Good Gimmick, Bad Gimmick

We all know that the right gimmick can make a wrestler. Hulk Hogan’s all American superman gimmick made him the icon of a generation and the terrible gulf between his wholesome in ring persona and his actual venal and self-serving nature is a potent illustration of how gimmicks help a wrestler get over with the crowd. 

 Hogan was a champion in a simpler, more racist time.

In this occasional series I want to take a look at some of the many factors that go into a good gimmick and how we can contrast those with gimmicks that have failed to take off and, in some cases, consigned talented workers to jobber status for big chunks of their career. I’m going to start with two WWE wrestlers with over the top gimmicks who have yet to make it to the big time; Tyler Breeze and Fandango. I’m hoping to illustrate that even relatively early in a performer’s tenure with the company you can distinguish between gimmicks that will go over and gimmicks that will become obscure future trivia questions.

Good Gimmick

Tyler Breeze is variously nicknamed “Prince Pretty” and “The King of Cuteville”. He comes to the ring in flamboyant ring attire and carrying a phone on a matching selfie stick which he uses to take preening photos of himself as he makes his way to the ring. On entering the ring he drapes himself across the top turnbuckle and continues to ignore the crowd, completely focused on his own good looks. The footage from his phone, in all its self-absorbed glory, is screened on the titantrons so that the crowd can see his various facial expressions and appreciate just how well he has plucked his eyebrows. Breeze’s gimmick is simple; he is a narcissist who thinks he’s a model.

 Tyler Breeze strikes a pose on the ring apron

Tyler Breeze’s gimmick is good for a number of reasons. It’s a natural fit with his heel persona - not least because he’s very good looking. Handsome men have traditionally tended to be heels because their very appearance tends to threaten the self-esteem of the male members of audience (and there’s a whole other article in that messed up dynamic). His gimmick also succeeds because it is largely based on his personality traits. You see him enter the stadium and it’s instantly clear that this is a man with no regard for the crowd, his opponent, the officials or anything other than himself. It’s no stretch to imagine him taking shortcuts to win a match, it would be more shocking if he didn’t. This gimmick isn’t new, Shawn Michaels, ‘Dashing’ Cody Rhodes and ‘The Narcissist’ Lex Luger have also used versions of the gimmick in the past. What Tyler Breeze has done is bring it bang up to date by adding a modern prop in the selfie stick. All right thinking people hate selfies and the selfie stick is a great tool to make a character come across as a complete prick.

Perhaps the most important thing that Tyler Breeze has going for him is that his gimmick is not static, it gives him space to grow and develop his character. he has room to try new things. He can add some comedy to his act, after all people love to see self-important people fall on their ass. If he wants to take it in a darker direction they can explore some of the character traits associated with narcissistic personality disorder. His introductory feud with Dolph Ziggler might be a good place to try this out, Dolph is also handsome, skilled in the ring, and over with the crowd and Breeze might be willing to go to extreme lengths to try to humble him. If the crowd warms to Tyler Breeze, and there is no predicting what the audience will do, there is also the possibility of allowing more of his actual character to come out gradually over time and form the basis of a face turn similar to how Ziggler himself took his brash, cocky heel persona and softened it into an underdog face character.

Tyler Breeze admires himself with his selfie stick after laying out Hideo Itami

If Tyler Breeze doesn’t get stuck in a rut replicating the same schtick every week  and his in-ring performances become more consistently top tier then there’s every reason to believe that this young man from Canada may have a bright future ahead of him. His fun and current gimmick should help him along the way.

Bad Gimmick

Fandango’s gimmick is that he is a dancer. He comes out to the ring with a dance partner, cuts some moves, reminds everyone how to say his name and then jobs to whichever mid-carder happens to be passing. Is Fandango currently a face? Is Fandango currently a heel? More to the point does anybody care? Fandango is a great example of how a terrible gimmick can really stitch up a talented wrestler. It’s the sort of gimmick that you hold up to wrestlers working on the indies as a cautionary tale of how wrong things can go even if you achieve your dream of working in the industry’s number one promotion.

