#genuinely we were so much better off in the 2010-2014 eras where you could follow anyone and everybody wasn't so fucking insane actually

[harquinzel]

honest to god i really hate the way tumblr is nowadays. like it's ridiculous that people (even some moots!) you've never spoken to just randomly block you one day even though you've never said a word to them and just liked and rbed their posts (with no shitty or rude tags or comments or anything). or someone new you just followed removes you as a follower for god knows what reason. like i genuinely do nawt make text posts or add anything sucky (nor do i ever add comments to posts, only tags really for later ref) and i'm not like "popular" enough to like.... be Known for anything. i literally mind my business and i don't even create content anymore

it's just so weird how people bitch about notes and rbs being low constantly and now you can get blocked or soft blocked just for "spam liking" or "spam reblogging" which is the entire fucking point of this platform lmao.... all of these unspoken rules by everybody are really fucking annoying! makes it very hard to interact with new blogs when i'm afraid to randomly get soft or hard blocked over literally nothing (or for just going through their blog and liking a bunch of posts!).

i miss when we all just posted whatever and there weren't a million rules to doing anything and people weren't so annoying

[etihw000]

You, Boun, Ninja and Taxi were my inspo for doing character designs, though I have to ask, what was the logic of the fashion you gave when interpreting the skins back at like 2013/2014? I could never figure out how to get that 2010s mcyt aesthetic of designs.

i’m gonna put this here for future reference: i do not want to answer asks that mention taxey. so if anyone else had sent in an ask involving her i probably deleted it and will continue to delete them, sorry.

but you tickled a bit of my rambling bones because i do like to talk, and she is part of what happened (i will hereby refer to her as T); so here we go.

i think you can separate my designs into two eras: before-T and after-T. before T came around, my designs interpreted the skins pretty literally. here’s bodil, here’s sky/ty/mitch/jerome, here’s bashur, and here’s jason.

my explanation on this: i was 13 and didn’t really like challenging myself. i’m pretty sure i took jason’s design from dopier, for example. so i took the easy way route out on a lot of things! 

but most notably, i didn’t want to draw complicated designs like sky’s. so the answer was very simple and clear: obviously, put it onto a sweater! i’m sure it was originally meant to be armor, but i didn’t want to draw armor. that’s too much thinking, too much highlighting, and i just wanted to pump out fanart for what i liked.

i didn’t like drawing checkerboards, so i switched them to lines.

i didn’t want to draw an anthro, so i just made it into a bear hat ala michael (i’m pretty sure this bear-type hat was more prominent in 2014, but it seems to have been simplified into just a hoodie with bear ears?).

i didn’t want to draw a humanoid watermelon nor did i even know where to begin with that, so i just drew bashur’s skin as a human and mirrored the design onto his hair and everything else was kept similarly.

it’s what happened with jason’s design - remember his astronaut-y outfit? yeah, i changed it to a hoodie shortly afterwards with an astronaut-y print. hated drawing that shit, challenging yourself is dead.

so in early 2014 (i came to the realization that i actually didn’t draw mcyt in 2013; i started drawing it in 2014), honestly just look at the skins you want to interpret and go with the simplest possible outcome. the end.

however, if you’re talking a bit later with the more unique designs - there was one notable thing that happened that caused it.

T.

see, i was a cranky little 14 year old child who got way too much attention. and with that attention came people copying my art - and one of them was T. 

i was highly uncomfortable at the time because, well, when you’re 14 you want to be unique as possible; you wanna stand out. and i was the only one who drew mcyt in this vaguely anime style way (because it wasn’t minecraft). and because we were all fucking weebs i assume people just started copying my art style wholesale.

see, people would mistake me for T. and vice-versa. i was extremely unhappy with this bullshit. “why are people mistaking me for this person,” i thought very unhappily to myself. and because i didn’t want to change my bloody art style, i decided designs were the way to go. so i went a bit crazy with it.

started out pretty simple. i cut ty’s shirt slightly differently (it still plagues his fanart to this day, i’m sorry ty). i gave bodil a beanie. everything was fine.

and then i still didn’t fucking want to draw checkerboards, so i just made a unique design for mitch. it followed with zek (the jacket on the right with the blue), who also had a checkerboard print. 

i did not want anyone replicating what i did, because it pissed me the fuck off something fierce. and i don’t know nor do i remember this clearly, but i’m pretty sure T started doing the same damn thing anyway. and i’m pretty sure it’s only T, because when I talked with swift and jasie they didn’t remember doing this shit. it was literally the two of us and whoever happened to be watching us do it.

it wasn’t meant to be easy to replicate. 

it was meant to be a bitch to replicate.

