Dradis058

Ari vs Helen is definitely fun to contemplate from perspectives both in and out of universe.

At their core level, both characters are heels.  But I think that they fall into distinctly different archetypes as to how that villainy is put into practice.  Helen is arrogant by nature; she is at the top of her game and will take every opportunity to rub that fact in your nose.  Ari meanwhile is the slimy backstage manipulator who refuses to engage unless she's confident that it'll be on her terms.

On one hand with a Las Vegas audience, everybody's going to be rooting for Helen.  She might be an insufferable bitch, but she's their insufferable bitch.  And Ari's done enough already that she's almost universally scorned there.

With the LA crowd, Helen's reputation precedes her; they're predisposed to being hostile towards her.  Ari isn't exactly viewed favorably, but she also hasn't really done anything to piss them off either.

It's been a long time since I last paid serious attention to pro wrestling, and I wasn't aware that any of the major promotions in the US actively engaged with one another.  I would clarify that the casinos and their fighters are all ultimately part of the same promotion / organizing body, but otherwise your description is pretty close to the mark.

Exiting wrestling analogies, I think I would point to my Vegas as being akin to the Warring States period from Japanese history.

The annoying limitation that I'm being reacquainted with when trying to do an index is that DA only supports the barest bones HTML in posts.  I can't use a table or anything to make the layout look pretty.  I think I have to accept that it won't look as nice as I want it to.

In my mind, what happened with Erica and Elliot is very much a product of the moment, rather than something that either of them had been explicitly waiting and holding out hope for.  Though Elliot's interest has clearly always been there and is a very poorly guarded secret, I would wager that Erica's existed at most on a subconscious level prior to now.

The degree of influence that Catspaw had on present events is an interesting point of debate.  Certainly, it's physically responsible for creating the conditions that allowed events to transpire.  But whether or not the absence of her trainer's and her friend's influences caused her to commit harder to Elliot as a support mechanism is harder to answer.

Regarding Whitney, I envision she and Erica have at least buried the hatchet somewhat by this point, even if they're not quite back to the point of being besties once again.  Going forward, I don't see Elliot being a specific point of contention for them.

Ari, predictably, will completely lose her shit when she finds out what happened.  Before now, I had not intended to depict that moment of revelation in narrative, nor had I really even given tremendous thought as to how the matter might come up in-story.  And while I still probably am not going to put pen to paper on it, I at least have a rough sketch in my head canon for the events that lead to her getting looped in.

Generally speaking, I'd say that the organizations in the Los Angeles setting operate with an expectation of exclusivity from their fighters.  How implicit or explicit this is probably varies.  There's likely some leeway if niches don't overlap, i.e. the league only has wrestling matches, but the fighter does some boxing on the side.  Fights between clubs do happen, but would likely require buy-in from whoever is doing the decision-making at the top - the more prestigious the organization or the larger the gap in prestige, the more rarely this approval is given.

A fighter could choose to leave one organization to get matches with another, but that's likely a one-way trip.  If for some reason she needed to go back and rejoin the first, it would probably require a fair bit of groveling or involve some other form of recompense.  Again, the higher one goes, the less wiggle room that exists for take-backs.

If I were tasked in-universe with selling the independent route, I would pitch it as way of bypassing all of this.  Theoretically, more power would be placed in the hands of the fighters themselves and less in those of the people who control the rosters and book the matches.  The vision, if fully realized, would be to create a whole new structure that might someday supplant the status quo.  But anyone buying in at this stage is in effect making a commitment, just a different one.  And as real life has shown us, gig work isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.

It would be interesting to explore this side of the universe and see if it does or does not live up to what it's promised to be, but that's far beyond the bandwidth that I have at my disposal.