Week 144: YEAR OF THE BEAST 2021 - (Twitch VOD)
If you prefer Twitch keep in mind that portions of the VOD are muted due to a false positive copyright claim that I hope will be taken care of soon. In the meantime I recommend Youtube instead.
All right, that’s year 3 wrapped.
I said I’ll close this thread and start a new one instead but I’m not so sure anymore. We’ll see. What I’ll do for sure is do a write-up like I did the last years too. But that’ll come some time in the next few days.
I’m a bit late on this for a variety of reasons but here is, like every year. A look back at the last 365 days.
Well, technically more than that because I aired the final episode of 2021 in 2022, but the flow of time is convoluted. And time’s bullshit anyway.
Without any further ado, let’s just hop right in with some general numbers.
It bears mentioning that I didn’t count VACANTs beatdowns once he turned red at matches. They weren’t after all, he just showed up and demanded to fight people.
I don’t have last year’s sheet here for you to see, but we had about as many “Multi” (read: Battle Royals and variations") matches as last year. There’s one less. In turn, there’s one more tag match. Even though, there’s 10 more matches total than the previous year. Mainly owed to the Showdown Tournament which had cards with more matches due to matches in the Dodecagon being shorter.
All right, I’ll do some comparisons here too. The average ratings are about the same as they previously were. Well, they’re a bit lower, actually. But not even by one percent. I’d have thought our weird freak matches that ended super quickly would leave a bigger dent in here but they didn’t. As far as the time goes, matches this year were shorter than last year (good) but longer than in the first year. However, this can mainly be attributed to the aforementioned freak matches that were super short. On the other hand we had a much smaller number of freak matches that went long. But even with that in mind, our longest match is still the shortest of all three years, while our shortest is shorter than last year’s but longer than the first year’s (the first year had one that was 1:53)
I believe I mentioned this last year. But after noticing that matches started going for longer and longer even when they weren’t meant to I made an effort to make them a little shorter with usually tiny tweaks. This worked pretty well overall. We still get occasional weirdness due to RNG. But that’s just how it is. Like that one match, Pantha had that almost went to a 60-minute draw.
If you remember last year’s stats you’ll already know what’s up. Yellow names are people who were Hellweight Champs during that timeframe of episodes. This is the one time in the year I actually use these ELO ratings for something. For booking they are only used if we fuck up. ELO is a system to measure the skill of players in zero-sum games (originally chess). In this case, we are partially measuring RNG, though. the top field here is very stable. Angus was on top all throughout the year except for the month where he didn’t have any singles matches. He was on a killer run that could only avoid a clean sweep by not being booked. Grace is surprisingly far up considering she has not held any titles here. It’s definitely nice to see at least one yellow name in each quartal. Because that tells us that whoever was champ was actually among the top four at the time and thus deserving. Hell, even Ricc 2 Thicc who was merely a challenger was really high up.
It bears mentioning that the above is only affected by singles matches in a ring. That means matches in the Dodecagon don’t count. Due to the vastly different ruleset, they don’t factor into the ELO calculation. They do however very much factor into the next ranking.
Where ELO is cumulative by necessity, otherwise it wouldn’t be accurate at all, whatever this is actually only awards points for matches that happened in that timeframe specifically. You can best see this in our fourth quartal, which was dominated by the Showdown Tournament. You can see it pretty much only features people who did really well in the tournament and Pantha, who was the Hellweight Champ. The reason NYG is on top there is that he’s had some matches before the tournament that bumped him up.
Compared to the last years there’s a bigger discrepancy between this and the ELO version. And much like with the ELO ratings these are not actually used for booking. I originally did this because I like looking at numbers sometimes. but they are also useful for fuck-ups (not always ours) or when we do something like the Showdown tournament that dominates the card but we still want to have at least somewhat viable challengers for the titles. Though, before looking at any of the “ratings” we look at stuff like recent wins or even winning streaks. Wins over the current champ at any point are also a plus.
Now we got some general stats. I’d say I’m surprised NYG, Family Man and Thunder rank in most matches at all but them being in the Showdown Tournament definitely bumped them up. Angus on Top makes perfect sense. With his Darkweight reign that lasted nine defenses, I’d be more surprised if he wasn’t. So eleven of his matches (earning and losing the title are not successful defenses after all) come from that reign alone.
Then we got match ratings. They don’t really matter, of course, but I track them anyway. The rating depends as much on the wrestler as their opponents so it’s not like it’s their achievement alone anyway. Fomore’s record here is seriously impressive, though.
The longest average matches here are skewed towards people in a lot of Battle Royals and Tag matches because those tend to last longer.
Meanwhile, the shortest matches are a bit more interesting… well… the top 3 are all people from the Showdown Tournament where the matches just don’t last as long. But Kayu had this weird streak where she won super fast against some people. But also lost super fast when she did.
The cumulative time comes with the caveat that it considers matches with eliminations as being in it the full amount of time even if they were eliminated partway through the match. But it still gives us a good idea about who spent the most time in matches. Mina’s on top here with 8:15 hours. She’s already working overtime.