(i did it with rage too. the man didn’t even have a checkerboard skin. the long hair also plagues his fanart to this day, too. sorry rage.)

the other designs (ragegaming-era) were in 2015. and i was still the same angry 14-year old kid, especially since the T situation hadn’t gotten any better. we were still being mistaken for each other. people were genuinely confused about which of us were who and i don’t know how to explain to you how much anger was packed into my tiny 14 year old unsocialized body. 

i genuinely still don’t understand it now because our art styles were fundamentally different.

so i pitch you this question: what happens if simple skins meet this anger at being copied when even the simpler prints intended to be a bitch to replicate end up being mimicked, especially when the person you didn’t want copying you followed you into a wholeass new fandom? (we were more divided than now; TC and Crew were two completely different fandoms lol; we didn’t generally unite ourselves under ‘mcyt’)

you end up with other weird attempts. strangely asymmetrical cuts. even more complicated patterns. i apparently hid these but it was hell, i tell you. 

but i can assure you that the patterns on my designs were almost always symmetrical, albeit colored differently from the other side. the asymmetrical parts were different - a cut, a rolled up pant leg. something that you could do with a regular article of clothing. i know that in my circle there were some people that would have different length in shoes. i never did that. i would literally never write words on a shirt, too. i wasn’t one of those graphic tee people.

then i guess in late 2015 i got tired of it all and went back to the simple times of just not wanting to draw difficult designs before quitting altogether.

so you want to know what defined 2014 designs? 

it was a 14 year old’s absolute anger at being copied to fucking death and having to be mistaken for other people.

i hope this helped and i am now going to choose to forget that i ever decided to answer this ask. not because it was a bad ask, but because i don’t like thinking about T in particular. 

thank you for indulging my rambling bones. here’s a tl;dr for you:

Before-T designs (simpler)

the interpretations are literal.

if you can’t tell what’s going on, just make it a sweater and copy the patterns on the skin 1:1.

if there’s a different head (jason’s astronaut helmet, jerome’s bacca head) just make it a hood or a hat.

After-T designs (more difficult)

you still don’t wanna draw things out of your comfort zone, so stay out of the armor/anthro business.

give every design two layers - three at most. 

you love hoodies :)

if the skin is simple, use slightly different shades to add patterns (i believe he had a plain blue hoodie and plain black pants).

want to be even MORE unique than before? add something asymmetrical. remove a sleeve, roll up a pant leg, or something, but never shoes or gloves. they are sacred and you shouldn’t do that to them.

idk someone pointed out that i was apparently allergic to necks because i kept giving designs chokers or scarves or whatever. they’re usually solid in color

[aion-rsa]

Did The Dark Knight Really Influence the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

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In 2008, there were two seismic events in the superhero movie genre so close together that you’d be forgiven for thinking they signaled the same thing. Over the span of a few months, Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) via Iron Man, and director Christopher Nolan changed the perception of how seriously to take these movies with The Dark Knight. Both are credited as watershed moments for how audiences and (more importantly) the industry approached such stories; and The Dark Knight is specifically singled out as the gold standard by which all other masked crimefighter films are measured.

However, was Nolan’s haunting vision—one in which a lone avenger is the last, best hope for a major American city on the verge of collapse—really that influential on its genre? The Dark Knight certainly had a monumental impact on the culture, then and now. You saw it when Heath Ledger’s searing interpretation of the Joker made him only the second actor to win a posthumous Oscar, as well as when the film’s exclusion from the Best Picture race changed the way the Academy Awards handled its top prize. And just last year, The Dark Knight became only the second superhero movie inducted into the National Film Registry.

Yet when a friend watching last week’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiere told me Marvel was returning to the “realistic” approach of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and by extension The Dark Knight, I couldn’t help but disagree. The new Disney+ series may have a slightly more grounded aesthetic than the last time we saw these characters (back when they were fighting space aliens over magic stones in Avengers: Endgame), but the medium-blending existence of the series belies the idea that Marvel took anything significant from the insular and self-contained Dark Knight Trilogy.

