This is true, this is real, this is Straight Edge

Why are there so few Trish Stratus/Lita femslash MVs on Youtube, huh?! I mean, are people blind? Wrestling must not have much of a fannish lesbian following, because I'd think Lita/Trish was tailor-made for femslashers into rival-shipping. See what I mean?

On a somewhat related note, retroginger and I were talking about this clip of Jon Moxley (aka WWE's Dean Ambrose) backing nemesis Jimmy Jacobs into a corner of the ring and kissing the fuck out of him. For those not familiar with wrasslin, think Sexy Psycho on Emo Jerkass Slashbait action. retroginger pointed out that you could make a flowchart of how many wrestlers have had their mouths on Jimmy Jacobs by this point. That brings me to one of my favorite little feuds in indie wrestling: Jimmy Jacobs vs. Adam Cole and now, in my opinion, its sort of fascinating, slashbait-y, and almost progressive, all at once.

Adam Cole and Jimmy Jacobs first encountered each other in EVOLVE, where Jimmy played the seasoned veteran openly contemptuous of newbie Adam. After Adam finally scored a defeat on Johnny Gargano, Jimmy made his way to the ring, got on a mic, and declared that Adam was hot (no lies detected) and came onto him. Adam, naturally, challenged him to a wrestling match. Their rivalry continued into early this year, including such notable moments as Jimmy propositioning Adam for sex on Twitter, and Jimmy open-mouthed kissing Adam during their match at ROH Hunt for Gold earlier this year. What I love about this, aside from the obvious fact that Jimmy and Adam are sexy and its entertaining to watch them have aggressive sexual tension, is that the rivalry's not so much about Jimmy being GAY (he's not, or at least his character's not; see below) but more about Jimmy being EVIL, and thusly Adam wanting no part of him. Other than the announcers joking about Jimmy not being "the first man to kiss Adam Cole", there's not much fuss over them being both male. You could replace either Jimmy or Adam with a female wrestler (or hell, two female wrestlers, ie Mickie James and Trish) and have pretty much the same story. There's some fun character development as well, as we see a return to Jimmy's stalker with a crush side we haven't seen much of since he was lovesick over his female manager, Lacey, c. 2006. It seems Jimmy has a thing for gorgeous dark-haired wrestlers!

Alas, my het wrestling OTP (Zigglee) is no more, and other canon couples, such as Kane/Daniel Bryan, and Cody Rhodes/Damien Sandow, are on the outs. Even CM Punk and Paul Heyman are going through a bitter divorce. But my slash OTP, Dean Ambrose/Seth Rollins, is still truckin' along. Allow me to show you my reasons to ship them.
( This post brought to you by: My insomnia )

If I got famous somehow, I would totally be the WORST famous person EVER. I know myself and I know there's no way I could resist. I'd fuck with my fangirls' heads, troll for hookups on Twitter, and just be a giant bitch. How do most celebrities resist the temptation to troll the shit out of their fandom?

On a not entirely-unrelated tangent, I showed a picture of CM Punk to my friend.

HER: Ewwww.
ME: Ewwww!? How can you say that! He's my dream man!
HER: Jessica, he looks like a guy who steals cars.
ME: I know, he's so hot!

Whatever, her type is '50-year-old British author', so I don't get how she can criticize my taste in men. Seriously, if he's old enough to be her dad and wears a lot of tweed, she will be all over that dick. I personally think my thing for rock stars/pro wrestlers is totally sane in comparison. /feels superior

1. I find it intriguing how sometimes, wrestlers are clearly portraying the same character, even with a name change, when wrestling for different companies, and how sometimes they are wrestling as entirely different characters, unrelated to previous gimmicks. For example, Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose of WWE's The Shield are pretty obviously intended to be the same characters as their indie personas, Tyler Black and Jon Moxley (respectively). Hell, the very first thing Ambrose did upon joining FCW was bring up their indie backgrounds. So Seth Rollins is the same guy who was in The Age of the Fall with Jimmy Jacobs and was Ring of Honor champion... just the name changed. There's a continuity of character there.

On the other hand, Windham Rotunda switched names AND characters while still in the same company, going from being Husky Harris to being (the much more awesome) Bray Wyatt. This is a clear break with the past, as there's no acknowledgement that Harris and Wyatt are portrayed by the same person. It stands out even more because his brother wrestles as Bo Dallas, and they were acknowledged as brothers onscreen when he was Harris, but not that he's Wyatt. Bo Dallas and Bray Wyatt are NOT brothers onscreen, even if they are offscreen.