Fandango hits a dancer's pose as the crowd tries and fails to care

Fandango has a terrible gimmick because it tells us what he does not who he is, we know he can dance but we don’t have the first idea why he thinks that this is necessary on his way to a wrestling ring. The wrestler with a job gimmick is a notoriously hard one to get over and after a very brief period where Fandango’s ballroom dancer entrance went viral because it was quite fun to sing along with his entrance theme the crowds quickly lost interest. After the novelty wore off it became obvious that his character had less depth than a pothole and he vanished off television for a time. When he came back he had a shiny new gimmick; he had swapped ballroom dancing for salsa dancing. The crowd embraced this exciting change with a riot of apathy.

It doesn’t help that when he was introduced the audience already remembered him wrestling under another name which made it very clear that he wasn’t an actual ballroom dancer. It’s a massive challenge for a wrestler to get over when the artifice is so clear. A crowd that will swallow the huge lie that a leg drop is a match ending move will tend to choke on the smaller lie that a wrestler used to be a ballroom dancer. Lastly, but by no means least, Fandango isn’t much of a dancer which is a problem when this is your entire gimmick.

Fandango prepares to remind people how to say his name.

It’s not clear how Fandango’s character could develop as he literally doesn’t have a personality. I guess he could dance more, or maybe less? Even if they went back to the drawing board and gave him a whole new persona the audience would likely remember Fandango and taunt him with his original entrance music the same way that they used to chant ‘Goldberg’ at Ryback. He’s trapped by his own ridiculous gimmick, forever destined to be remembered as that guy who danced on his way to the ring and somehow once beat Chris Jericho clean at Wrestlemania.

If you’ve enjoyed this article and want to read more words that I have written then please consider purchasing my extreme horror novel ‘This is not a Lovesong’. It’s a available from amazon as a digital download for a very small amount of money.

Gaming for Mental Health

Video-gaming is saving my life. At a time when my mental health is as bad as it has ever been video-gaming is saving my life on a daily basis. I’m currently going through a phase I would describe as medically misanthropic, a profound sense of fear, alienation, and despair that manifests whenever I have to interact with people in anything but the most perfunctory way. The sheer awfulness of people has brought me to the point where I cannot imagine how people exist in the urban environment without attacking one another with machetes and improvised clubs. The world sickens me to the very core of my being. This, as one might imagine, makes living in the world something of a challenge. It’s OK though because video-gaming is saving my life.

I didn’t leave the house during July and August, the sense of panic was too raw and too visceral. Instead I stayed indoors and played video-games. I played quite a lot of Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, a fair amount of Nuclear Throne and worked my way through Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City. I barely read, except for a few comics here and there, didn’t watch television more demanding than old episodes of Friends, I more or less gave up on films. Now, somewhat recovered to the extent that I can leave the house and even go into shops and make purchases, I’m still spending large chunks of time in front of a screen. Dark Souls has been a revelation in this regard.

This guy is basically Jesus to me at this point

Video games help in a way that no other entertainment can help me because they require my attention. When reading a book or passively watching TV it’s all too easy to drift away from the text and into a nihilistic reverie. Games, good games, don’t allow me to do that - they demand that I participate, however liminally, in the experience. Lose concentration in Dark Souls and you are dead, you are required to maintain focus and rewarded for doing so. There is no better engine I know for turning today into tomorrow.

It seems perverse to think of a game as fundamentally hostile as Dark Souls as therapy but its depth of strangeness is intensely immersive. There’s a whole world of additional content created by the fans and, while I may struggle to concentrate on fiction I can binge watch YouTube content created by the Dark Souls community because it has relevance to my experience of the game. It creates a rich inner landscape that doesn’t solely consist of self-loathing and emptiness which are otherwise my default states of being. At a time when I feel unbelievably isolated from the rest of the human race it also creates a fragile sense of empathy and community, it keeps me from falling into the black abyss of my own worst impulses.

