Independent wrestling
I subscribe to a lot of tumblr feeds. It's the one social network that's avoided selling out and is still filled with weirdos. I don't have a tumblr of my own (don't keep your stuff on other peoples computers kids) but I like that it's there. My list of subscribed tumblr feeds shrinks as sites are banned, abandoned, or grow too niche or too conventional and the list grows when I find other like-minded individuals.
A couple months ago I subscribed to a site titled from the rafters which would post independent wrestling gifs ~70 times a day. It was a strange window into the fandom and I started collecting images and videos from the site to do a post.
Two weeks ago the site went dark. I don't know what happened. The account owner posted so often and regularly I can't imagine he quit cold turkey and all I can think is he was banned due to a copyright complaint.
So now I have a bunch of gifs from a defunct website and a hole in my feed reader. I still want to do this post but I can't link to the primary source and I can't expand beyond the images I collected. Still, here is what I learned.
Like metal, wrestling is goofy live theater and should be appreciated in that light. As kids we often discussed whether wrestling was real. My own views matured from confusion to scoffing disdain. My views have continued to mature. There's no question these actors are athletes. You don't have to be gullible enough to believe in the theater to enjoy it, though I still wonder about some of the fans.
The mysterious guy behind my tumblr site was well aware it was theater. Here's a post showing a wrestler using a razor blade to cut his forehead to make the death match more convincing.
The author was impressed by the sight of people slammed into the ring, dropped on their heads, falling off of ladders, or thrown onto chairs or cinderblocks. He had a particular interest in death matches where the wrestlers used props to cause superficial bleeding.
I was surprised to see how often the show is overtly sexual, with women deliberately wearing thongs and men acting promiscuous. A few wrestlers use sexuality as their weapon. A wrestler (with the persona of a flamboyantly gay man) would turn around to present his bottom before being slammed, causing his opponent to veer away at the last second. The author mentioned off-hand being bisexual. It may have been a joke but it would explain things.
Mainly wrestling is silly. The costumes, bad acting, and ridiculous plots seem to be the primary draw for it's fans. People want to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all while at the same time marveling at the athleticism. I can appreciate it in that light but perhaps not with the same devotion of it's fans.
Because this author was interested in death matches I got to see a lot of the props used in matches. These primarily consist of fluorescent light bulbs which break in a cloud of phosphorus dust, and cause innumerable little cuts.
Piercing was another gimmick. I saw several videos of wrestlers having to hold still and act outraged as their opponent carefully pushed a metal skewer through their cheeks. They would also play on beds of thumb tacks, hammer vegetable skewers into their heads, or staple things to their foreheads.
You have to laugh at a death match ring strewn with legos.
Sometimes it's just inexplicable.
I have more wrestling gifs than I can reasonably post on my limited bandwidth blog. I just wish I could find out where this guy went.
Update (2023-02-08)
I think I may have found him. I randomly came across another tumblr wrestling blog called jaffa cakes that posts way too many gifs every day. It's possible it's someone else with a similar problem but the humor seems to be the same.
I tried to go to the archives and scroll back to see when the blog was started but tumblr defaults to loading every gif he posts and it saturated my internet connection.
So if you're interested in an extremely active feed full of burly men and women hitting each other check out jaffa cakes
The infrequently updated blog.