2. It really skeeves me out when people write fics using the wrestler's real names. I mean, okay, Randy Orton is the guy's real name, but Randy Orton the character is not identical to Randy Orton the person. But c'mon, don't call Dean Ambrose "Jon Good" in your fanfic. Pretend that Jon Moxley is his real name if you have to. That, for me, starts toeing the line over into RPF which makes me antsy. What is the point of using their real names, anyway? Are you saying that this fic ACTUALLY happened, and that you know Dean as Jon Good? No? Then why the hell are you calling him that?

3. The abyss gazes back... we know from interviews and such that some wrestlers ARE aware of fanfic and have even read them. Jimmy Jacobs has tweeted fanfic to Seth Rollins in the past. I get real jumpy over this. When I was coming up in fandom over a decade ago, the prevailing wisdom was to keep fandom underground, to protect our own asses if nothing else. It is very easy for copyright holders to make a fuss and get fanfic and fanfiction sites/comms axed and deleted. Because its so much more visible today, I'm all for keeping that seperation between the fictional personas and the real wrestlers. Minimize embarassment for them, minimize the damage that could be done to fandom.

4. Mick Foley sends me text messages. Gabe Sapolsky (Ring of Honor, Evolve) emailed me a couple days ago. I have never been in a fandom that, in a sense, is so small and intimate. It's surprisingly easy to get in touch with some of these guys. In a sense that is cool, and in another sense its totally freaky. I CANNOT look at fanfic that includes Mick as a character. Are you shitting me? It'd feel as weird as reading fic about the people on my flist. And if its so easy for me to have this much contact, when I haven't even tried all that hard, how easy is it for fanbrats to get up in their face? And yeah, some of the stuff that goes on in Tumblrland is frankly invasive, but that's, y'know, Tumblr.

My biased listing of the scariest bad guys in pro wrestling. This is very much an indication of what I consider scary, and should not be taken as an authoritative list. Some great heels -- such as Jake the Snake -- don't make it.

5. Jimmy Jacobs

"Love doesn't save. NOTHING saves!"

Arguably, the scariest thing about Jimmy Jacobs is the disconnect between what he looks like and what he really is. Jacobs looks like an adorable emo boy, but in fact he is a bloodthirsty hate machine. After falling head-over-heels for his manager, Lacey, Jimmy finally won her love, only to fall right off the edge of despair when he discovered that love didn't redeem him or make him feel fulfilled. Discontent with life, he formed a quasi-cult, quasi-wrestling stable, The Age of the Fall, with several like-minded individuals. Their first public performance was stringing up an unconscious Jay Briscoe and hanging him upside down over the ring so that Jimmy could stand beneath him, pontificating on his philosophy, while Briscoe's blood rained down onto him. When Lacey fell in love with another man, Jimmy attacked her several times with a metal railroad spike, and he had no problems discarding any friends or associates that failed him or had served their purpose. Jimmy Jacobs is an evil person.


Age of the fall by BadFurDay

4. Jon Moxley

Now known by his WWE slave name, Dean Ambrose, Moxley rampaged through many independent wrestling promotions from the mid-to-late 2000s. Growing up in dire poverty, with a prostitute mother and an unknown father, Moxley is deeply traumatized and appears to suffer from borderline personality disorder, swinging wildly between despair-driven epic meltdowns and a raging god complex. His articulate, creepy promos are often compared to Heath Ledger's Joker; they actually pre-date Ledger's Joker character (I've found promos dating from 2006, before The Dark Knight, in which Moxley is indistinguishable from his more modern persona). I actually think he's scarier than Ledger's Joker, if only because the twitchy, strung-out, unpredictably violent Jon Moxley displays a vulnerability that the Joker never has. You can clearly see the neglected child beneath the persona, and he's all the scarier for it.



