promos and ignoring a lot of the (non-Foley) wrestling content, to skipping most of the 2000's until the New Day piqued my interest and then diving back into the product retroactively to finally appreciate the whole "wrestling" content, this has really helped me fill in a lot of blanks and shown me an appreciation for the thing that isn't the usual wrestling smark stuff. Seeing guys like DiBiasse ranked so highly really makes me happy, as that kind of "pulling a great but not five-star match charged with enough emotion and character to make me care" is really what I love more than workrate, and that seems to be a hard opinion to find online past, like, Strowman in the last six months of 2017.

Don't totally agree with a lot, and the Savage fanboy in me can't entirely forgive him ONLY being 54 after watching his buildup to the Mania III match again and again, but this has been consistently enjoyable for a number of days, and thanks for it.

Thanks for following along. Admittedly, I am a little biased against Savage since I came to his greatest era years later and found the Steamboat-Savage match wanting a little bit. It's hard to rate a match when you are not the target audience for it, I think.
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Yeah. He had good matches. Though by 2012 AJ Styles definitely had his share of excellent matches too. I'm a big character guy though so I really need the character to click with me for me to really think they're an amazing all around package of a wrestler. This doesn't need to be something super grandiose-- like I'd previously been defending Dean Malenko's character as completely fine, but before like 1996 Pillman wasn't even on the Malenko level and was more of like a Finn Balor ball of bland imo.

And then at that point he gained the foundation of an interesting character muddled in weird storylines in WCW, and then he had the beginnings of a good one in WWF but there wasn't enough for me, personally, to really latch onto, since it just didn't last very long.

Anyway I don't really want to ramble on about this too much as I don't want to feel like I'm trying to rag on the guy, cause I'm not, but just want to make what I'm saying clear I guess.
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It's fine, I'd rather have discussion than not.
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Would you call him a a Finn Ball-or of bland?
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A fun lurk for sure.

I believe you said 9 of your 10 favorites are repped. Who wasn't nominated?
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Roddy Piper
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Nice work on all these write ups, even if I totally disagree on basically everything about how you rate wrestlers lol (although oddly enough DDP would rank pretty high for me too, in my case just because he was my favourite when I started watching WCW as a kid in the mid/late 90s)
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Well if that was true you would reverse the rankings!
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Panthera has a really big crush on Jenna Morasca, okay
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I'm trying to think of what that would seriously entail. I think my biggest thing is being able to suspend my disbelief for entertaining segments, so I guess Panthera wants to not believe boring segments?

Triple H #1?
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I disagree with what qualities you value relative to others (the reasons given in write ups), not necessarily the actual conclusions (the specific rankings)
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I'd be interested to hear what you value.
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Basically you put a way higher premium on character and story telling than I do. In twenty years of watching wrestling I've never seen a story that went beyond being a decently enjoyable set up for a match, the vast majority to me is just "generic angry dude yells at generic angry dude" stuff that I only don't dislike because I don't hold it much of a standard
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Gotcha. I do value great matches a lot though!
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Yeah I would say that's where Lopen and I differed most from Scar is where we valued character over in ring performance.
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scarletspeed7 posted...

Gotcha. I do value great matches a lot though!

Yeah thinking about it more you're really more in between the guys like Lopen who are total opposites to me and me, I guess I had their comments on the brain or something
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Lopen on the brain is a serious condition.

I think I work like this: Can the person put on an entertaining match? If so, you move on to round 2, if not rate. Round 2: can this person entertain me in between their matches? If so, move on to round 3, if not rate. Final Round: Does this character speak to me about something beyond simple wrestling? Rate based on this.
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Well

Where Eddv and me and scarlet differ is specifically on a character end.

Scarlet likes good stories just as we do, which is relatively lower priority for you, but we like more bombastic characters.

Like for me (and I think eddv) it's like Character > Story > Ring Work
For Scarlet (from what I've gathered from the write-ups) it's like Story >= Ring Work > Character
For you (from what I'm gathering) it's like Ring Work >> Story/Character
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I disagree with you Lopen. I just look for something different in characters than you. To me there has to be some nuance to a character. That's why I look at Luger and I'm like, "This is a character with some depth to him; I can rank this guy highly."

I don't really rate story for characters; I don't hold it against them too much. I try to rate the character purely for the character.
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Well that's kinda what I meant by story. Like to get nuance for a character you need to flesh them out with plot arcs and stuff. A character doesn't come nuanced out of the box, really.

Me and Eddv we might like a guy like Sid just as much even if he didn't really do anything but cut incoherent promos his whole career. You'd get a lot more out of him like, changing over time.
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Yeah Lopen that sounds about right. I don't completely ignore story and character or anything, to me they're just there to provide a bit of extra context for the matches and fill the time between matches in a feud (which is important since I prefer guys who are feuding to not directly lay hands on each other much, if at all, during the build up to a PPV unless the feud has been going on a while and they've had a big PPV match or two already...so there needs to be *something* of value going on to build it up)
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But I can survive on snapshots of a character more than you. If Sid's incoherent promos and ring work created a more solidified character for me, he would have ranked higher. That said, Sid ranked as highly as he did for me because he was incoherent.

Scott Steiner is a great example of this. I ranked Steiner very highly because he is a coherent version of Sid's incoherency. There is an utterly stupid logic to Steiner. That's character, not story. Steiner's story arcs are the shits in TNA.
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Well, I'm not trying to argue the definition of story here. I'm just saying what I meant when I said "story" in the context of that inequality.

I should've probably said like, character depth or something. I do think the stories the characters contribute to will help provide this more often than not, but like the actual stories going into matches I don't think I would weigh into whether I like a character much at all either. Sometimes there are just great guys who get screwed over by the writing-- that isn't gonna generally make me hate (or love) the guy unless it makes me view the character in a different light.

Which I mean, it can. Like in some ways you could argue my complaints with Arn Anderson were just that, because the on screen story of the horsemen in the vacuum of MNW era Nitro to me didn't didn't match what the character was presenting, which made me care for the character less. And to go back to way earlier in the list for a positive spin on this, I wouldn't have cared for Glacier nearly as much had I not seen his story arc where he sold his entrance to Kaz Hayashi. So I mean, what I'm talking about is related to story in that story will help bring it out, but not directly story, if that makes sense.

I think the stories in and of themselves we all care about about equally though.
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Lopen posted...

So I mean, what I'm talking about is related to story in that story will help bring it out, but not directly story, if that makes sense.

I can see what you're saying.
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That was a fun read, thanks for writing it.

scarletspeed7 posted...

Roddy Piper

Hell yeah.
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An example that captures peak Eddv priorities is this: I would have ranked Jerry Sags somewhere in the low 40s on this list because for me the Nastys pastiche and stupid over the top "6 year old boy who thinks gross=cool" is super awesome and I would rate that well over like a sound technical wrestler with an understated character like Dean Malenko.

But Sags was a significantly better worker than Knobs and that would still be worth a few placements to me.
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This was a blast to read, Scarlet. Thanks!
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I loved reading this even if I lurked
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Chris lurked and in the end that's all that really matters. Thanks for following trdl!
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I liked reading through this topic and look forward to whatever it is you rank next.
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Yayyy
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