The Dark Knight vs. Iron Man

It’s interesting to look back at just those 2008 films since at face value they bore minor similarities. They both were focused on fantastically wealthy billionaires using their fortunes to fight wrongdoing on a potentially global scale; each movie was directed by filmmakers with indie cred thanks to Nolan helming Memento (2000) and Jon Favreau writing and starring in Swingers (1996); and each starred unexpected casting choices with Ledger as the Joker and Robert Downey Jr. jumpstarting a career comeback as Tony Stark.

But their goals and approaches were worlds apart. The obvious thing to note, besides The Dark Knight being a sequel to Batman Begins (2005) and Iron Man being an origin movie, is that Iron Man had an slyly hilarious sensibility, and The Dark Knight fancied itself an allegory about post-9/11 America. The former’s success was engineered in large part by Downey’s gift for comedic improvisation and freestyle. Indeed, co-star Jeff Bridges said in 2009 that he, Downey, and Favreau were essentially improvising their scenes from scratch every day during primitive rehearsals. “They had no script, man,” Bridges lightly complained with his Dude diction.

By contrast, The Dark Knight appears at a glance to be an exercise in self-seriousness and lofty ambition. Every scene, written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, appears like a chess move, and each character a pawn or knight who’s been positioned to put contemporary audiences in a state of pure anxiety with War on Terror imagery and dialogue. Of course this clocklike presentation is itself another Nolan illusion, as smaller players like Michael Jai White, who portrayed gangster Gambol in the movie, have been quite candid about. As with almost every film, there is still a level of fluidity and workshopping on Nolan’s set.

Ultimately, the bigger difference between the Nolan and eventual Marvel approach is what each is hoping to accomplish with the film they’re currently making. More than just offering a “realistic” vision of Batman, The Dark Knight attempted to tell a sweeping crime drama epic that would stand alone, separate from its status as a Batman Begins sequel. Rather than being “the next chapter,” The Dark Knight was meant to be a cinematic distillation of Batman and Joker’s primal appeals writ large. With this approach, the film also broke away from the superhero movie template Batman Begins followed three years earlier, and which nearly all superhero films still walk through the paces of.

In essence, The Dark Knight showed that superhero movies could be dark and mature, yes, but they can also be subversive, unexpected, and genuinely surprising. Nolan’s previous superhero movie, as good as it is, followed the beats set down by Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie nearly 30 years earlier. They’re the same beats trod by Iron Man and pretty much every other superhero origin movie, including a large bulk of Marvel Studios’ output. The Dark Knight, by contrast, reached for a cinematic vernacular separate from its specific genre. The movie’s not subtle about it either. The opening scene of Nolan’s epic wears its homages to Michael Mann’s Heat on its sleeves, and the story’s structure has more to do with Jaws than Jor-El.

The approach shook audiences in 2008 after they’d come to expect a certain type of movie from masked do-gooders. In The Dark Knight, superhero conventions could be subverted or obliterated when love interest Rachel Dawes is brutally killed off mid-sentence, or stalwart Batman is forced to claim a pyrrhic victory over the villain by entering into a criminal conspiracy and cover-up with the cops. The thrill of novelty was as breathtaking as the movie’s allegorical elements about a society on edge.

And even with The Dark Knight’s open-ended finale, it stood as a singular cinematic experience, complete with then-groundbreaking emphasis on IMAX photography. Nolan was so adamant about making this as self-contained an experience as possible that he jettisoned his co-story creator David Goyer’s idea of setting up Harvey Dent’s fall from grace for a third movie. Dent’s fate, as that of everyone else’s, would be tied strictly to the events of the movie you’re now watching.

“We Have a Hulk”

In Iron Man, and then more forcefully in Iron Man 2 (2010) and the rest of its “Phase One” era, Marvel Studios demonstrated a wholly different set of priorities. Similar to how Batman Begins paved the way for Nolan to do what he really wanted with that material, Iron Man 2 came to encapsulate Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige’s grander designs for the type of movies he was making. Where The Dark Knight was singular, unconventional, and two steps closer to our world than its comic book origins, Iron Man 2 was episodic, entirely crafted around audience expectations for a sequel, and even more like a comic book world than our own.

