Event / Concert The Real 2017 WIP Climax in Korakuen Hall (17/08/29)

Same here. My oshimen was there since day one, and I was worried sick about her this entire time. I also had felt uncomfortable seeing the girls in pain (although now I know 99% chance they were acting). But after reading the posts here from people who know more about this, seeing how most of what they were doing was nowhere near as horrifying as it looked and hearing how the stage was extra padded, I'm not as worried as I was before.

However, at the same time, I feel like they should still just let this go. This drama was twice as long as any previous AKB48G or Sakamichi drama, had two songs/PVs based around it and a live event. Maybe this opinion is just some leftover concern talking, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Yeah, I did finally watch this and aside from the stuff Haruu was doing which was with actual pro wrestlers (and she's being trained in that, right?) it was nearly all the usual stage fight fare.
There are probably some ad-libs in there but I'm sure they practiced these fights a lot beforehand and everyone knew which moves were coming when. It's so fakey though I dunno how people enjoy it...when you've got a girl standing there in a headlock waiting for her cue to fall or roll or whatever and pulling a bad "pain" or "anticipation" face instead of fighting to get out of it, it's just so unbelievable lol.

 

Well... some of the girls had visible bruising.

But if you look closely you can see also see a lot of them briefly break a smile after they land a move successfully, before going back into wrestler mode.

 

I agree. I don't watch wrestling so I can't compare how it is to pro wrestling, but everything looks really fake to me. I know it is acting, but still.. at least make it look more real? Like when member would climb on top a corner, but jump down, land, stop, and then hit the opponent... what's the point of climbing up in the first place then? When it gets too fake it is just cringeworthy to watch

 

if the video does not show watch the video here

I just wanted to use this lol.

But anyways, Wrestling's not really fake, It's staged, Yeah you have stuff like that (You could say this was more stagey and that since these girls aren't Wrestlers and I'm guessing wanted to be a little more careful). But this was tame more then the stuff you actually see with the actual wrestlers (Just look at Shibata/Ishii and tell me that's fake). Hell, Excuse my lanuage. But the totally fucked up shit with these matches (mostly from Japan bc they are crazy) here

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Japan+Deathmatch

Now tell me that's fake lol.

 

The in-ring action we saw at WIP Climax can't really be compared to the real thing. They're idols putting on a pro wrestling show after all, so the skill level is far from actual pro wrestlers. These matches were definitely more rehearsed than usual, and extra care would've been taken to decrease the chance of someone getting hurt.

If you've got a spare 20-odd minutes and want to see what top-level female pro wrestling looks like, below is a match between arguably the 2 best female pro wrestlers in the world (match starts at 02:06):



If you'd like something much more recent, one of the best female matches of the year happened just last month in the WWE between Asuka and Ember Moon (match starts at 08:20):



Interesting fact: Asuka legitimately broke her right collarbone during the above match, but worked the entire match like nothing was even bothering her. It wasn't until a day or two after the match that the fans found out about it after an official statement was released from the WWE.

 

if the video does not show watch the video here
You mean like this?
I believe these girls are capable doing that, but who can guarantee their safety?

Granted, 2nd match was pretty meh, the battle royal match was so painful to watch before Sato eliminated half of competitors, but other matches quite decent. 5th match was impressive for a debut match, if you ignore few of Megu's botches. Despite of those few botches, Megu herself did quite well.

If you watched Brady Rhodes debut at ROH last month, she failed to impress the audience despite the match also carried by other 3 experienced wrestlers. I can say most of WIP Climax girls are did better job than her.

 

Battle royales are tough to keep interesting when there's a ton of people. We'd do things like having impromptu team-ups, using other participants as weapons, or dragging people offstage to keep the focus where we wanted. Since these girls were mostly everyone for herself and there was no real (hidden) offstage, we ended up with a lot of 1v1 stuff with some flimsy exchanges on the side. Anyway, what I'm saying is choreographing chaos is hard. (I was still a bit disappointed because some of my favorite members + members I wanted to pay more attention to were in the battle royale & I kind of zoned out towards the middle...)

 

It really is, especially if the performers' safety is paramount. For our melees in renaissance guild we'd either be assigned parts or make up our own and fit them into the general chaos of everyone else. But the brain can only pay attention to so many things at a time so it's quite difficult to do a convincing-looking chaotic melee and I think it suffered a lot more than our 1v1 fights because of that.

For 48g in particular, though they had some acrobatics mixed in for the girls who can pull that stuff off, not all of them can so the fights looked pretty lopsided at times. The round-robin style 3v3s work okay but...when I say "it's so fake, I don't get why people like it" I really meant "the 48g girls don't make it look convincing" unlike true pro wrestling where at least you know you're getting a show created by professionals and it's probably gonna be pretty exciting. They did their best and I can't fault them for that but...I guess it's just a thing for fans who like idols and pro wrestling the rest of us aren't going to take much from it, I think.

 

what is the discussion here? they are idols wrestling, what did people expect???

 

So I'm another showy fighter (crusades-era though), you can make big melees interesting but the way to do it is either have teams (so the audience don't have to pay attention to more than about four things at a time) or just make it really, really short; we rarely have a free-for-all lasting more than about a minute and a half (when a duel is expected to take thirty seconds to a minute), with loads of people getting eliminated in the first thirty seconds while the most impressive fighters are left to the end.

I was impressed by the acrobatics of some of them (would love to fight Jurina or Suda, you could script something really cool if they were trained right), and honestly the fighting wasn't bad. I particularly like their kicks, wish we had people who could get to head height... Yeah, you could tell they were very focused on not hurting each other, but it did the job, even if some of the fights started getting a bit samey.

And for those who're worried about injuries, well, like I said ages ago in the Tofu Pro Wrestling thread, an injured wrist from a bad fall was the most likely one and otherwise they were mostly safe. Notice that pretty much all the hits that actually connect are to the top of the ribcage or the side of the back, both of which have thick bone and muscle protecting them. They also usually hit with either the sole of the foot or the whole of the forearm, both of which spread out the force of the blow and minimize injury. Finally, they're avoiding hits to the head and face, which have the most potential for injury. I like to think that I've taken enough injuries in my time to know what's likely to cause them, and none of the stuff these girls were doing was going to.

(well, except dropkicks. But only if they weighed at least twice what they actually do and were doing them on a hard floor)

 

wait wth is this wow. glad i saw this!

 

Okay, I actually watched the pro wrestle videos posted above. And I actually liked it loool. Guess I'm kinda hooked now.

 

Some of these girls are actually good enough to make a career out of this. I've seen way worse in Joshi puroresu, American indy wrestling and even the big leagues.