All right, same deal but Singles matches only. For the most matches, Angus is still on top here surprising no one. Neither are any of the three that follow behind. For Pantha, I can say it took us nearly the whole year to get her into a position to be Hellweight champ again. We booked her but she often lost the important matches. If you want to push someone in a fed where 99.99 of all matches are simulated then you need to sometimes accept that things don’t work out, even if they normally should.
Fomore’s average match rating for singles matches is even more impressive than the one for all matches here, wow. Every average above 90% is really good. But 98.83 is insane.
What’s a bit surprising to me is that Fomore has had a longer match time average than Pantha, who suddenly decided to have a near one-hour match again. This is only the third time this happened with Pantha specifically. Then again, Fomore was also in the longest one out of those.
Our shortest matches here are somewhat surprising. Especially considering Skullistair. In the stats for all matches, they were in the longest, after all. Hobo’s on top, partially because he showed a glimpse of the guy who was the first to beat VACANT way back in 2019 again.
And it comes as no surprise that Angus has spent the most time actually wrestling in singles matches with his run. However, look at Fomore. They aren’t even on the list of most matches so they managed to come just five minutes short with much fewer matches. Guess that’s the Hellweight Main Event kinda bump that you get. And for them and Pantha, one hour of that cumulative time comes from a single match. Well almost, it was 55 minutes.
Time for some random stuff here.
The column for VACANT Slayers is a relic of the time when we did the VACANT Open challenge regularly. It hasn’t been for a long time. In fact, this column was empty last year too. I could remove it or replace it with something but eh.
I didn’t really track Best Bouts as much anymore. So we only had four people who had more than one anyway. But hey Suman and Florida Man sure gave it their all to make it this far.
For the title defenses, I’m listing the most for each title currently in circulation. Two lines for the Pokeymanz because both Duckbaby and Vacation Skeleton had three successful defenses. With a title this weird I honestly expected longer reigns. You don’t even need to win matches to keep it, just not be the one to take the fall.
The longest reigns in terms of days really show just how long Angus’ Darkweight reign was. The 7DP is the only title without a reign that made it past 100 days. But VACANT nearly got there and they had to team up to get rid of him too.
Finally, we got our Workhorses. Basically, this means matches per episode. It’s a lot more even than in the past years. Mainly because we made more of an effort to spread bookings out more a little bit. Though newer characters still get booked more often barring something like the Showdown Tournament getting into the way of, for example, Baron of Hell, who had two matches, and then the tournament started.
And here’s our four longest matches. Last year we had two rumbles at the top. But this year even our third-longest match is still longer than our second longest from last year. And we even got a singles match here, because Pantha and Fomore went 55 minutes. Last year Pantha went 54 minutes against Harmony. Generally, I make an effort to keep matches at a reasonable length, the exception being main event title matches. But knowing Pantha’s track record I decided not to do that for any of her title matches and we STILL got our longest singles match ever out of it somehow.
Surprising me a little bit, our very shortest match is not from the Showdown Tournament. Instead, it was VACANT destroying Hobo. That was before he became red and was expected to do that. Then we had Dash destroying Josef as our second shortest. After that, we got two matches from the tournament.
Nothing much to say here but it might interest some. But we can compare to the previous years. Though this year’s episode with the longest match time average is shorter than last year’s, overall it was shorter both previous years. Though, our shortest matches are on average shorter. So there’s a wider range. Episodes 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 140 and 144 were PPVs Every fourth episode, basically.
Time for our spotlight of this year. Let’s have a look at Fomore.
With the quest for earning all solo titles at the very beginning, which was completed at episode 40, and the transformation into Fromore, there’s quite a bit going in. Fomore still has not earned the Pokeymanz, though that’s not sanctioned, or the Tag Titles. But if they also held those two Fomore would be the first to hold ALL titles at some point.
I was also going to do another one of these spotlights for another character but I got lazy.
VACANT
This is a storyline that went all throughout 2021. Even 2020. Hell, 2019
The story of VACANT was never meant to be quite so dramatic. He started as a simple joke: “What if the dark gray silhouette that often represents vacant titles or mystery challengers was an actual wrestler and he was mad that he was advertised to appear all the time but never actually got to wrestle. And what if he was also the strongest wrestler!” It ended up spanning four separate “eras” of VACANT. Open Challenge, Gray, White Eyes and Red.
