Alright, let’s have a little bit of a moan. Honestly, I’ve tried to avoid skewing negative against WWE since I started doing lists again.
Lists of the worst things in wrestling are fun, they’re fun to write, typing the word bad into thesaurus.com and getting creative with ways to talk about what is essentially silly entertainment, but I’ve to avoid overtly coming after Vince’s Brigade of sweaty charades.
But honestly, right now, man it’s hard to avoid how dumb it feels to follow modern WWE. The fact that fans have been back for a little bit and some of WWE’s worst habits have intensified rather than relaxed, it gets proper dispiriting after a while and if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to dedicate one full list into trying to examine what these habits are, and how all those roads lead to one thing, WWE not really giving a hairless monkey ass about wrestling fans.
Fans have their own bad habits, but I honestly believe, at the end of the day, we want to enjoy wrestling. We want to be able to sit and watch a show without the constant specter of questionable decisions constantly needling and forcing us to examine, why, why do we still… care?
Because at this point, I’m not sure that I’ve always got an answer. And it goes beyond simple stuff like ‘I don’t like the doll’ and I don’t like the doll, but it’s more than that, and I’ll try to explain why.
I’m Adam from partsFUNknown and here are the 10 Biggest Ways WWE Disrespects Its Fans.
10. F**k Tag Team Wrestling
I’m really going to try and make this list purely about WWE and not spend the whole thing comparing them to other promotions, but for this first one, you can’t not bring up AEW, but hey those guys have their own problems, but they seem to understand one thing, tag team wrestling is fun.
Team psychology, creative tag cheating, the hot tags, the double teams, the fact that tag wrestling has structured moments for stars to rest, meaning the overall workrate’s a bit higher.
I do not understand why WWE seems so dead set against denying its fans the simple pleasure of good tag wrestling, with its myopic obsession of creating short-term moments by imploding all of its goddamn teams, rather than letting them have an actual division.
The Revival split, The Good Brothers got released, The Hurt Business broke up, Heavy Machinery imploded, each brand has what… two, three teams at most?
It’s baffling that WWE had so many people on their roster, and five hours to fill each week that they weren’t swelling their tag roster with teams, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s so disheartening for tag wrestling fans to see a vital part of wrestling essentially shrivel up and drop off like a c**k in a blizzard.
9. Manipulating Crowd Noise
Well, this is an easy one to unpack, isn’t it? Tell us what you want, says WWE, you’re the authority now. “We want Bray Wyatt,” fans say, “ssh,” says WWE, just turning down the crowd mic. Ssssh.
WWE has been doing it for years, where they think they can get away with it, muting the crowd’s boos at WrestleMania 32, even piping in crowd noise on recent SmackDowns. I mean, Jesus, WWE, just go back to the Thunderdome if that’s how you feel.
Must have been a dream for them, telling them when to gesture, when to move, like meat sacks covered into electrodes, occasionally shock into animation, while WWE pipes in favorable crowd noise over unfavorable Jackson Ryker.
Nothing says “WWE would much rather a world where the crowd can’t express themselves”, than literally turning them down when they go off-message, which leads us to the age-old problem.
8. We Choose Who You Like
It’s something that’s been talked about to death, the fact that when Vince used to take to the mic to scream at the crowd, ostensibly in character, “you like what I tell you to like” that it’s the biggest shoot in company history.
It’ll be an easier point to leave behind if the fans hadn’t been recently vindicated a whole bunch of times, with the oft-requested Heel Roman Reigns, Main Event Cesaro, Main Event Becky Lynch being, y’know, great.
Getting those things felt like a struggle, but at least we got ‘em, but it still feels like we’re having people’s value dictated to us, rather than the other way around.
The lower midcard runs of Shayna Baszler (a UFC fighter so dumb she can’t outsmart a puppet), Keith Lee being repackaged to oblivion because of percieved problems that he didn’t have, the sexy goddamn mountain, the Karrion Kross stuff, I’m not saying the fans should get to book the show, but it’s maddening to see someone get over with the crowd, and then have that reaction ignored because it doesn’t gel with how certain stars are viewed backstage. And hey, speaking of…
7. WWE vs. NXT
Sigh. Where do you… how do you even start?
How do you even try to explain to someone who doesn’t watch WWE that there is a branch of WWE that everyone really likes, or at the very least liked, that constantly receives heaps of praise from fans and industry alike, and WWE has decided to reshape it based on decades old standards of populating it with the credo “no more midgets”.
WWE already had a dicey relationship with the black and yellow brand, pinning its champion in less than two minutes with a veteran painted like a psychedelic frog, whacking paper plates on a bunch of their stars and giving them names out of the Black and Decker catalogue, or ridiculing The Ascension for weeks for a fleeting nostalgia segment populated by confused grandpas.
We accepted that, almost as the yin to NXT’s yang, that WWE needed to balance out the quality somehow, but now it appears that WWE is aiming to rip out the very heart, the high workrate low stature heart, the blackheart and all heart no soul, rip that out of everyone’s favourite bit about WWE wrestling, and replacing it with more land of the giants bulls**t.
It’s not the past WWE, it’s not then, it’s now, but judging from recent reports, not forever.