In other words, the first Iron Man gently submerged audiences into the fantasy by beginning with contemporary images of Tony Stark in a Middle Eastern desert; Iron Man 2 then made sweeping strides in defining what that MCU fantasy is as quickly as possible: Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is introduced solely to establish the superspy who will be vital to The Avengers two years down the road, and the central narrative about Tony Stark fighting an old rival is put on pause to reintroduce the character Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) as a supporting, and superfluous, side character. The post-credit scene even arbitrarily introduces literal magic with a glowing hammer that has absolutely nothing to do with the story you just watched. Still, it’s a hell of a teaser for Thor which was due in theaters a year later.

With the release of Iron Man 2, Marvel Studios’ emphasis became diametrically opposed to the driving concept behind The Dark Knight Trilogy. Rather than each film being an insulated, standalone cinematic experience like the Hollywood epics of old, Marvel’s movies would be interconnected episodes in an ongoing narrative saga that spanned multiple franchises and countless sequels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unlike Nolan after The Dark Knight, Feige and his stable of writers always know where the next movie (or five) is going, and have a better idea of what the overall vision is than any single director working within this system. Ironically, this returns power to the studio and producer as the seeming authorial voice of each movie. Like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, directors are more often hired hands than influential auteurs.

However, this means the aspects Nolan really valued on The Dark Knight beyond a gritty “realism”—elements like spontaneity, subversion, and a distancing from superhero tropes—became antithetical to the type of movies produced by the MCU. For at least the first decade of its existence, the Marvel Cinematic Universe flourished by creating a formula and house style that is as predictable for audiences as the contents in a Big Mac.

When you go to a Marvel movie, you more or less you’ll get: an ironic, self-deprecating tone, a story that often revolves around a CG MacGuffin that must be taken from the villain, and a narrative in which disparate heroic characters come together after some amusing, disagreeable banter. In fact, more than Iron Man, it was Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012) which refined the Marvel formula into what it is today.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. Black Panther became the first Marvel movie since Iron Man to arguably tackle themes significant to the real world, in this case specifically the legacy of African diaspora. It also became the first superhero film nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture as a result; James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies might follow the narrative formula of most MCU movies, but they’re embedded with a cheeky and idiosyncratic personality that is distinctly Gunn’s; and in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Captain America: Civil War (2016), directors Joe and Anthony Russo, as well as screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, attempted to inject a little bit of that “realistic” aesthetic from The Dark Knight. But only to a point.

Particularly in the 2014 effort, there was a push by the Russos to rely on in-camera special effects and cultivate what they often described in the press as a “1970s spy thriller” style. Ostensibly, the hope may have been to make The Winter Soldier as much a spy thriller as The Dark Knight was a crime epic. In this vein, there were even attempts to graft onto the story very timely concerns about the overreach of a government surveillance state, which had only grown in the decade since the U.S. PATRIOT Act was passed, despite a change in White House administrations. However, all of these ambitions had an invisible ceiling hovering above them.

Despite having overtones about the danger of reactionary if well-intentioned government leaders, like the kind personified by Robert Redford’s SHIELD director in the movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier couldn’t become too focused on the espionage elements or too far removed from the Marvel house style. The story still needed to interconnect with other Marvel films, hence Redford’s character turning out to be a secret HYDRA double agent, and it still needed to give audiences what they expected from a Marvel movie. Thus how this “1970s spy thriller” ends in a giant CGI battle with citywide destruction as Captain America inserts MacGuffins into machines that will blow up HYDRA’s latest weapon for world domination.

It’s easy to wonder if the movie was developed a little longer, and didn’t have to play by a certain set of rules and expectations, that instead of backpedaling into comic book motivations, Redford’s character would’ve been a well-intentioned patriot amassing power “to keep us safe,” and in the process destabilized the institutions he claimed to revere.

Read more

Movies

What Did Batman Do Between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises?

By David Crow

TV

WandaVision: The Unanswered Questions From the Marvel Series

By Gavin Jasper

A Universe Without End

The Marvel method breeds a heavy need for familiarity and comfortable predictability, as opposed to disorientation and discomfort. Yet both methods are valid. While Nolan achieved near universal praise for The Dark Knight, his attempt to replicate it with the even more ambitious The Dark Knight Rises—an unabashed David Lean-inspired epic that took more from A Tale of Two Cities and Doctor Zhivago than DC Comics—left fans divided. It also was a narrative dead end for the corporate/fanbase need of an ongoing franchise. Nolan instead reached a final, artistic, and emphatic period for his cinematic interpretation of Batman mythology. By comparison, Marvel Studios has created a new cinematic vernacular that only ever uses dashes, semicolons, and commas. There is always more to tell.