A nice bonus of playing games with people online is that they can't hear the screaming

Gaming is often examined through its negative impacts on mental health and where positive effects are observed they are often linked to cognition and executive function. It’s rare, though not unheard of, to hear about their effects on mood and socialisation. When I try and think about how I might get through the day in the absence of videogames I shudder. Drinking in the morning and then going back to bed seems like the best option. Cooking isn’t bad but there’s a limit to how many meals you can cook a day before you have to start throwing up to make room for the next one. Perhaps I’d be painting or teaching myself to play a new musical instrument but I somehow doubt it. Regardless, this World Mental Health Day I’m mostly going to be thinking about how I lucky I am to exist in a time and a place where avoiding the entire human race in favour of other worlds is a realistic option because I am significantly happier because of it.

Online Life Lessons

I estimate that currently about 75% of my self-worth is tied up in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Blizzard's hideously addictive online collectible card game. It's a fantastic game in many ways, a blend of careful strategy, knowledge and the brutal vicissitudes of blind chance. It's a bit like playing poker but with more dragons and you don't win anything except not having to think about your life for a while.

As a 36 year old white man I automatically assume that everyone else in the world is the same as me until I see evidence to the contrary. When I play Hearthstone my accidentally ageist, misogynist, and racist hind-brain pictures an ever flowing stream of white male opponents in their middle thirties who happen to be playing an online card game at 2 pm on a Wednesday because otherwise they would just be screaming into a careless void. The limited communication tools of Hearthstone encourage this narcissism, unless you know the person you are playing you are limited to a handful of emotes (that can be switched off) and trying to make inferences based on the name they have selected. There's not much there to challenge my lazy demographic assumptions. Unless someone is literally calling themselves 'LadyOfColourBorn1999' I'm going to struggle to picture anything other than an analog of my own stupid face staring back at me from a screen somewhere in the blander regions of England.

In my head everywhere in the world looks like this

Hearthstone has a quest mechanic whereby you can earn in-game gold for nugatory achievements within the game. Sometimes these relate to wining a certain number of games or playing in a particular way but there is one quest which requires you to watch another player win a game in the spectator mode so that instead of feeling bad yourself for losing, you can feel bad about yourself because someone else is much better at Hearthstone than you are. The only players you can spectate are those that are on your friends list. I had a problem with the spectate a friend quest for many months, I only had one friend in the game, I was married to him and he didn't play Hearthstone anymore. This is in many ways a reflection of real life where I have precisely zero friends in a town where I have lived for the last four years.

Hearthstone allows you to send a friend request to anyone who you have just played. This being the internet this is mostly used to try and circumvent the limits of the emote system in order to dump homophobic, racist, and semi-literate abuse on someone who has just beaten you. You get beaten, you send a friend request, they add you, you act out your childish insecurities right into their stupid friendship accepting face. However, it's also used by lonely people so they can have someone to spectate when the relevant quest comes up. I've got a couple of people who added me for that reason and I'll occasionally get a message saying that one of them has started spectating me, usually at the point where I'm about to lose a game in the most humiliating way possible. These people are strangers to me, and me to them. We are voyeurs in a very specific part of each other's lives and that is all.

Who wouldn't want to watch something like this?

All seemed well. I was sat in my bubble of self-loathing torpor, just getting on with playing the game and trying not to think about my life. Then I noticed that one of my "friends" was online at the same time as me, specifically at a time when normal people are at work. At first I thought little of it except to idly wonder whether they too were severely depressed. The thought cheered me slightly, misery is relative after all, and the idea that someone I don't know might feeling worse than me always brings the ghost of a smile to my face. It's not a very nice smile but then it's not a very nice thought either. While I waited for my next game to load I toyed with idle fantasies concerning their identity. A drink problem, a failed marriage, fired from their job for performing sex acts in the boss's office, the sort of problems with which I could empathise. Then I thought that they probably just had the day off work and felt irritated that they were probably much happier than me. They were probably playing Hearthstone for fun rather than because beating strangers at a pretend card game was their only source of self-esteem. The swine, I thought, the happy fulfilled swine.

Over time I noticed a few other things. Sure, they were around during the day but this was a recent phenomenon. Then I remembered a few months back I'd idly noticed that the often logged on at four thirty or so played for a couple of hours and then stopped. I recalled that I'd seen them around during the day before, at around Easter time when I'd had some time off work. It dawned on me that one possible explanation for their logon times was that they correlated with the school holidays. It seemed possible, likely even, that I, a 36 year old man, had accidentally made "friends" with a child.

