May 2025 – Blog.Nearzone

Let’s talk for a little bit about how pro wrestling matches themselves can be different. I’m talking about more than just skin-deep; I want to talk about the bones. If you watch WWE, AEW, NJPW, and UWFi (from back in the day) one after another, you’ll see that they’re all presented with significant differences, but they all move in a way that has basic similarities. There’s an underlying assumption that everyone shares about wrestling. This is what I call the “match theory”. This article is going to explain what I think the common match theory is, then I’m going to introduce my own match theory: vulnerability theory.

Let’s try and rethink wrestling. It’s an ambitious proposition, I get it, but I’ll have fun with it and maybe you will, too. What I’m going to do is propose a new style of wrestling booking: the Agency System. If I had to boil down the goal of the Agency System to one word, it would be realism. If I had a few more, I’d say this: we’re going to rely on naturalistic stories for wrestling rather than on artificial stories.

American pro wrestling is for children. When I say this, I don’t say it disparagingly as-such. That is, I’m not saying “American pro wrestling is for children and therefore bad, because children only like bad things”. What I’m saying is compare the beats of The Sopranos to the beats of Power Rangers (look, I’m not watching TV these days, work with me) and see what pro wrestling hews closer to¹. Not just WWE. All of American TV pro wrestling is like this. It is loud, it is in your face, it is frantic. It’s almost desperate not to lose your attention.

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