Wait, I don't think I'm parsing this sentence correctly: guys who don't care about anything but having good matches are.. bad? Or are you making some kind of delineation between guys who have good matches and guys who are "just here to have a great match and get 5 stars"? And, if so, what's the difference?I don't enjoy the "I'm just here to have a great match and get 5 stars" type guys but I don't think its very common in aew/wwe/njpw outside of a handful of guys I wouldn't like anyway. those types have always been a problem though and I don't think Dave has anywhere near the influence people act like he does (including myself when I get annoyed at him) on most wrestlers.
There's been a distinct shift in the last 20ish years (really since the IWC grew along with the indie boom) of talents who are overtly working toward a generic "5-star" match. They're the equivalent of Oscar bait movies. And it seems like they've become an even bigger portion of active workers since Meltzer invalidated his own rating system with the bevy of 6/7/etc. star matches.Wait, I don't think I'm parsing this sentence correctly: guys who don't care about anything but having good matches are.. bad? Or are you making some kind of delineation between guys who have good matches and guys who are "just here to have a great match and get 5 stars"? And, if so, what's the difference?
Entirely too many, but since I don't pay any attention to guys like Meltzer, I don't have any sense of what their respective grading rubrics are, so I'm not familiar with the "5-star bait" tropes. It's legitimately never crossed my mind that the guys actively doing that stuff were actually "trying to have 5-star matches." I don't know if my brain ever put them in any category, but it definitely didn't try to put them in that one.Case in point: how many matches do you see in a given week with the standard "your turn/my turn" strike exchange?
RVD started bragging about that to push his arrogance as a gimmick, though, right down to adding unnecessary flips and twists to things in order to amplify the "I'm that much better than you" gimmick. There are workers who legitimately cut promos referencing critical acclaim and mean it now, though. I've said it before, but Tony Soprano never told Big Pussy "this decision is going to get us all kinds of Emmy nods," and a wrestler, whose entire schtick is supposed to be "this is real to me" when in character, shouldn't be giving a fuck about star ratings.I mean RVD had the gimmick of guy who brags about being in really well reviewed matches twenty five years ago. Wrestlers being overly conscientious of how their matches are reviewed has definitely gotten worse in the past decade but it's not exactly a recent phenomenon.