Nolan reflected on these changing circumstances for superhero movies in 2017 when he said, “That’s a privilege and a luxury that filmmakers aren’t afforded anymore. I think it was the last time that anyone was able to say to a studio, ‘I might do another one, but it will be four years.’ There’s too much pressure on release schedules to let people do that now, but creatively it’s a huge advantage.”

This lines up with what Jeff Bridges said about the evolution of the Marvel method way back in ’09 after the first Iron Man: “You would think with a $200 million movie you’d have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script [and they think], ‘Oh, we’ll have the script before that time,’ and they don’t have their shit together.”

Bridges’ unhappiness with the new process notwithstanding, Marvel was rewriting the playbook about how these types of movies were made. Nolan’s approach of one at a time and years-long development processes created three distinctly different and relatively standalone Batman movies. But Marvel has shifted the idea of not just what a franchise can be, but also what cinematic storytelling means.

Instead of three movies, their rules and structures have generated dozens of well-received and adored entertainments, that when combined can produce experiences as unique as Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019): two movies that were more like a two-part season finale on TV than individual stories. And the latter became the highest grossing film of all time.

The success of this approach is further underlined when one considers competitors that tried to emulate both Marvel and Nolan’s approaches, relying on a lone auteur to build a shared cinematic universe—while also arguably taking the wrong lessons from the “dark” in The Dark Knight title. In the case of the DC Extended Universe, that approach collapsed on itself after three movies, leaving the interconnected “shared” part of its universe in tatters, and fans and studio hands alike divided on how to proceed with the franchise.The Marvel Cinematic Universe took a narrower road than that of The Dark Knight. But it turned out to be a lot smoother and much, much longer.

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[thesportssoundoff]

Lists ‘N Stuff: The Top 10 UFC WWs from 2010 to 2019

I like lists! It’s my thing these days I guess. I started doing this particular list because my attempt at creating the top 10 boxing welterweights of the 2000s was pretty much DOA given how most of the guys you’d expect (Cotto, Mayweather, Pacquaio, Mosley) all jumped around weight classes so frequently in that era that I’d either be left removing Floyd (who fought thrice at the weight) or Pacquaio (twice) or trying to justify how Carlos Quintana and Louis Collazo were actually really genuinely top 10 welterweights. I figured I could extend that to just 140 and 147 lbs but at that point I gave up. Instead let’s jump sports and go right to MMA which I’ve been chronologically bullshitting about on here since 2012. Just HOW good was the UFC’s welterweight division from 2010 to 2019? Well let’s do the hard work!

Couple of caveats here:

-This is strictly based upon 1) your fights at WW only and 2) your fights ONLY in the UFC. Guys who were fighting outside the organization don’t have those fights count against your record.

-There’s a FIVE fight minimum to be eligible. This is primarily due to not wanting to have to deal with “What about Conor/Nate/Nick?!” questions. 

-Unless a fighter actually popped positive on a drug test, I did not try to  dock anybody who I suspected of being on PEDs. We know the UFC was the wild wild west for most of this era so rather than be the equivalent of the guy who swears RDA is on steroids because “Well he started winning then he lost!”, I stuck to the facts. 

Honorable Mentions:

Colby Covington- As much as we all may dislike Covington for what he does and says, the fact of the matter is that Colby Covington is a genuinely good welterweight. Wins over Robbie Lawler, Demian Maia and Rafael Dos Anjos are his two big punctuation marks but this is also a guy who gave Kamaru Usman hell for an extended period in their title fight and holds a bevy of solid under the radar wins over the likes of Max Griffin and Dong Hyun Kim. I could see somebody putting Covington on their top 10 and I wouldn't begrudge them at all. I just couldn't cross that bridge on my end.

Rafael Dos Anjos- RDA is probably a top 10 all time lightweight and one of the greatest fighters of the 2010s but I still think I prefer RDA's dominance as a lightweight. As a welterweight he got off to a tremendously hot start in the weight class punctuated by a win over Robbie Lawler but from then on? It's been a pretty dry run. Since the Lawler fight, RDA is 1-4 and the pattern is pretty much out there. If you pressure him early and prevent him from getting a good feel for the space and pace of the fight, he's a pretty easy touch. He's gritty and durable but he basically exists now to test if you're ready for the big step up. I'm not a big fan of the gatekeeper label for dudes like RDA so I prefer the term mini boss. He's the guy who checks to see if you're ready for the big boss.

