Were you tempted to bring back the Mack?
Not really, no. I like the idea of Daddy Mack, but the character had a very short shelf life. I did a kind of comedy RP that nobody really got once, and I think from there it was the beginning of the end, and I went with the retirement angle.
Mack would be a good manager or backstage interviewer (or preshow panel guy, which I think is how we introduced him in the first place), but I don't think he has much more legs in ring.
Did I do the character justice having him fly off the tron for his for now final match?
Yes, perfect actually. I've been prepared to let the character go for some time, but the character would have never left without losing fairly and squarely. With the loss at Lethal Lottery (which, if I'm completely honest, I wasn't expecting but maybe that's why I lost), I think the writing was on the wall.
It was important he went out in a blaze of glory, but I'm glad it was Cooper that finished him and not the fall, it's a lot cleaner.
If he never comes back, it's a great ending. But my feeling is that he probably will at some point, and it's certainly a lot better than the previous departures of 'injured'.
I think - Thunder Studd- sounds better than Randy, but I get why you went with Randy. I can't believe you took the Black gimmick so far that you wouldn't talk to us in the forum, that is dedication personified, lol! Love it.
I struggled on the name, and still don't particularly like it, it could be subject to change.
Garth Black's original pipe bomb made it happen, and at the time I wrote a very short post in the discussion thread saying 'no hard feelings', and then that's basically been it for about two years.
Where was the line between Black and Tastycles during the anti-authority gimmick?
This is a very difficult question to answer.
I owe Creative an awful lot in two ways. When the team was good, it set Black up well. When there was something where I, Tastycles, thought 'that's not how I would do it', it's not hard to turn that into 'they're picking on me' as a character.
Let me try to elaborate.
I think first and foremost I have to say that Tastycles doesn't really care about the outcome of fake fake wrestling. I enjoy writing here mostly, but when I don't, I make an appearance as it's the right thing to do, but I might lose and that's ok. Vee ADZ and the triple threat this cycle are definite examples of that.
It's very galling to lose when you think you've brought your best, but I trust the judgement of creative. Whether deliberately or not, I think I was given lots of outs throughout - Black rarely lost cleanly. Equally, my Gold Rush run was made entertaining for me because it was good RPers and I had to try every round, but it also made it good for Black that he was fighting big names 'unfairly'. This is what I mean by the good side of creative helping me.
I don't care that I was on Ascension every week for 18 months, but it is very easy to turn that into something that would bother a character. Equally when I spent time doing the interview with Shotaro that never got published, that was easy too. These obviously didn't really impact me, Tastycles, but it did make me think 'why?' which Black could then write as 'why me?'.
It's easy to criticise from the outside, and actually there's not much I'd change about the bigger picture around Black's run or the creative team. The 5% of 'this could be improved' that Tastycles thought looking at the shows became the 100% of what Black would talk about.
The very first RP, the one that took me all of about 15 minutes to write is probably the best one I've ever written, and I think most people would agree, was probably the one written with the most truth in it. I do think that Creative do a fantastic job, but I equally think that the fed had been stuck in a loop of stables and characters that were a bit stale being endlessly cycled.
I guess it was difficult to write Black without being a bit of a dick about things, and there were a lot of times where I thought 'I should reign this in, or let them know that I'm not angry' but it would of detracted from what I was trying to do with the character.
The only time that I've been genuinely pissed off is when Black talked about losing to a girl in a super sexist manner backstage. He wouldn't do that, and I think there's far too much of it in the fed. He says as he debuts an overt sexist.
