sources for the main project

https://www.sportskeeda.com/wwe/what-are-the-delete-chants-and-hardy-boyz-broken-gimmick-all-about

Cillanki, Akash. "What are the "Delete" Chants and Broken Gimmick of The Hardy Boyz all about?" Sports News. Sportskeeda, 10 Apr. 2017. Web. 14 Apr. 2017.

 The main Idea of this article is the struggle of how Broken Matt Hardy came to be. I will use this to not only show how Matt suffered a mental breakdown, thanks to Jeff, but also show how fans react to him and what that means for our society. "This massive surge in popularity saw the brothers take the Indy scene by storm. They went to a number of wrestling promotions around the world – either as a team or Matt Hardy alone – and it was always to overwhelming success. Things got so good that the brothers didn't extend their deal with TNA, instead waiting for better opportunities" (Akash).

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/02/the-postmodern-brilliance-of-broken-matt-hardy.html

"The Postmodern Brilliance of Broken Matt Hardy." Pastemagazine.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2017

The main idea of this article is that changing one's gimmick can restore fan appeal. It connects to my topic because it can be classified as celebrity worship, because he was a fan of the Hardy Boyz before they became "Broken" but their appeal died off, but now they they are "Broken", the writer is once again a fan. This will not only be a celebrity worship part of the essay, but also showing that changing oneself can be good, and it also can be used to show how people feel to Matt Hardy ever since he became Broken Matt Hardy. "Hardy is in on the joke, exaggerating each facial expression like a salivating cartoon wolf."(Pane).


http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.bucks.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=da49b5dc-5714-4b62-80b6-2d27ed0d19e7%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=10664485&db=aph     (A Cognitive profile of Individuals who Tent to Worship Celebrities)

 http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.bucks.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=4&sid=da49b5dc-5714-4b62-80b6-2d27ed0d19e7%40sessionmgr103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=13467035&db=aph

 I will be using both of the these articles to further examine the extent of celebrity worship when it comes to Matt Hardy. The first tells you what type of people are likely to full into celebrity worship.  The second one too show that some people take celebrity worship to a extreme and can treat it like a religion. Both of these will help me greatly talk about the fans who support Broken Matt Hardy.

 

Celebrity Worship Broken Hardy Boy (Matt) Academic Source Evaluation

 Mccutcheon, Lynn E., Rense Lange, and James Houran. "Conceptualization and measurement of celebrity worship." British Journal of Psychology 93.1 (2002): 67-87. Web. 


 For my research on Broken Matt Hardy, one of the topics I will be talking about will be Celebrity Worship. For this, I will be using a article written by James Houran and others for the British Journal of Psychology. The article is called "Conceptualization and measurement of celebrity worship". The reason why i'm using this article is because the writers back up their work with other sources, and they add to the information that was already written about.

 The main point of the article is to show how people react to celebrities in certain fields of media. They used the a scale that they named the Celebrity Worship Scale, or the CWS. The scale factored acting, music, sports, and other celebrities equally. Celebrity worship, they said has 3 different stages, stage 1. Reading and watching the celebrity. Stage 2. Talking about the celebrity on social media. 3. A mixture of empathy for the success and failures the celebrity goes through, compulsive behaviors over the celebrity, over-identification with the celebrity, and obsession. The authors created a model showing the absorption and addiction people feel when seeing or hearing about the celebrity. I feel this research is important because it shows how people react to the celebrities they hear about everyday, especially since some people go to extremes over the celebrities.
 
 To gather their research, the authors used the Parasocial Interaction Scale which measures the how viewers developed relationships with newscasters. This is important because the scale showed that 61% of viewers watched the same news channels because it made them feel comfortable. They also used results from a celebrity appeal questionnaire that was based on attraction to the celebrity using sex appeal, role model, entertainer, and mystique as their 4 factors. They themselves gathered information using a Rasch scaling approach that focused on responses from 249 volunteers to see how that rate a celebrity. The scale factored out bias and errors of estimation.

 In the end of the study, they found that music and sports celebrities were more popular then those then those in acting. They found that men tend to talk more about media celebrities then women, which was consistent with another study by Levin and Arluke in 1985. The reason they found for the idolization of a celebrity was that they felt a special connection to the celebrity. I was shocked to hear that men were more likely to talk about media celebrities, but I wasn't shocked that the reason people worship a celebrity was because they felt a connection to them. In professions such as wrestling for example, how over a character is, the better they tend to do in the business. 

 In the end, I feel that I can use the article in my essay. When working with someone like Broken Matt Hardy, their research about how celebrities are seen by their viewers because of a "special connection" defiantly are seen with Matt. To see this, all you have to do is watch Monday Night Raw when Matt Hardy is on stage. Another thing this helps with is that most of the people who talk about him are wrestling fans, and most fans are men. The research they provided will help me fully analyze how and why fans respond to the "Broken Brilliance" of Broken Matt Hardy 