3. Goldust

Goldust during his debut was one of the creepiest, most "out-there" characters WWF/E has ever had, before or since. Like a lot of their heels (see: Kane), Goldust was watered down into kid-friendly comic relief, but for the first couple years of his career, he was a 6'6 wrestling tank with an unnerving ability to tap into Middle America's homophobia and terror of the unknown. The only thing scarier than an effeminate sissy to red-blooded macho dudebros is an effeminate sissy who can bodyslam you so hard you see Jesus coming for you. I really have to give props to Dustin Rhodes, who portrayed Goldust; not only is Dustin a great wrestler, I think he's one of the better actors WWF/E has ever had. If he had let on that he was uncomfortable with his gimmick, or thought it beneath him, the whole thing would've fallen flat. But because he embodied the character so utterly, you could get behind him. Dustin also came up with a couple of Goldust's most iconic moments. It was his idea to have Goldust be wearing lingere under his ring attire when Roddy Piper rips open his outfit during this match, for example. The Bizarre One, indeed.


Goldust vs. 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper - Hollywood... by ShatteredDreamsProduction

2. Raven

Someone on Youtube once said, "If there's such a thing as a cult wrestler, it would be Raven. Raven is the Rocky Horror Picture Show of wrestlers." Raven during his epic run in ECW was such a dark, nihilistic character that almost the first thing WCW did when they got a hold of him was to turn him into a joke. Later, he and the other ECW legends would be completely wasted in the WWE. But nothing can dilute the power of his feud with Tommy Dreamer, in which they portrayed childhood friends who had a falling out over a girl and took very different paths in life. As abusive and self-centered as he was, Raven's genuine charisma won him a group of flunkies, and during one storyline, he brainwashed The Sandman's wife and children to his side. He also notoriously crucified the Sandman with barbed wire, sort of like a less violent Passion of the Christ. The aforementioned Jimmy Jacobs and even CM Punk in his SES days owe a lot to Raven's deranged cult-leader persona.


Raven Crucifies Sandman by Spencer619

1. Mankind

The incredibly cuddly Mick Foley portrayed Mankind as a raging, mask-clad psychopathic manchild with a pig-squeal voice, who delivered eerie promos on the cruelty of mankind itself, and threw his body into every match like it didn't even matter if he hurt himself, as long as he made his opponent hurt ten times worse. Undertaker threw him off the Cell, Mankind climbed back up for more. So Undertaker chokeslams him through the Cell... and Mankind gets back up for more. Like Goldust, Mankind would be watered down into a Muppet, but for a while there he was straight-up nightmare material. While all of Mankind's promos are incredible, I have a special place in my heart for this one co-starring Goldust, in which you can almost smell the crazy.


Goldust & Mankind Boiler Room Interview - In... by ShatteredDreamsProduction

Omigod, y'all, how PRECIOUS are Dolph and AJ?!

WHY are the fanbrats pearl-clutching over the latest AJ & Punk segment? 'Creative is ruining AJ's character! They're degrading her! They're slut-shaming her! Now she's gonna be weak and pathetic ~omg!'

First of all, since when has AJ ever done what everyone expected her to do?! No one thought she'd get Kane wrapped around her finger, play Daniel Bryan for a fool, leave him at the altar, and become a GM. For MONTHS the fanbrats have been bewailing the most predictable bullshit and AJ surprises them every single time! There is nothing about this girl that is gonna crack and fall apart the first time CM Punk and Darth Heyman are mean to her. Stop underestimating AJ!

I'm not sure what's up AJ's sleeve but I am eager to find out. As for Punk using her sexual history against her -- he's the BAD GUY! He's a heel, that's what they do. They go after the most vulnerable part of a person, in this case AJ's feelings for Punk, and they rip it open. It'd be one thing if Punk was still a heroic character and therefore we were supposed to accept his slut-shaming of AJ as implicitly right. But he's a BAD GUY who does BAD THINGS like calling a girl a SLUT and mocking her about it. We are supposed to despise him for this!



Okay, onto my third part: Kane and Daniel Bryan's segments continue to be some of the best things about WWE. There's even a growing contingent of 'Kaniel' shippers (being a diehard Kane/AJ shipper, I appreciate it but cannot board that ship). "My name is Gerald." Kane's comic timing is impeccable!

And, oh yeah...

At some point in the near future I will make a post that goes into more detail about Goldust, as portrayed by wrestler Dustin Rhodes (son of "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes and brother of Cody Rhodes), but as an introduction to this one-of-a-kind superstar, have some gifs!


GIFSoup
His classic "THIS BITCH" look when the Ultimate Warrior goes all King Kong at him.


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Sneaking a peek up Rowdy Roddy Piper's kilt. ♥


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The Artist Formerly Known As Goldust reading Dr. Seuss aloud. This is the closest thing to bisexual fetish porn performance art the WWE has ever given us


GIFSoup
Goldust strutting around dressed as Sable!