Leon Edwards- Leon Edwards is 10-2 and coming off a career defining win over RDA and yet he's not in the top 10? Against fighters who have better records than him?! To begin with, Edwards has a looot of dead air on his resume. We're talking about guys who weren't even relevant at the time of their fight. A green Vicente Luque and Bryan Barberena were his good wins but not exactly top 10 worthy, especially given the UFC roster bloat. There's also only one guy on the top 10 list who did NOT get at least an interim title shot and that guy beat him up in a backstage fight so it's not like I could squeeze him in. I also have to admit (unfortunately) that Edwards is sort of a dull fighter who tends to get overlooked on lists like this.

Jake Shields- I don't think there's anything wrong with Jake Shields sneaking onto this list. Shields' run as a welterweight in the UFC was a 4-3 jaunt (that felt like the 100 year war) with wins over some damn good fighters but mostly in close contested score card-y fights. On paper though wins over Woodley and Maia SHOULD get you into the top 10 though so again, if he's on yours then fine. No shame in losses to Hector Lombard, GSP and Ellenberger.

Jake Ellenberger- If you remove the last five fights of his career when he was just sort of being trudged out there because “He hit hard so he can always win a fight!”, Jake Ellenberger has a spiffy record of 9-6 with wins over the likes of Jake Shields, Josh Koscheck and a not exactly cooked Diego Sanchez while his losses are to the likes of Rory Mac, Robbie Lawler, Wonderboy and the generally underrated Martin Kampmann. Not a top 10 for the decade even at that point but the rise of the elite four in Colby, Masvidal, Usman and Woodley and him continually getting fights over and over and over haven’t been kind to him. Ellenberger, Kampmann and Carlos Condit are the three guys who will always be sort of forgotten by modern fans who deserve their just due.

------------------------

1- Georges St. Pierre Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 6-0 Record in title fights- 6-0 Record against other fighters on the list- 2-0

So in hindsight, GSP's resume is not exactly all that hot. Dan Hardy, Jake Shields and Josh Koscheck all pretty much faded out of relevancy shortly after their title fights although GSP probably ended Koscheck's career. GSP's record is a mere 6-0 and he pretty much sat out the Woodley/Lawler/Hendricks era of MMA minus a cameo to claim the UFC's middleweight crown. Ignore that part of his resume and instead remember that GSP tore his ACL on TWO separate occasions and there were genuine questions about his ability to come back and fight. Not only did he come back but he came back with basically the same style that made him a legend slightly tweaked and amplified to overcome his lack of explosiveness. GSP will always be viewed differently because he didn't finish fights but again, he was pretty much cooked physically well into his early 30s due to repeated knee injuries. What's more? GSP should be #1 overall if only because he is one of the few guys in MMA who was able to continually dictate his own terms. He was able to pick who he fought because for years he fought EVERYBODY there was to fight. He was able to choose where he fought because he was the UFC's biggest draw before the rise of Conor McGregor. He beat Hendricks in a close fight, realized his health took priority and retired. He started a media war with the UFC and won that too. Then he returns, coaxes the UFC into giving him a middleweight title fight, wins that and then realizes that he doesn't have to fight anymore against what was at the time a rising crop of genuinely bad ass middleweight contenders like Robert Whittaker, Yoel Romero and the likes of Weidman, Jacare, Gastelum, Rockhold and so on so forth. GSP got in, got titles, got paid and then got out when the situation didn't seem right to him. That's #1 shit.

2- Tyron Woodley Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 9-3-1 Record in title fights- 4-1-1 Record against other fighters on the list- 4-2-1

To quote the always esteemed "Tyron Woodley is just going to continue to piss people off." Woodley's UFC reign began with him bombing out Jay Heiron on short notice and then he followed that up by smelting Jay Heiron and then sort of stumbled over his feet to the tune of a 2-2 record. After his loss to Rory MacDonald in June of 2014, Woodley went on one of the welterweight divisions more impressive tears with wins over Dong Hyun Kim, Robbie Lawler, Stephen Thompson and Darren Till to name a few. Woodley's fights were either really great (Thompson I, Till) or really awful  (Thompson II, Gastelum) with very little in between space. His 4-1-1 record in title fights and 4-2-1 record against competition on this ledger paint the picture of one of MMA's best neutralizers and one of the greatest resumes of the 2010s. Woodley's 2019 pretty much hit the skids as he lost to Kamaru Usman in a blow out and then pretty much disappeared with hand and shoulder issues. Woodley's probably approaching the back 9 of his career but I would be stunned if he wasn't in the top 3 welterweights all time even when the NEXT decade ended. All hail MMA's greatest nuisance.

