Wrestling fandom can be problematic, puzzling and downright infuriating on any number of levels. There's barely one person amongst us who hasn't had to put up with years of what John Stossell called “the standard question” - “it's all fake, right?”, with the smug sense of superiority – and of utterly missing the point – that carries along with it. There's the initial breakthrough so many of us have shared of realising that there's more to wrestling than what the TV feeds us – whether that's the behind the scenes gossip, or the offerings of promotions well outside of the WWE monopoly – being tainted when we realise how much of the internet wrestling “community” we were once so excited to enter into is full of bickering, bigoted man-children clinging to opinions that might have meant something ten years ago. There's the drunk, rowdy, or just plain obnoxious fans who seem hell-bent on spoiling your live experience by shouting homophobic or sexist slurs at performers.
And, right at the base of it all, there's a sense of entitlement. That's hardly unique to wrestling, but it seems to manifest itself more openly, and carries with it a decades-old language and set of codes and conventions that probably seen entirely baffling to an outside observer.
In essence, we're always told that there are two ways you can be a wrestling fan. You can be a mark – the mindless mook who believes that the product they're watching is legitimate – or a smart mark or “smark” - the fan who knows the score, they not only know that the results are predetermined, but they know the names of the writers making those decisions, and the backstage politics that influence them. Increasingly, as the distinction of “mark” becomes more and more meaningless as anything more than a childish insult, the derision once levelled at the clueless mark is directed at a new victim, the “casual fan”. The casual fan is a hypothetical entity – maybe they were a wrestling fan twenty years ago, maybe they're a first-time viewer flicking through the channels and stumbling on a wrestling show he wouldn't ordinarily watch, or maybe it's the kid who's hooked because John Cena is his hero, but who's still fickle enough to give it up in an instant the moment he's distracted by bright colours and flashing lights. Whoever the casual fan is, they are assumed to be the antithesis of the “smart” fan, who wants wrestling to be suited entirely to their needs.
There's a positive angle to all this too - the "smart" fan can approach wrestling with all the attention and analysis of any cultural critic; with no academic framework to work within, they're a fanbase that studies the text of every match, every angle, every performer, studying, critiquing and deconstructing every match, every decision, every minute gesture and every carefully selected turn of phrase for deeper meaning, looking for clues to future events, callbacks to the past, or references to "insider" gossip, or else debating where the line is drawn between the reality of the performance and the "fake" of wrestling - an entire culture has grown up amongst wrestling fans online obsessed with uncovering "botches", or moments in the performance where a wrestler slips up, whether that be failing to perform a move correctly, saying the wrong thing in a promo, or an increasing number of other definitions. The smart fan is, above all, a critic.
Returning to my earlier point, though, the opinions of critics are there, at best, to inform and to educate us. They are not there to talk down to fans who may have been watching for less time, or less intently. They are certainly not there to present their opinion as fact, and to belittle those with different views, or who simply don't care about aspects of wrestling beyond the on-screen product. In all honesty, that attitude enrages me. You can enjoy wrestling on any number of levels, and that's the beauty of it, but no one person's enjoyment or interpretation is more important than another. If you've been watching every wrestling promotion under the sun for the past thirty years, and you're watching Wrestlemania decked out in NJPW merchandise, you have invested the exact same amount of time and money into that experience as a new fan watching for the first time ever. What you think of it, and what you take away from it, carry no more weight from what they take away from it.
And you know what? The “smarter” a fan you think you are, the more of a mark you are. It's the “smart” fans that invest more of their time and money into wrestling than anybody else, more than the smiling kid in the John Cena t-shirt, all while acting as if they're above it all. You know the script, so when you're forking out $9.99 for the WWE Network, and $25 for your brand new Dean Ambrose T-shirt – because only marks buy the John Cena merch – you're oiling the gears of the corporate machine far more than the kids, marks and “casuals” you resent so much. That's why wrestling throws you a bone every now and then.
If wrestling doesn't hook you with one trick, they hook you with the next. The difference is that the mark or, in modern parlance, the “casual fan”, is happy to be taken along for the ride, while the smarks will argue to the death that they haven't been hooked.
Who remembers #hijackRAW? A bunch of self-important, entitled smarks staging an anti-WWE protest that amounted to...what? Buying tickets to a WWE show, and once they were there, chanting for the good guys and booing the bad guys. Some act of rebellion that was. Hook, line and sinker.
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