So tonight was the tag team match with Kane (demon wrestler from hell) and Daniel Bryan (YES! YES! YES!) vs. CM Punk (Best In The World) and AJ Lee (#crazychicks). For those peons not in the know, these four are at the epicenter of WWE's most salaciously soap opera-riffic storyline.

DBry was AJ's dirtbag boyfriend, and after he dumped her, AJ went off the deep end. She started wearing CM Punk's shirts to the ring and interfering in matches between her ex and Punky. Then Kane got involved. Then AJ started stalking Kane. DBry went around loudly proclaiming how he ttly doesn't care about AJ anymore srsly u guiz.

And then, tonight's match. It starts off with Punk being manhandled by DBry and then Kane, then he stumbles into AJ and inadvertently tags her into the match. AJ (standing 5 foot nuthin') climbed into the ring to face off with Kane (6'7 or thereabouts and powered by the souls of the damned).

Then fuckin' pornography broke out in the ring.



Okay, so it's PG porn. But this is about as sexy as WWE will allow their performers to get -- and dayum, it's not like she gives him a peck on the cheek. AJ gets all up on Kane and kisses the hell out of him. She is on him like white on rice. At 7:45 you can see Kane bite her lip, naughty boy.

Kane then stumbles over to DBry, tags him in, then bails like "Fuck you, I gotta go backstage and take a cold shower." Punky handily takes out DBry and during the victory celebration, AJ sits Indian style in the ring and makes sex eyes at all three men.

I AM NOW MORE CONFLICTED ABOUT SHIPPING THAN EVER. What is gonna happen!?

Scenario A) Kane punches Punky and DBry in the face, then slings AJ over his shoulder and carries her backstage to have rough monster sex. AJ grins and flashes thumb's up as she's carried away.

Scenario B) AJ's conniving makes DBry and Kane attack each other like a pair of horny wolverines. They tear each other to pieces and she and Punky, being the sole survivors, are declared the victors. They proceed to make out for the rest of the PPV.

Scenario C) DBry's l33t ninja skills make short work of both Kane and Punky. He then drops to his knees and rips off his shirt to reveal a tattoo of AJ's face. She kicks him in the jaw and knocks him out cold.

Scenario D) It somehow turns into a big happy foursome.

So much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair over this storyline!

Theories:

A) AJ is sekritly in cahoots with DBry and will turn on Punky, giving the title to Bryan. He then takes her back. Kane will then bust through the ring floor and devour CM Punk, bones and all. The End.

My rebuttal: Throwing away whatever dubious character development the WWE's given AJ to turn her into DBry's flunky so he can preen and shout "YES YES YES" while holding the title would be such a pisser of an ending to this storyline, which is why WWE would probably do it. Also, what a bad message to send to little girls: do whatever your abusive boyfriend tells you to do, and he MIGHT throw you a crumb of affection! Sleep tight, kiddies!

B) AJ is still in love with DBry, and is using Punky to make him jealous. Meanwhile, Kane feasts on the souls of the innocent.

My rebuttal: Like option A, this option really doesn't need Kane in any way, shape, or form. Also, the only time Daniel Bryan and AJ had believable sexual tension was on the 6/1/12 backstage segment, AFTER they'd already broken up (they can generate angry I-hate-you-so-goddamn-much tension but nothing else).

C) Punky soundly defeats DBry and Kane, realizes he's in love with AJ too, and they ride off into the sunset together.

My rebuttal: Going steady with AJ doesn't fit with CM Punk's loner, rebellious character. He's also hung onto the title long enough at this point that fans are starting to wonder when he's gonna drop it to someone else. If this threeway feud with Kane and Daniel Bryan doesn't do it, who's gonna take the title from him? Freakin' Big Show? Give me a break.

D) Punky and DBry take each other out in an onslaught of flying limbs and chokeholds, and while both are unconscious Kane snags the title AND AJ.

WHOA OUT OF LEFT FIELD. But honestly, AJ's character arc is taking her to some dark places, and WWE loves to heelify its bright pretty young things as of late (cf Eve). Her taking off with Kane would be a shocker. This would be soundly hated by fans, who aren't gonna want to see teeny tiny AJ tagging along after Kane to the ring. On the other hand, can you *imagine* Punk and Bryan's reactions?!