Broken Matt Hardy

 The cultural artifact I have chosen is Broken Matt Hardy, one half of WWE's Raw Brand Tag Team Champions. I chose Broken Matt because he is one of the most popular wrestlers in the world. He was named 2016 Gimmick of the Year by Thewrestlingnewsletter. Everywhere he goes, the crowd chant "DELETE" at the top of their lungs, because that is one of Matt's catchphrases. Matt Hardy's gimmick is over the top and exciting, it is pretty much a walking meme on steroids. He talks in a British accent, and has his brother Jeff be called Brother Nero, his son be called King Maxell, a butler named Senor Benjamin, a giraffe with the soul of George Washington, a drone called Vanguard-1, and many other crazy stuff.
One of is most popular story lines was the Hardys versus Decay, also called Delete Or Decay, in which Matt, Jeff, and Reby Hardy fought against Abyss, Crazy Steve, and Rosemary in TNA. In the feud, they fought at the Hardy Compound, Matt and Jeff's home, and had Roman Candles, someone getting choked out in a pool with a inflatable pool toy, Decay stealing a pickup truck and kidnapping Senior Benjamin, Matt Hardy's Zoo, which holds animals with the souls of the worlds smartest people, such as the George Washington Giraffe and a Tiger who is Genghis Khan, and so many other things that its hard to believe actually happened.
 Broken Matt Hardy represents emotional struggle, which led him to becoming "Broken" after his failure to defeat Jeff. His struggle with the fact that he couldn't beat Jeff and the fact that everywhere he turned Jeff was there, wore him down and changed him into the Broken Matt that he is now. The entire Broken gimmick revolves around Matt having a mental breakdown, changing him and making him go ding dong merely on mental. How the fans react to him is, in a way, celebrity worship. The fans can't seem to get enough of him even though he is now a nut case. He also caused a similar mental breakdown to his brother Jeff by attacking him with drones, roman candles, gardening tools, a boat, a taser, and ladders, which is enough to drive anyone insane. He pretty much forced Jeff to become his unwilling servant.
 From everything that Matt Hardy now is, it shows me that the fans love it when a wrestler becomes creative and tries to do things no one else has done before. Before the gimmick, Matt was somewhat over as a heel, but after he became "Broken" Matt Hardy, he has become the most popular wrestler in the world. The fans want something new and exciting, and that is just what Matt Hardy has done. Because of this gimmick people are now chanting "Delete" as loud as they can whenever he appears.
 The fans love something new, exciting and weird. The fans seem to worship him because he is hilarious, but they don't take in to account that they are in love with someone who went off his rocker and is now mentally unstable. He tired to Kill Jeff, and I mean Kill him, with fireworks. He took roman candles and shot them at him. Then, after Matt "Broke" Jeff, the two tried to kill Decay, Crazzy Steve and Abyss, with even more roman candles. Yeah not so fun now when you realize he is a nut case trying to murder people with roman candles and drones.

WWE VS MMA: How Differnet Really Are They?

 Now first off, a main difference between them is that One, WWE, is staged, while the other, MMA, is a actual fight. however, what people seem not to understand is that WWE is actually more dangerous then MMA. With MMA they don't bash each other in the head with a weapon, they don't get knocked off ladders while reaching for a title, they don't have inferno matches, Hell In A Cells, Steel Cages, Street Fights or a number of other match types. It is not "Fake", the moves they do are real, some of the injuries, those that are not introduced for a story line, and if you mess up, you can get seriously hurt or die. Lets look at a big WWE and UFC star Brock Lesnar at WWE's Wrestlemania 19. Brock was fighting the World Heavyweight Champion Kurt Angle and went for a shooting star press to the Olympic Gold Medalist, and ended up misjudging the distances and his rotation, and the killer whale in human skin landed right smack on his head.
 


   

Another time a wrestler was injured by a misused moved was WWE Hall Of Famer Sid Vicious who attempted to do a second rope big boot to another wrestler. What happened you may ask? Well.... I'd Rather show you then try to say why a 300+ pound man should never attempt this move.
 


 Now, people rag on WWE for being "Fake". There are many sites talking about this. One such site is ezinearticles.com. He calls WWE fake because they use weapons and have a script in which the wrestlers follow. Now this is true, however what he seems to forget is that wrestling does take a toll on the body. The writer of this article, Michael Wickham, has experience in MMA, as he has been training in it for 1 year, prior to writing this article.

 UFC is also different from WWE is different ways then just how a fight goes. According to Forbes.com, WWE's and UFC's annual revenue is far apart. UFC made almost $100 million more then WWE in 2007. However, WWE's popularity is on the rise, as it made $659 million, which is $59 million more then UFC did in 2015. So it seems that even though WWE is "Fake", it is making more money then the "Real Sport" of MMA.





https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2016/07/12/ufc-vs-wwe-how-much-more-is-real-fighting-worth/#73f4885650f0
 http://ezinearticles.com/?Differences-Between-WWE-and-UFC&id=4967504

Goliath's 15 Wrestling Injuries That Changed Everything

 One of the things that all wrestlers have to fear is injuries. People like to talk about the worst wrestling injuries of all time, and the injuries that changed the business. So now, i'm going to look at one such article that was written by Goliath, talking about 15 injuries that changed the business.

The audience that they are writing too would be those who both hate wrestling and those who love it. For a fan of wrestling, finding out about the most influential injuries that ever happened and to learn how they changed the business for better and for worse. As for those that hate wrestling, they can use a article like this to prove that wrestling is too dangerous and shouldn't be allowed.

Ethos- WWE, WCW, NWA, and 15 famous wrestlers. The names are very well know, especially Shawn Michaels, Steve Austin, Triple H, Goldberg, Bret Hart and the Undertaker, so talking about anything to do with these people means that they should know what they are talking about, as each of these men will be, if they are not already, Hall Of Famers in WWE, which itself is the biggest wrestling company in the world by a large margin.

Pathos- Informative and sad, because it is talking about people getting hurt.


Logos- Showcases the dangers of wrestling.


The writer wanted to inform us of the may injuries wrestlers can obtain in the ring. He wanted to show how each of these injuries effected the everyday life of these wrestlers, with Daniel Bryan, Bret Hart, and Steve Austin being forced to retire do to the injuries. I think that it was very effective, because it go the point across that wrestling is dangerous and should be taken seriously.











http://www.goliath.com/sports/10-wrestling-injuries-that-changed-everything/ Here is the article by Goliath.