3-  Robbie Lawler Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 9-5 Record in title fights- 3-2 Record against other fighters on the list- 4-2

I remain a sentimentalist I suppose. The latter days of the Lawler era are painful in large part because years of wars and a style that willingly sacrificed rounds 2 to 4 finally caught up with Robbie Lawler. He just sort of fell apart which isn't too surprising since from December 2013 to Jan 2016 he fought NINE times with FIVE of those fights going a full five rounds. From that period of time Lawler has  win over Rory MacDonald (twice), Carlos Condit, Jake Ellenberger, Matt Brown, Johny Hendricks with FOUR fight of the nights and FOUR UFC title fights. Robbie Lawler spoiled us to believe welterweight fights were always awesome because every fight he was in WAS awesome. The latter era of Lawler is pretty sad. Woodley beat IMO the last image of a prime Robbie Lawler but after that I think it's fair to say the fire was gone. He probably deserved to lose to Donald Cerrone as well if we're being honest. The one brief flicker of light was against Ben Asken in a fight I thought he won prior to Askren pulling out a sub in a rally come from behind 1st round "win" dare I say. Lawler has had a lot of injuries, a lot of inactivity (he fought the same number of fights in 2014 alone than he has since the start of 2017) and sometimes the magic just runs out.

4- Kamaru Usman Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 11-0 Record in title fights- 2-0 Record against other fighters on the list- 2-0

Next to Wonderboy vs Rory MacDonald, Lawler vs Usman was a tremendous struggle for me. Kamaru Usman's steadier and had more of a balance to his career. Even if he had slipped up once or twice prior to this, Usman's overall dominance is stupendous. Wins over RDA and a bunch of good welterweights like Leon Edwards, Sergio Moraes and Colby Covington are good enough to get you on the list but getting into the top 5 requires you to scalp Tyron Woodley in a blowout. Usman's here because for most of the early portions of his UFC career, he was borderline brutal to watch and his competition was pretty blegh/eh/meh. Usman's rise really took off in after the Emil Meek fight and the Woodley/Covington back to back performances vaulted him up the rankings big time. The fun part with Usman is seeing how high he'll go when this list is re-done in 2030 or so. By the time we hit 2022 or so, Usman could have wins over Masvidal, Edwards (again), Covington (again) and potentially a whole new banner crop of welters.

5- Stephen Thompson Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 10-4-1 Record in title fights- 0-1-1 Record against other fighters on the list- 3-1-1

If we decided to rank these dudes in order of politeness, Thompson and Maia would be fighting for the #1 spot. Sometimes I wonder if Wonderboy is forgotten when we discuss the best UFC fighters to never win a title. On this list alone, he beat Johny Hendricks, Jorge Masvidal and Rory MacDonald. He gave two tough title fights to Tyron Woodley while holding the title of having arguably the biggest disparity in title fight quality in said title fights. He'll probably never live down getting smelted by a pudgy lightweight in Anthony Pettis and that alone could've been enough to knock him down the charts I suppose. I wonder how the WW division would've changed if Wonderboy arrives in, say, 2010 or so as opposed to 2012. He's just never had the gear to go out and take a tough fight away from the other guy which is why he lost twice to Woodley and suffered that kind of brutal decision loss to Darren Till.

6- Rory MacDonald Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 9-4 Record in title fights- 0-1 Record against other fighters on the list- 2-4

Rory entered the UFC in 2010 and was gone before 2016 was over. In six years, he has one of MMA's most impressive resumes with a whose who of fights against the elite of the elites. He fought Robbie Lawler twice, Carlos Condit, Demian Maia, Stephen Thompson, BJ Penn, Jake Ellenberger and Tyron Woodley and that's all without looking it up. He'll always be defined by the war vs Robbie Lawler that basically broke him beyond repair. Rory may not be a top 3 WW but of the ten names on this list, he's arguably among the more culturally significant to the MMA landscape. Rory is without question one of the best welterweights of his era and I also think he's one of the few dudes who did it while almost certainly without steroids. My hat is off to him.

