slash

When the Rebel Heart Met the Blackheart: Slash in Professional Wrestling

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I’ve been working on this project for awhile now, and this presentation from MPCA/ACA 2019 contains my preliminary results on slash fanfic that feature NXT wrestlers Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa. This work began with noticing that other fans were as interested in this pairing as I was: https://prowrestlingstudies.org/2018/11/21/pro-wrestling-slash. When I started looking into the … Read more When the Rebel Heart Met the Blackheart: Slash in Professional Wrestling

The Emotionality Behind Ciampa/Gargano: Part 1 Pre-Tag Team Titles

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One night while working on the Ciampa/Gargano slash project i.e. reading fanfic and luvin it), I realized how all these fanfics are not attempts to recode the Ciampa/Gargano (CG) NXT story (e.g. characters, plot points, facts) but to recode the emotions of the stories as those emotions play a role in how fans decode the stories. … Read more The Emotionality Behind Ciampa/Gargano: Part 1 Pre-Tag Team Titles

Pro-Wrestling Slash

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When I first got into professional wrestling — way back in 2014! — my first favorite wrestler was The Miz. I was watching WWE Main Event, which aired Wednesday nights on our Ion TV channel. This was before the WWE Network was launched, and before I had any access to higher level cable channels like … Read more Pro-Wrestling Slash