Writing Stevens/First

I've gotten some praise for the Stevens/First match, so I figured I'd just explain exactly how I tried to write the match and what kind of ideas I had.

Going into the match I really wanted Stevens to dominate the early going, no matter what booking I got from Brunk, (Well unless he said "First squashes Stevens like a bug, put yourself over huge, if you don't, you're out of the fed.") because First is supposed to not be at the level of Stevens. So the early going had to be Stevens just controlling things.

After the first missed X-Factor I wanted Stevens to go to plan B, which was to ground The First and start wearing out the smaller man, rest holds are boring as hell to watch, but you can bang them out in a couple lines and get to the next event, so it's generally not that bad to write about.

Then I had Stevens hit a series of moves to get some two counts, show that First isn't going to just die off, build a little bit of anger for Stevens that this thing isn't ending so quickly. Then we hit the turning point where The First gets control and he starts getting near falls. Now I'd have done this again no matter what the booking of the match was. (Except again if Brunk had told me "Stevens crushes First")

Now the thing that kind of blew my mind was that Brunk really wanted to get First over as a legit threat to Stevens, where as my booking was that of a pretty much scumbag cheat stealing the belt. Having not Rp'ed a strong character since Carlos Canyeta back in the days before gunpowder was discovered, this is a new idea to me. Bloodhunt was a cheat, Doc's the biggest cheat alive, the Forsaken have been pretty heelish, so like, Brunk's view of where the match would go and mine were different by a good margin. I was gunning for First to win the title, Brunk was looking to give First credibility.

Cause I never would have had First hit his finisher on Stevens and get a pin that wasn't counted by the ref, never would have crossed my mind to even think to do that. As a matter of fact my angle for the match was "If First wins the title, I want Stevens to kick out of the Cut The Thread." I was booking for a Doc-ian screwjob, Brunk was trying to get himself a contender.

Now The First (I keep switching between "First" and "The First" that's always gonna be something in my head, maybe Stevens is right and I should just call him Brian) hitting his finisher on Stevens and covering without a ref there. I felt this was out of character for The First, who views wrestling matches as a black/white 'win/lose' ideal. I was watching ECW's One Night Stand from 2006 and when RVD frog splashed Cena, he didn't cover him, he raced over to Nick Patrick to wake him up to count the fall, and I feel like First would have done the same thing, so I had to work out why he'd go for a cover, and my answer to that was to have the ref in a state of limbo, slumped against the ropes. First has to cover cause Pat Jones *could* be awake enough to count the pin. I justify First's counting of the fall himself after Jones crashed to the mat as the actions of a young gothtard who's throwing a pity party for himself after getting screwed out of the title.

Now with Brunk's booking I would have finished the match with First trying to wake up the ref and getting X-Factor'ed into a pin, because at that point we'd basically done everything that the match was designed to do, get The First over as a guy who can beat Stevens, and now Stevens retains, but Brunk put in my own angle so I run with it.

For the storyline of the match I wouldn't have used the mist/ultra-cheating cradle, but it fits First completely, cause he's totally amoral about actions in the ring, cause all that matters is winning. He doesn't plan to screwjob anyone or anything, but he just lives by the mindset that 'it's only cheating if you get caught'

When I got the match, the card was late enough already so I wasn't going to try to pick apart details of the match and try to get revisions and rewrites, cause that would have been pretty absurd, double so because I was thrilled with the booking, cause having a strong in-ring character is something I've seldom had, now I just have to resist ruining his cred with my own paranoid angles.

One final note is that Sean Stevens' T-Shirt he wore on his way to the ring was most likely the toughest thing to write in the whole match, I have become Jamarian (JN not JS) detail freak in my intros and I really hate, hate, HATE it when I write up like a paragraph or two about my own guy and then I check the profile for the opponent and it doesn't have much or anything about what kind of outfit they wear to the ring, cause I feel like such a dirtbag writing out First's facepaint/Wrist tape/hair color/whatever the hell it is, and then I write something to the effect of "MUSIC UP: "Opponent's theme" Joe Blow wearing black trunks shambles to the ring to a loud chorus of boos." I just want to write like an OORP note under their intro saying "Please forgive me, I really don't know your entrance, I'm so sorry."

Thankfully Lindsay came up with an idea for the T-Shirt and I added a little extra to it and I was able to move on. Rest assured I wouldn't have written another line of the match until I had defeated that T-Shirt, I am deeply ill.