Oh God, is this me?

My next thought, not unreasonably, was that I had been automatically added to some sort of list held at Blizzard and freely shared with law enforcement agencies. "Middle Aged Weirdos" the list was probably called, either that or "Potential Nonces". I imagined being interviewed by hard faced inspectors, men and women who called each other 'guv', were riddled with institutional homophobia, and extracted confessions through intense psychological pressure. I imagined trying to explain that I had no interest in this child, this vulnerable youth adrift in a digital ocean of seething, cunning pedophiles. I would try, likely in vain, to explain that all I wanted to do was watch this innocent child play a card game, that my voyeurism stemmed only from a desire for pretend gold with which I could buy pretend cards. 'Do you expect us to believe that?' they would answer, their sneering contempt breaking down my resolve. In desperation I would sign the proffered confession and my life as I know it would be over.

In truth I had no way of knowing for sure who this unknown person was. It was at least as likely that the tenuous connection I had a had made was with an adult and my paranoid suspicions were the results of confirmation bias. Nonetheless I removed them from my friends list with a frisson of guilt, the sense that I had somehow got away with something. I resolved in future only to accept friends requests from people whom I judge, by standards that I would be completely unable to articulate, to have selected adult sounding names. By applying this standard I have been subjected to a barrage of abuse from almost everyone whose request I have accepted but that feels strangely comforting. It makes me feel like I'm ten years old again but without the burden of having my whole life ahead of me.

The strange case of Vampire's Kiss

Vampire's Kiss is not a good movie. Let's get that out of the way at the start. The overwrought tale of Peter Loew, a literary agent losing his mind and starting to think he's a vampire, has an intriguing premise but fails to deliver. It's a strangely ugly little film, a harrowing tale of misogyny masquerading as a black comedy. It is frequently deeply uncomfortable to watch but for all it's faults there's something strangely fascinating about it. Part of that fascination stems from Nicolas Cage's legendarily exuberant performance. You can get a flavour of that performance from the clip below in which he rants the entire alphabet at his therapist to illustrate how easy filing is.



Cage delivers a performance that punches straight through parody and comes out the other side with a deranged grimace and a determination to baffle and confuse. He rips through the ghastly script with a maniacal enthusiasm, gurning and waving his arms about as though the audience were somehow watching him from a nearby hill. This is the element of the film most people remember.

Watching Cage stalk, harrass, torment and sexually assault his employee Maria is deeply uncomfortable, not least because his grotesque behaviour is ostensibly being played for laughs. We are invited to smirk at an awful human being behaving in an awful manner towards a woman who is clearly traumatised by his increasingly erratic and dangerous conduct. There is little sympathy for his descent into madness because he was clearly a terrible person before the collapse. We learn nothing about him, we learn nothing about his psychology, other than bad things sometimes happen to bad people. This, for me, is why the narrative of the film fails.

There's a comparison to be made here with Bruce Robinson's exhausting film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, released in the same year. That film stars Richard E Grant as an advertising executive to starts to believe that a boil on his neck is talking to him and growing into a second head. It's a strange, funny little movie, which charts a man's breakdown and resurrection as a biting satire on the advertising industry. It's another riff on the same theme that Vampire's Kiss fails to properly address. You can get a flavour of How to Get Ahead in Advertising from it's darkly upbeat final rant, delivered with fervour by Richard E Grant. It's well worth a look, if only because Robinson should be known for more than just Withnail & I.



One thing that Vampire's Kiss does do well is to interrogate the idea of the vampire as a sexual predator. This is an old theme, Dracula in particular has long been seen as a dramatic enactment of Bram Stoker's sexual issues. What Vampire's Kiss does is strip away the layers of glamour and charisma to reveal the rather grubby reality beneath the facade. Many vampire films work with the ambivalence of sexual feeling, a strange mixture of attraction and trepidation that leads to fascination. Peter Loew behaves exactly as a vampire does but the result leads to a feeling of revulsion in both the protagonist and the viewer. The vampire is not glamorous, not fascinating, just a nasty little creature on a deranged power trip. Had the film been played straight, rather than inviting the viewer to laugh, it might have worked rather better. The sheer ugliness at its heart just isn't funny, it isn't sad, it is ultimately just ugly. You'd be much better off watching George A Romero's Martin which deals with the subject of vampirism as mental illness in a much more intelligent and interesting way.

