When did the "new era" tricks start?

General Yo-Yo
1

I know I may not be the greatest explainer and disector of tricks so give some slack on this. :slight_smile:

I was noticing some destinctive “new era” type of play through many players over the last year or so. Players who are doing sort of trick concepts that may not have specific classifications, but are no doubt very different than what I feel I was used to seeing say 2 years ago. But its not necessarily that its “improvement” (e.G. tricks from 2001 becoming the tricks of 2008.) But a sort of different kind of play that certain 1a players are taking on.

As I said I’m not the best describer of these things, but I will list some examples. Case in point: Compare some very well respected players. There is a very distinct difference in the tricks that say Zach Gormley, Takeshi Mattsura, Lazar Mendenev, Ondra Dolejz, and Toru Miyazaki are doing compared to players such as Yusuke Otsuka, Shinya Kido, Gentry Stein, and Harold Owens are doing. I feel the forementioned players have taken 1a into a sort of alternate substyle of 1a in a sense when I compare the trick style of theirs to the latter mentioned players.

It is hard for me to exactly pinpoint what it is exactly that makes the “new era” tricks I see that classification, but there is a very distinct difference to me I see with my eyes.
Perhaps it’s the focus on higher complexity and slack, or maybe it’s just unclassifiable elements, but there is clearly a reason why the players I mention can be put together as a sub style in my eyes.

My question then is actually two questions I suppose. Do you feel that the players I mentioned have a sort of substyle? And also, when did you notice that sort of play coming Into the light?

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I don’t see complexity as a defining factor in this situation, but definitely agree that a lot of it has to do with how classifiable new moves can be. This is likely just due to saturation and time, as anything that sticks to the wall is going to be defined either formally or informally at some point.

I also don’t think that just because a player works a 1a yoyo in a drastically different manner than another, that it’s a different substyle. The variable here is the player’s creative endeavor; it’s all the same yoyo style until the hardware changes, as I understand it. Perhaps there’s worth in defining /yoyo/ style vs. /play/ style for trick theory discussions.

I’m in the process of incubating a dramatic redesign of my 1a play. It refuses nearly all the normal conventions of 1a, but never I considered it anything other than 1a because the /medium/ I’m interacting with is the same. There’s an artistic argument to be made here.

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around the same time low wall gained popularity

1 Like
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Im not sure if that was the case though? it seems that the low wall came about around 2008-09 to what I could see, whereas I feel personally that the sort of tricks I am speaking about didn’t come about til a few years after that.

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The last wyyc won with the classical style was like 2009, and after that stuff like yyf metal and yyr took off then just 1 year later the trick concepts are already almost indistinguishable from those today

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So you mean current “era”…