A single thread for an entire month of RPing for an entire show's worth of people? It sounds both exciting and scary as hell to even think of participating in or keeping track of staff/judge wise. lol We sometimes do back and forth trash talk threads per match when it's a house show but at least then it's divided up by match so some element of structure is there. I can see how it might be fun though to sometimes see people cross over into insulting others they aren't booked against that cycle. I wonder if there's a way to experiment with something that brings that freedom and some of those elements without having it turn into a clusterfuck of insanity. I'm always up for trying new (to the XWF) styles and experiments.

As far as the trash talk goes, I miss the feeling of reading somebody's trash talk against someone else and feeling like even I myself got kicked in the stomach or like I need to cringe at how badly the victim in question got dismantled, not just by direct responses to what they said earlier but by having their entire "character" of their character torn to bits and their entire history spun back at them in such a way that there's almost nothing that person could do or say to come back from it. One of the best I've seen in that style was John Madison in his very early XWF days but I'm not sure what happened along the way with him because even he will tell you he doesn't quite have that ability anymore. Most of it I think was on the lost boards we used before our current boards, but I might dig around later and see if something of that nature from him can be found on these newer boards.

Going back further in time, names like T Money, Kid Money, and sometimes even Steve Jason had incredible ways of delivering their trash talk and it didn't matter if the opponent had even said anything at all for them to feed off of. James Raven and Blizzard have that ability with slightly more comedic elements thrown in so not only are you seeing that they crushed anything that was said against them but you're laughing your ass off at some of it along the way because of how stupid they're able to make their victim look. Then there are the types who just know how to talk shit in such an overbearing asshole way that people will mention how they're afraid to even send the person an OOC pm, which I've heard said guys like Sid Feder, Sewaside, and I think John Samuels because they had a way of pushing the envelope so close to OOC sometimes without going OOC that it just made you believe they really do want to hurt you in real life.

How do I really sit here and lay out piece by piece the formulas these guys and others have used though? Any of the names I mentioned could most likely beat me in a trash talk battle and it's my job to recognize and respect that (and score it accordingly) more so than to have the ability to conjure up that same level of material myself. I wish we did have all of the old boards, like even the old old boards before the old boards but unfortunately all that great material is lost for the most part.

I do feel like your mentioning of the back and forth singular thread/reply style being what brought you up in the trash game kind of explains the style I see you have mastered, whereas you may not have been exposed to the type of trash talkers who sometimes can trash a guy successfully without even needing anything to reply to, and in SOME cases without even actually trash talking them. Sometimes the way a narrator's description or even a series of scenes are laid out can expose the poor writing and/or narration of the opponent without said character even once saying anything bad about the opponent's character, and I just haven't seen these types of things done in some time.

In order to really clarify what I mean about what's missing, I feel like we need to get into some detail about your own work and I hope you don't mind. When it comes to you particularly, you're excellent when it comes to sounding like your characters believe they're the most superior and intelligent being on the face of the planet in how you write them and talk down to others, but a lot of the success you've seen has been through that style of intimidation working splendidly on opponents and kind of leaving them unsure how to react, I think. Yes that's a definite victory when it happens but does fall under the umbrella of what I described as our current landscape having a good number of people who are either just afraid or not sure how to act/react accordingly when they buy into the IC superiority that your characters exude.

As soon as you convince them they're beat, they ARE beat in that regard and they're apparently afraid to attack any of the elements of your RPs that others may have been able to, which I don't want to get into and give away because it's up to them to figure out and up to you to patch along the way, etc... but one thing I can get into some detail about simply because it's very obvious (I feel I'm not giving anything too huge away in the following two paragraphs) is I'm very shocked you have gotten away so clean on so many occasions where it seemed as though you didn't even proofread your work, which on its own won't hurt yourself TOO badly with most of our current judges but could have been exploited to incredible levels by the right opponents.

There have been many times you'll glaze your narration and commentary with vocabulary that suggests your narrator and character have a superb intellect and intelligence level, but then in the same sentence the grammar is broken or you're writing "your" instead of "you're" (or other common yet necessary to avoid strikes if we're going for the superior intellect style) and that just kills the WHOLE mood of what you're attempting if we're seeing thesaurus worthy words right next to incorrect usage that clearly isn't intentionally tied to an IC quirk or flaw. Broken coding left unfixed also delivers this negative effect. It feels unnatural or careless, and just isn't convincing if it's not all flawless when it comes to the easily fixable elements. See what I'm saying? And these are areas harder trash talkers and exploiters would have had a field day with and been able to feed off of like monsters when they tie it in with the half of their trash talk that didn't even need those extra bits to feed off, tying right in with being your answer of SOME of what we're missing lately in the fed. Just this small aspect alone can be huge under the right light. The ruthless killers who can take ANY and everything, spin it IC, and in turn train someone to never allow themselves that same mistake/opening again. I wouldn't normally get into these types of details with anybody publicly but it seemed like you were open to getting into detail here and I'm just hoping you can use these points to improve and refine your own work in the future, or perhaps some people can see this and start trying to go harder in the areas they'll attack. So again as I said earlier it's not a knock against you or anyone when I talk about the landscape or who has had a somewhat easy path... it's just that there are a lot of strategies and abilities I've come to know as being amazing, that are sadly missing from today's XWF. That why I stress that we don't want everyone to become the same writer, same trash talker, etc... we should be trying to learn and improve as much if not more than we're trying to teach others or give feedback. All of us, myself included if I am RPing.

By now I feel like I'm just rambling on but I do find these types of talks fascinating and like sharing my thoughts. When I have more time during the week I'm going to try and do some digging for some examples of what I feel are amazingly hard hitting trash talk pieces on our current boards and if I find anything that really reminds me of that feeling of being kicked in the stomach, I'll make a thread somewhere with some examples.

All in all I think we do have a great roster here and as long as we're all feeding off of each other's ideas and everybody is always adapting and thinking outside of their own box instead of trying to emulate somebody else, or trying to teach too much of what they themselves do, we may have one of the XWF's strongest rosters yet later this year!

PS: Didn't proof read this yet. Might edit it later lol just need to post and go eat!