In August 2017, I went and saw Monday Night Raw at TD Garden with my meme friends on Destiny purely for the meme. The tickets were a lot more expensive than what I expected and the stadium was also way more packed than I would have guessed as well! Although I went mainly for the joke, it turned out to be a lot more informative than I imagined.
Although most of my friends here just for irony (you can see trueluis holding up a John Cena cardboard sign right above the BRAAAAUN sign – notably John Cena does not fight in Monday Night Raw), I was lucky that my friend Erons was actually a HUGE WWE fan and watched it growing up as a kid. He was very hyped about the whole thing and nearly shouted himself hoarse. He also explained a lot more of the rules and lore to me, and by the end of the night, I was actually really excited to see how Summer Slam 2017 was going to end.
Perhaps the most important thing that came out of the night was the realization that having finite time means that you can’t take on every project. After talking to Erons, when I got home, I was very excitedly researching professional wrestling, finding the CMS class that had been done about it. Somewhere between finding Jenkins citing Roland Barthes and TV Tropes arguing whether Professional Wrestling Fanfic is Real-Person fanfic or not, I realized that I didn’t actually need to do a deep dive on pro wrestling, even if I could. It sounds sort of obvious, but it was actually a really powerful realization to me that I could just leave the pro-wrestling rock unturned and keep it as a blog post – acknowledge that several of the themes it brought up were definitely related to my primary interests and move on. It’s definitely been a hard thing to manage, but as called out in my meta post, it’s been an important refinement for me.
Below are my raw (Monday Night Raw?) screening notes — because I am incapable of experiencing any media anymore without pen and pencil in my hand
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