Episodes 5 until 66 - VACANT Open Challenge
51-8-0 - Win Percentage 86.44%
Avg. Time: 11:40 - Avg. Rating: 86.44%
And thus the VACANT Open Challenge was born. It lasted for a little bit over a year and had the audience vote on the challengers for most of them. He made his debut on the fourth episode in a scene, kind of unassuming but we made clear what the joke was. He had his first match the very next show against Vacation Skeleton. I don’t have any records for who was up for a vote at each of the challenges anymore, unfortunately. The VACANT Open Challenge was held 56 times between Episodes 5 and 66
Episodes 67 until 89 - VACANT Gray
5-1-0 - Win Percentage 83.33%
Avg. Time: 27:52 - Avg. Rating: 91.60%
From here on out we did not book the VACANT Open Challenge anymore, not the way we used to anyway. VACANT still had matches but they were much rarer. We figured after over a year of him having a match almost every show we should dial it back a little bit. The challenge was supposed to come back eventually, though. At that point I already had the idea to “power him up” eventually. But figured it’s a “down the line” kind of deal. I also already planned to have multiple escalations based on whether people managed to defeat him often enough. That part of the story kinda changed, though. On Episode 90 I went through with his first escalation. I don’t think I ever explicitly mentioned it but this is where I first implied that SATAN is the one who created VACANT. If only because he is able to lend him more power and “modify” him so to speak. The idea was to also have VACANT with different colored eyes over time but that idea was scrapped.
Episodes 90 until 124 - VACANT White Eyes
9-3-0 - Win Percentage: 75.00%
The plan here was to have VACANT not actually want the power-up. He gets kind of mad at SATAN when he gives him more power. It didn’t happen immediately but VACANT was always supposed to get corrupted by this. For the Hellfire Tournament 2020 VACANT held the VACANT Fuck You Challenge. I went a BIT out there and had him tear off Tara’s arms in the middle of a match. Now, explaining how Tara lost her arms originally was a thing I was gonna do anyway and since she has a time-traveler gimmick I could easily get away with actually showing it. Originally I wanted to have blood squirting and everything, but I figured the dismemberment was already enough. Yep, that’s a line crossed right there. VACANT was “suspended” and it was kinda explained away with us being able to grow back Tara’s arms (which she refused) and VACANT knew that so the punishment was really light. But hey, maybe we’re gonna go edgelord, right? VACANT came back a few weeks later and actually lost to Majin Bob Sapp here in a really good match.
It went on for a bit and VACANT was clearly going overboard with some of his moves. His finisher turned from a regular Burning Hammer to him teleporting up high and dropping the hammer from there. He also used many more Izuna Drops and some other moves.
When he easily takes care of Angus McMutton quickly in a Lest Jimmy Standing match SATAN decides it’s time to power down VACANT again. At this point, though, VACANT is no longer the same person he was when he got upset and SATAN for giving him more power. Because he tricked SATAN and actually consumed most of him instead, becoming much stronger than before.
Here VACANT’s record ends. All the matches past this point have not been sanctioned. But his total lifetime stats are as follows
65-12-0 - Win Percentage 84.42%
Avg. Time: 14:27 - Avg. Rating: 86.04%
Episodes 124 until 144 - VACANT Red
Victims: Dash Rendar, IGgy IGsen, Fomore, Ricc 2 Thicc, Pig Destroyer, Isabel Ibarra, Fomore, Tara Milleneon, Sapp Ledesma, Supreme Sadim, Majin Bob Sapp, Grace Thoruson.
14th of August 2021 was the day Episode 124 aired, which is the episode VACANT consumed most of SATAN to power up once more. The reason I bring up this date is, because about a month before that I first had the idea for the final showdown against a crazed VACANT in the clouds of a foreign sky with rings floating in the background and everyone working together to bring down the big bad. That’s why I did it the way it happened.
The reason for all of VACANT’s matches being off the record from this point on is twofold. For one it simply doesn’t make any sense to book him anymore when he nearly killed the guy who runs the show. But also every one of his matches after this was rigged. With one notable exception: Grace could have theoretically won her match. And I actually had an idea just in case she managed to pull off a miracle. But that was always going to be unlikely. Basically, when VACANT later came out with DCB in tow it would have been Grace instead. Putting sympathy on a heel is probably not the best idea but it would have made sense.
I brought his resentment towards Black back up, since he beat VACANT three times total over the years and coupled that with a strong desire to not lose. On one hand, I don’t think I stressed this part of the story enough on the other I think it’s extremely clunky to keep having him say stuff like “I’ll no longer lose.” In fact, I cut out at least one instance from the script of his final showdown. The idea is he’s not so much obsessed with winning, but with not losing.
I always felt like ending it the way I did would be controversial because I’m basically going against one of the most important aspects of wrestling (and, hell, storytelling) and that’s that the villain needs to get comeuppance. Instead, the villain won, but inadvertently killed himself in the process because he was so obsessed with not losing that he blew himself up in a last-ditch effort. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on adding any more dead bodies to OHPW. So I was a bit surprised that I got a mostly positive reception for it.
While this story was not built to be like this from the start you can still explain stuff away, like SATAN apparently not being familiar with VACANT when he first shows up. That’s probably the biggest one, after all, considering SATAN created VACANT. I had ideas for flashback sequences and stuff, but felt those would break the flow too much. I was gonna include them in the NEWD showcase, which will feature the final showdown, but the time limit was too tight. I don’t really think it’s necessary to show this anyway.
Shows should ideally resume next week. Or maybe not I don’t know yet. We’ll see. I’ll post a card once I’m ready again.