Hey, my login still works! Anyway, this is why you’re here – a couple of lovely comments directed my way from the lovely people over here at our Inside Pulse community.
Finn McInnes: You should have to review the TNA New York shows. Also, I think you need to pick another fight with TNA Insider. That was a ton of fun a couple of years ago. Or with PWI Insider, Dave Scherer is a king-sized douchebag. You are definitely at your best when critiquing someone.
Sideshow Bob: Interinactivity seems closest to the podcast formula, so that, by far.
First off, let me say thanks – and that I actually did watch the TNA New York shows after it was suggested to me, and while they left a lot to be desired, they were easily the best one-off shows I’ve seen from TNA in… I don’t even know. A LONG-time. Like pre-Hogan long. So, TNA is definitely not the worst it’s ever been. That being said, it still seems like the show is in some serious trouble, but any progress is good progress.
I know this will shock many, but I am actually not a regular visitor to TNAInsider. The last time I was there was last year, when ANOTHER Pulse commenter suggested I do a piece on the site. Despite what you may think, doing pieces on TNAInsider was never originally my idea. But they certainly do make commentary easy.
So, at Finn and Bob’s urging, I went back and looked for something current that was going on. This was around the time that Bobby Lashley claimed that WWE was imitating TNA’s storyline of 3 African-American guys in a stable. This of course became TNAInsider’s new rallying cry, and many of the denizens somehow managed to simultaneously claim that WWE was stealing TNA’s storyline, AND that WWE’s storyline was racist while TNA’s wasn’t – even though the storyline was supposed to be a complete ripoff.
Here is what TNAInsider member, admin, article-poster, white person, and apparent first-round-cast-audition-reject-for-Jersey-Shore-ripoff-show Christian Parazuli had to say on the issue.
Christian Parazuli: For those that missed it, WWE took another racial reference on this one. Xavier Woods was dressed in white and looked like a black Colonel Sanders. All he was missing was the little southern hick string tie.
As if the WWE couldn’t pull any more cheap racial stereotypes out of their bags, they make a brother look like the man that literally popularized fried chicken to the masses. Another cheap racial reference by the WWE.
BD: I think you better check your colours there, West Side.
Now I should point out, to be fair, that TNAInsider does have it’s fair share of people with common sense and who make valuable contributions, even though they’re normally jumped on and beat about the head with pillows almost immediately after speaking.
And in a delightful, almost intentional twist of irony, in the case the dose of reality actually came from a commenter named “Mr. Anderson”.
Mr. Anderson: Colonel Sanders? Really? This has to be the worst case of connecting dots that aren’t there that I’ve seen in a long time. Any similarities between Xavier and Colonel Sanders are merely a coincidence.
Christian Parazuli: I wouldn’t put that past the WWE at all. This is the same company that just recently put Ron Killings in a confederate uniform and just recently Mark Henry admitted that they wanted to coin the term “Silverback Gorilla” for him.
BD: DON’T YOU DARE LAUGH AT THAT. DON’T YOU DARE.
I know – you’re probably thinking the same thing I was, which was that there are several ways a rational person could respond to this. You could point out the obvious like I did when I started this article, which is that WWE’s storyline CAN’T POSSIBLY be racial if it was indeed lifted from TNA’s storyline, which, according to you, is NOT racial. You could point out the absurdity of even bothering to debate the idea of WWE stealing TNA’s storyline when two of the participants in TNA’s storyline came straight from WWE and are currently portraying their exact WWE characters.
You could go with what I’m sure would be most people’s intial instinct, which is basically just telling Christian that this notion is fucking stupid.
Or, if you felt like putting the minimum amount of effort in and yet still wanted to make your point in the strongest possible terms, in a way that ONLY a TNA screen capture could… you could just state that TNA is the company that did this:
But sometimes in life, when faced with this level of absurdity… before you even have a chance to say anything – no matter how perfectly you believe you could have made your point – someone beats you to it.
And manages to say it better than you ever possibly could have.
Mr. Anderson: Or he could just be dressing nice.
And while the implied meaning of the words I’m about to say is DRASTICALLY different than what I literally mean, this still brings me to a sentence I never would have imagined myself typing.
Well done, Mr. Anderson.
Now, those of you that know me know that I’m not trying to defend WWE on the racism front, or really at all. And for any who don’t know me – yes – WWE is racist. It’s a point I’ve made many times, and I’m not sure there is any rational person out there that could debate that. Is all of wrestling racist as well? You could definitely make that argument. But as the biggest and most prominent company that arguably has a monopoly on the industry – in North America at the very least – WWE should still, I believe, bare the brunt of the responsibility for that.