Vampire's Kiss made me think about my own work and what I was trying to do with This is Not a Lovesong (available here for not much money). I wanted to get inside the head of monsters, to convey a sense of what it would be like to be a monster. I wanted to write something that expressed ugliness but with prose that was carefully crafted. I spent a long time writing and re-writing every scene to try and get under the skin of the protagonists and to make the horrors completely . I don't know whether I succeeded but I do wish that I had seen Vampire's Kiss before I began as knowing how not to do something is as important as knowing how to do it.

The best defeats in Hearthstone

Hearthstone, Blizzard's online CCG, is a phenomenon. It's the first CCG to really and truly embrace the possibilities offered by the virtual space. Blizzard have consistently created mechanics and effects that would either be difficult or impossible to achieve in a physical card game and solve some of the issues that plague Magic the Gathering's computer adaptations. It's a sleek game of fast decision making with only 75 seconds to take you turn and no direct interaction with the other player when it's their turn. This limited interactivity really ramps up the tension, especially towards the end of the game. It's a great game, easy to learn, hard to master with a high skill ceiling. It's also free to play so if you like that sort of thing there's no harm in giving it a spin to see if you like it. It also, and I can't stress this feature enough, has very limited ways to communicate with your opponent. You can even silence them if you don't want them to be able to communicate at all. You can't reach through the screen and slap them in their stupid face but I remain optimistic that this will be added in a future patch.

I stopped playing Hearthstone for a while due to anxiety issues but I got sucked back in yesterday by the hype around the new expansion, The Grand Tournament. It got me playing Hearthstone's super casual Tavern Brawl mode, where literally anything can happen and the rules change on a week to week basis. After that I played some games on ladder with my current favorite Warlock deck. I was going through the motions a little bit, it's a deck I know reasonably well, and having not played  most of the month I was languishing in the depths of the ladder and playing mostly newer players with less extensive collections. I cued up into a Warlock mirror match and got my backside utterly handed to me.

I know it doesn't look it but this is thrilling

I thought I knew most of the main archetypes of the Warlock deck but this was a new one. It played a little like a handlock (a deck that builds up a big hand in order to discount or buff certain cards) with whole bunch of dragon synergies added. It ran a bunch of really big dragons to close out the game. After being schooled I immediately went to look at some decklists on the internet and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to learn how to play the deck with some success.

I don't know of any other game where I can feel better about being beaten. I've played some Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's answer to the MOBA) and being beaten there feels like reading the warning on a cigarette packet. I've played a limited amount of online shooters and being beaten feels in these usually feels like being beaten by a feral child who has learned to communicate only in racial slurs and headshots. I've been beaten at poker which somehow always leaves me with the sense that a man with a city in his name is going to break my legs and steal my television because I got in too deep.

In Hearthstone every defeat teaches me something. Usually it teaches me that I suck and should go back to playing Zelda: A Link to the Past for the fifth time. On rare occasions it teaches me that there's an entirely new way to build a deck and I should totally give it a try. It's possible that my ability to face defeat with a shrug and a smile is due to the large numbers of sedative drugs in my system. At this point I feel like I could greet Michael Gove with a a mere grimace of despair rather than the usual mixture of project vomit and screams so I'm obviously very chilled right now. Still, I do feel that defeat has less of a sting in Hearthstone compared to other PVP games. Check it out and see if you agree. If you want to play with me and put my laid back attitude to the test you can hit me up on twitter @hjdoom and I promise faithfully not to put rabid weasels through your letter box if you win.

Don't forget that I also have a book out on kindle. It's called This is not a Lovesong. It's a horrible, horrible book about horrible, horrible people and you can buy a copy here. I also have a facebook page which you are encouraged to like. Think about it, what's the worst that could happen?

Batman: Arkham Asylum and the depressing truth about immersion

Batman: Arkham Asylum is pretty good game, sometimes even a great game. There's plenty of problems but the scale and ambition of the title is such that I'm content to overlook the padding that tries to hide the relative simplicity of the game underneath all the shiny.