7- Demian Maia Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 12-5 Record in title fights- 0-1 Record against other fighters on the list- 2-3

So when I originally did this list, I had Demian Maia MUCH higher up. Like above Rory higher. Maia being ranked above Rory Mac sounds like a bit of a crock given how MacDonald beat Maia BUT I'm also accounting for long term career relevance in a sense. Maia's still having competitive fights at WW (pause on that Burns fight) and beating up on dudes sometimes 15 years younger than him while Rory is 3-2-1 since leaving the UFC and 3-4-1 since 2015 ended. That said when you factor in the Woodley performances for each guy plus Rory's prime being so magnetic (and the win in the H-2-H matchup, I made a switch). When you consider how utterly one dimension Demian Maia is, it's a testament to how insane that dimension is that he's up this high.  Maia has wins over list guys Carlos Condit, Jorge Masvidal and relatively dominant performances over dudes you'd recognize like Ben Askren, Lyman Good, Neil Magny, Gunnar Nelson and then undefeated Ryan LaFlare. His losses are to genuinely legitimately awesome fighters like Rory MacDonald, Kamaru Usman and Tyron Woodley.

8- Johny Hendricks Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 10-6 Record in title fights- 1-2 Record against other fighters on the list- 2-3

Hendricks is another dude who had an unceremonious ending to his career. From 2011 to 2015, he was genuinely at worst #3 in the welterweight rankings. We're talking a resume loaded with guys like Josh Koscheck, Carlos Condit, Martin Kapmann, John Fitch, Matt Brown, GSP and Robbie Lawler all on the docket. I went back and watched Hendricks vs GSP for this and still come away thinking Johny got jobbed. Hendricks' career will always be filled with question marks and what if's. We'll never know whether he was on steroids and we'll never know what would've happened if Hendricks would've kept himself in shape more consistently to avoid the ballooning up that eventually fucked his body up.  We'll never know if he would've beaten GSP in a rematch or how he would've done had the rumored Nick Diaz vs Johny Hendricks fight that was in talks for 2015 (the one which led to Anderson vs Nick Diaz) would've panned out. Hendricks is a what if but the fact he is a what if while also being a top 10 welterweight for a loaded decade of great fighters is a damn testament to how big of a whirlwind he was for the beginning of the decade.  

9- Jorge Masvidal Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 7-5 Record in title fights- 0-0 Record against other fighters on the list- 0-2

Jorge Masvidal makes it onto the list primarily due to his run on the back half of the 2010s. Regardless of how you feel about Darren Till, Nate Diaz and Ben Askren, those are three of the most impressive wins of 2019. He was in the running for 2019's FOTY (I believe he WAS my pick) and is having a seriously impressive second half of his career. Even his losses are all in pretty damn close fights minus Wonderboy who just casually pieced him up. The reason he's so low is that the two guys on this list that he fought, he lost to. Masvidal historically has been a guy who can feast on the lower portions of (insert division/rankings here) but when it comes to the step up, he never actually takes the next step in fights he can CLEARLY win. If he ever fights Kamaru Usman, he could move up higher on the list and if he wins then we need to talk about Masvidal as having a Bisping-esque career resume.

10- Carlos Condit Record in the 10s (Jan 1st 2010 to December 31st 2019)- 6-8 Record in title fights- 1-2 Record against other fighters on the list- 1-5

If Carlos Condit had simply retired like he planned to after the Maia loss, he would've retired 6-5 with wins over the likes of Rory MacDonald, Nick Diaz and Martin Kampmann from 2010 to 2019. Instead his resume was littered with rough losses in three straight fights against substandard competition. Carlos Condit's run from 2011 to 2013 is stuff of legend but the tide clearly turned after tearing his ACL vs Tyron Woodley. He had one big turning back the clock performance vs Robbie Lawler in a fight I still to this day feel like he won. Condit's body and lack of significant pop in his hands just put the ceiling on his career. Condit's back 9 of the 2010s are ugly but on the front leg, he was the first dude to beat DHK, the first to beat Rory MacDonald, beat Nick Diaz, gave GSP his toughest fight in years and IMO beat Johny Hendricks. Also come on now dudes. If you think Condit wasn't on this list somehow then you don't know me.