So I’m not suggesting that WWE isn’t racist – I’m not even saying that WWE’s current storyline with Kofi, Big E and Xavier isn’t racist – what I’m saying is that it’s a little bit silly to accuse WWE of racism when the company you’re defending, who’s storyline you’re saying WWE stole, did this:
So I’m not exactly sure that TNA is really in a place to judge.
There is a lot more fun to be had on the article where I pulled these comments from, which you can find on TNAInsider here. The Mr. Anderson commenter even responds to a couple more with the same common sense. It’s awesome.
But the craziest thing is the reason I didn’t tackle MORE of the comments on this issue. It certainly would have been easy. But I got sidetracked by something amazing.
You see, this was initially the subject I was going to cover for the Interinactivity article that Bob and Finn suggested. It was easily the funniest thing going on at TNAInsider… at least, at the time.
Unfortunately, in the middle of writing it… all of THIS happened.
And then TNAInsider did this.
And, while it’s not going to be in this article… the reaction to THAT issue was even BETTER than the issue I just tackled. Think about that for a second. It was more entertaining than watching people debate something that never made a modicum of sense to begin with.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot I could cover on their reaction to this. The interesting part for me was that when this was posted, I wanted to engage that same Christian Parazuli guy above to see if I could figure out how where he was coming from made any kind of… y’know, sense… and get an actual back-and-forth going that I thought would make for interesting reading here.
However, there are a couple of interesting complications for me at TNAInsider.
One is that everyone at TNAInsider apparently already somehow KNOWS me. This is despite the fact that I’ve never posted at TNAInsider in my entire life.
Although, that’s admittedly less of an issue than the next complication, which is that everyone at TNAInsider already FUCKING DESPISES ME. This is apparently based on articles that I wrote years ago – most of which weren’t even that hard on TNA, yet dared to suggest that perhaps Crimson, Gunner, Ken Anderson and Matt Morgan were actually NOT the start of the next wrestling boom period.
Now granted, neither of those complications are going to cause me to lose sleep. But, they do make it difficult to start a dialogue with these people, since they could ban me from the thread or just delete any or all of my comments pretty much anytime they wanted – and they still can – and I fully expect that upon seeing this, they will. I wouldn’t even think something like this would hit their radar if it wasn’t for the fact that they somehow creepily knew everything I’d ever written in the past. (Well… not EVERYTHING – apparently just the anti-TNA stuff.)
But you might be asking yourself- “BD, would the good people at TNAInsider really moderate their board THAT heavily when you’re just trying to start a conversation just because you made fun of Mickie James getting run over by a motorcycle and the Angelina Love / Winter storyline all those years ago?”
Well, immediately after posting my first TNAInsider comment EVER last week, I was greeted by Christian, who stated “well if it isn’t Mr. Inside Puss” (not exactly sure how that’s an insult depending on how you take that wording), and by another user immediately altering the mods to my presence, stating that I had written “inflammatory” articles about TNA in the past – probably all because of that ONE time that I dared to think that Sting force-feeding Hulk Hogan pills and painting his face was awkward. Anyway, my initial comment, which said that it was stupid to suggest all WWE fans wanted TNA to die, was then deleted, presumably by those same mods, who also deleted the comment by the user that altered everyone to my apparently alarming presence.
So if I wanted to engage someone, I had to be careful with what I said because I really wanted to try to make some sense of it and not get banned or have all my comments deleted. CB and James Sawyer joined me on there for a bit before they realized that trying to talk to Christian was like trying to fistfight a retaining wall – the retaining wall can’t very well make any headway of it’s own or hit back, but it’s not coming down either. Obviously, we should have realized after seeing his interaction with Mr. Anderson on the race issue… not a lot of common sense can get through.
After they deleted my initial harmless comment simply for being someone who thought that maybe putting Jeff Hardy in a PPV main-event match drunk and stoned off his fucking gourd may not have been the best idea, I figured that after I posted THIS article, I may not have access to that wonderfully entertaining TNAInsider message board anymore. So, I took it upon myself to save an offline copy of those “Impact May Get Cancelled ZOMFG BOMB SPIKE TV AND KILL THE IWC” articles, which contain ALL the comments from the TNAInsider users – just in case they want to get childish and ban me or delete my comments again.
I need those comments for the next piece I’ll be writing, which contain the comments from those very articles.
I hope to have that for you sometime in the coming weeks. For now, this has been “Interinactivity”. Have a great weekend and I hope you enjoyed.
BD