What's strange to me about Arkham Asylum is that when Batman is being awesome I don't feel like I'm Batman. I idly flick a couple of buttons and Batman pummels one guy, blocks another and then executes a perfect kick on a third. I feel like I'm making suggestions and Batman is following them up, as and when he feels like. I spectate and marvel at his amazing skills, much like I do when reading a comic.

The times that I do feel like Batman are the intervals between the action. The times when I, and by extension Batman, don't really know what we are doing. This is a Batman that's taken one too many punches to the head and is feeling groggy and slightly confused. This is a Batman who can't find the door that he just came in through and spends five minutes anxiously running in small circles while trying to find it.

"Batman stood motionless for several minutes while he tried to remember how to jump"

Batman is very good at doing awesome things even when you aren't controlling him. He's fucking in charge and has his shit very much together. He can call in a Batplane to deliver him a gadget that he knows he's going to need any minute now. When Batman is being is being controlled by me he develops strange tics, a sudden need to find the secret area that he knows must be around here somewhere, despite the fact that the Joker has made it very clear that time is of the essence if Gotham is ever to be saved. At a critical moment in the plot Batman inexplicably decided to enter completely the wrong building and fuck about in crawlspaces, trying to piece together the secret history of Arkham Asylum. He honestly thought he was in the right building too which just made it worse.

It's strange and jarring that, for me, the immersion is highest when Batman gets incompetent, fixated and a little bit mad. I feel like I'm doing the Joker's job for him, embracing that madness and the chaos that the Joker espouses, just in a much smaller and sadder way than he might have expected. I feel that the ultimate Batman game would be one of those QWOP games where all you have to do is get Bruce Wayne out of bed and dressed for a business meeting. It would be impossible to achieve, you'd inevitably end up with toothpaste in your ear and trying to put both legs into one arm of your shirt. Eventually Alfred would put you out of your misery with a tranquilizer dart. The message would be very clear - you are not Batman, you aren't even Bruce Wayne getting out of bed. You aren't the hero, you're the reason it takes the hero fourteen attempts to kill the final boss. You are a disease afflicting the hero, an inner ear condition, a sudden stroke, a bilious attack and Batman would be much better off if this wasn't a game but a comic book. You never read an issue of Batman where he couldn't get out of bed properly and you never will. You aren't a superhero and you never will be.

New novel out today!

This is not a Love Song is the book I've been writing for the past 18 months on and off. It seems strange to be releasing this into the wild whilst I'm signed off work with chronic depression and a hatred for humanity that means I can't bring myself to leave the house but, given the topics covered in the novel perhaps that is appropriate. It's one of the bleakest things I've ever written but I also think it's one of the best, all the better for being written very slowly, and redrafted several times.

I've always been drawn to the darkness, to dark themes, and I've always been fascinated by people operating a long way outside the usual conventions of society, people who almost seem like aliens among us. Murderers and psychopaths are the obvious examples but I've also always been drawn to people who expressed their weirdness in a much quieter fashion. One of my heroes is Henry Darger who spent his whole life meticulously working on a 15,000 page unfinished novel that expressed themes that mattered only to him, mostly those involving androgynous children. I wish I had his staying power.

This is not a Lovesongis my attempt to get some strange ideas of my own out of my head and onto the page. It's the first thning I've felt really comfortable sharing with people, not because I think people will like it, I'm sure some people will but I'm sure many, many more won't, but because I feel like it captures something I've been working towards for a very long time, since I first started trying to write more than short stories. I've written three novels before this one, and even shown the texts to a few people but they were never things I felt inspired to make widely available. This is the one that captures who I am, or who I was, as a writer.

During a bout of chronic depression might even be a good time to release this nasty little piece into the world. I don't really care about it being out there because I don't really care about anything much right now apart from staying indoors and playing videogames. I hope some people like it but it's not a problem if no one does. I write for recreation, not for money. If I wanted money I certainly would have written a very different book, probably involving a dystopian future populated by feisty teenagers who defy the social order. Actually, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. Perhaps that'll be the next one I work on.