"You can't do that, it is an act of depravity!"
"'Controversy creates cash.'"
You are a fly on the wall at a meeting
of Show Managers for Divas Wrestling sim. In the interest of full
disclosure, this reporter is a "Spokesmodel" at this sim. One of the
managers, who may be a Spokesmodel with a newspaper job on the side, is
proposing a particularly brutal main event for one of the Divas shows.
Before we go further, we must explain a few things about wrestling on
SL.
There are two kinds of SL wrestling.
One is done with a hud, and is a sport/game. Two wrestlers use a hud to
have an actual competition against each other. The Virtual Wrestling
Alliance, who advertise with this paper, are this sort of league. While
they may use some sort of plot contrivance, they are selling the sport
more than the spectacle. I do not know if the wrestlers are paid by the
league, paid by tips from the audience at shows, or not paid at all.
The other sort of wrestling is poseball
wrestling, which is more of a Performance Art. The matches, while not
fixed, are contrived, and the opponents cooperate rather than compete.
There is a heavy emphasis on personality, conflict, good/bad girls and
just making a scene. The wrestlers live off the tip money from the
crowd, so whatever they do to draw attention to themselves is fair game.
Divas Wrestling is this sort of wrestling.
Pro Wrestling in general is a sketchy
business. Her roots lay in barnstorming carnival shows, the
anything-that-draws-attention motif was in full effect as far back as
when Grover Cleveland was the President and elements of it stretch back
to the Dark Ages. When your show is two people fighting, you don't
really need to waste as much money/time/effort on developing scripts or
hiring gifted writers. You can be very ham-handed with the presentation.
Thusly, wrestling tends to have broad,
easily understood storylines. The dastardly Mean Girl is fighting the
adorable All American girl, stuff like that. Wrestlers can be cowboys,
European royalty, cheerleaders, bikers, musclemen, axe murderers,
surfers, college boys, cannibals, karate guys, etc... pretty much
anything that can be painted with a broad stroke and understood by
children.
One easy way to perform this task is
the Ripped From The Headlines motif, where your storyline reflects some
current news event. This motif is good because FOX or CNN or NBC News do
the backstory for you, all you need to do after is provide the militia
guy or the evil comic book heroine ripoff and your story pretty much
writes itself.
With that in mind, it was almost
inevitable that, at some point in 2022, this (see below) meeting among
wrestling show producers was going to happen:
"We need a main event that gets people riled up."
"I have one."
"Do tell..."
"It's ripped from the headlines."
"Aren't they all?"
"We get a Russian girl and a Ukrainian girl to fight."
"Huh?"
"It'll rule."
"You can't do that, it is an act of depravity."
"Controversy creates cash."
"Thousands of people are dying over there, we can't make light of it."
"The crowd will love it."
"Where would you even FIND a girl from Russia or the Ukraine?"
"I have a Ukraine t-shirt and shorts."
"You're French."
"Close enough."
"Where do you plan to get the Russian?"
"My friend Courtney, she does some model work for me with the SL Enquirer."
"She's from the Ukraine?"
"Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA."
(pause)
"We'll get her a Soviet Union gymnast outfit I saw at a store."
(second pause)
"She's blonde... she'll look Slavic."
"The idea that someone might be offended by this never popped into your head."
"I have a filter which blocks things like that."
"This idea has been terminated with extreme prejudice."
The road to the castle gates is not
always the high road, and one has to step on a lot of nice people as
they claw their way to the top. The person proposing the fight wasn't a
monster. She was just ahead of the curve.
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