This is the final part of this series.
In the past two articles I spoke about my long history in e-wrestling, and the link to my writing This is part three.
MBC
Mighty Bastard Championship started about a year before AEWA ended. The ‘owner’ was one of the top bad guys there, and when I came over there were a few others I knew.
Thing is, we all changed in many ways.
How to explain MBC? In the ring, it was more hardcore. Outside the ring, it was… surreal. Character skits were strange. Individual promos were often stranger. Once we all were focused more on entertaining readers all our skits and promos showed it.
Writers lesson: Sometimes your characters and their story get better when you push the boundaries.
Doug Christian was here. He became a villain. In actual wrestling promotions, a performer is often switched from good to bad, or bad to good, to freshen their character. In the case of Doug, his brooding Goth persona failed to make him interesting. He did win the heavyweight title, but it was just to set up a feud with another guy I created:
Johnny Thunder. He was a friend of Doug Christian, another high flyer, and had a great ring intro. They had exciting matches against each other, and traded the title.
(For people who follow wrestling history, both were trained in Canada, by our fictional version of Stu Hart.)
The Oakland Oddball also came in. He didn’t win titles, but he did something that I never thought of:
He became a fan-favorite!
The commentators had a hamster. No surprise, it couldn’t speak. It just said ‘Meep’.
Good guy Oddball had a hamster too. It said ‘Peem’.
Every match had an original video to start. Very imaginative stuff… as with comicbooks, writing has no budget. It always finished with the word, ‘Peem’, and the Oakland Oddball’s theme music:
It was always the same: a maniacal laugh – his – then he yelled the word, “Wipeout!” followed by that surf song.
Writing lesson: We’re often told that villains are heroes in their own stories. Here, heroes could become villains (and visa versa) with a small tweak.
This fed lasted about a year. On its final card most of us broke the fourth wall, wrote skits as if our performers were “real” people…so Oddball spoke about how weird it was to be a fan favorite. Johnny Thunder and Doug Christian spoke about being good friends outside the ring.
(If you know wrestling terms, these were shoots.)
Writing lesson: I may now have an idea of how magic realism works. More likely, I have a taste of the “fourth wall-breaking” that Deadpool does.
Because of these two good experiences, I tried another.
VCW
I think this was Vegas Championship Wrestling. I didn’t research it a lot before I joined. Queue the foreboding music!
I brought the Oakland Oddball there. Oddball was a villain again. I didn’t know any of the other players, so I had trouble creating stories with their characters.
One good thing: when we put together our pitches for match strategies, we included sequences where we failed. In a good actual match, opponents both have their moments to shine, and their times when all seems dire.
Writing lesson: When you write fight scenes you need to have the hero fail sometimes, at least seem to be failing, to make the scene interesting. If it’s no challenge, why bother?
I lasted 2 months. My opponent had amnesia and acted as my lackey. I gave the person in charge a series of vignettes to make a fun story, then a payoff where the other guy got his memory came back and Oddball got it bad.
The PIC used none of it. Instead he ran a pointless match in which the other guy got his memory back for no reason.
Call it ego, call it petty, but I quit.
The PIC claimed they didn’t get my email, but that was a lie. They used everything else in it.
All that matters: after nearly a decade, I was out of e-wrestling.
Epilogue
I created a mini website for the Oakland Oddball.
The site no longer exists, but I still have the files. You can see some of my genesis as a writer here: I invented a backstory for him full of fictional federations and feuds. I wrote it, and I’m not sure if it’s all made up.
No doubt, efeds helped to shape my writing, and was an interesting pastime. My memories made (for me, at least) some interesting blogs.