6. All Hail The Legends
Goldberg is wrestling for the WWE Championship at SummerSlam, and look he’s not going to win, or at least, if this goes out and he won yesterday, then it doesn’t matter because you won’t be watching this, you’ll be too busy picking up shards of TV from your carpet, but how is he still a thing in 2021.
How is Jeff Hardy beating undefeated behemoths and expecting no one to care because he came out to his song from 12 years ago.
And hey, maybe WWE doesn’t really have much of a choice, maybe it does need to bring back The Rock and John Cena and Goldberg and the things we remember because without them the current starpower of its roster isn’t enough to make the Big Four feel like Big Four shows, but just look back at 1998 to 2001, wrestling’s hottest boom period, all of the Big Four shows main evented by current talent that were there every single week.
Doesn’t it just make the rest of us feel like chumps for watching every week where really WWE are telling us that the only weeks that matter each year are the few weeks leading up to the big shows when Taker might have come back or Brock, or anyone else who sticks their head in the door for WWE’s version of sweeps, rather than the roster they have, or should I say… had.
5. Endless Releases
It just makes me sad at this point. It’s been an endless conveyor of ‘who’s gone’, since WrestleMania and look, on one tiny level, I get it. WWE panic-bought all the wrestlers it could a few years ago, and didn’t have room to promote everyone, so some people drift away.
That I understand. Buddy Murphy, Malakai Black, The Iiconics, Andrade, Braun Strowman, Bray Wyatt, that I do not understand, and when people of that calibre can vanish into the wind, sometimes in the middle of a rebrand, how unsure for their jobs that must make 90% of the roster, really makes me f**king sad, especially when WWE is objectively not hurting for money, which makes all the spin of budget cuts even more insulting to the fans intelligence.
It doesn’t matter who we like at the end of the day, and for all of our pointless sound and fury, and this entire list is a load of pointless sound and fury, ultimately we can’t protect our favourite stars, which as the authority, you’d really think we’d have negotiated that as part of the deal.
But we can’t protect them, because we don’t always have the same values as WWE.
4. Wrestling Isn’t The Draw
It really doesn’t make any sense that WWE can have so much talent on its books but so few of them feel like stars, despite often being imported to WWE BECAUSE of their indie starpower.
Why is it, he asked pompously pretending to have any answers to the complex working of an entire corporation? Because wrestling isn’t the draw.
Like honestly, WWE should be the easiest thing in the world to book, take someone good, pit them against someone else that’s good, say to the crowd, oh man this is going to be good, heres where you can see them fight and here’s how much it costs and that’s the sell.
NXT do it, putting together those excellent hype packages, sit down interviews, doing their best to not give away the important thing, the match itself.
On the main roster, Rhea Ripley and Charlotte’s amazing talent for wrestling takes second fiddle to weird skits about crutches, challengers for midcard titles earn their shot by beating the champion, giving away the match they’re trying to sell.
Obviously storyline is a vital part of wrestling but WWE produces matches to get to certain story moments, not the other way around. And they hold so many matches.
3. Endless Rematches
This one’s not complicated. This has nothing to do with business psychology, the complexities of roster hierarchy, or the demands of casual fans. It’s as simple as stop wasting my f**king time.
Not enough happened to justify Big E and Apollo Crews wrestling each other 15 times in 2021. Or Randy Orton’s endless feud with Drew, or Andrade and Angel Garza’s endless series with the Street Profits.
You can absolutely have people wrestle each other over and over, if there’s story progression each time, Christian and Randy Orton in 2011 is proof of that.
Same with Jeff Hardy and CM Punk in 2009, or HBK and Jericho in 2008, but so often WWE just trots out the same matchups week after week after week, with the bare minimum of booking, grinding feuds into the dirt rather than developing them and just diminishing the audience’s desire to see these talented wrestlers through the sheer power of f**king tedium.
Wrestling should be the draw, but the same wrestling every week on free TV just flattens out the entire roster and, crucially, shows zero respect for the audience or why they should tune in next week.
Which brings me, Julie Andrews-styles, to one of my least favorite things
2. Non Finishes on Pay-Per-Views
Stop doing this you bastards. I am having a full moan this week, so let’s get it all out there. This is possibly my least favourite habit WWE has. The pay-per-view is a sacred place.
It is what we, as consumers, are spending our money to see. Non-finishes on TV, it’s not ideal all the time but I get it, protect the match, give us a reason to open our moth-infested wallets and shell out for SummerSlam, to see these two SETTLE THEIR DIFFERENCES, emphasis on SETTLE.
What WWE repeatedly does is cram their cards with cheap finishes, double count-outs, DQs, Hell in a Cell no contests, all to promote Raw, SmackDown and inevitably the next pay-per-view, not understanding the parable of the boy who cried wolf.
If you string out your fans, your PAYING fans, crucially, and expect the same level of emotional investment and anticipation after, I dunno, counting out your WWE Championship match because Randy couldn’t stop looking at Kofi’s kids, then you’re living in a f**king delusion. Especially when…
1. THE RULES DON’T MATTER
Rule consistency is crucial for WWE and they do not care about it and I DON’T KNOW WHY.
A consistent framework of rules creates a set of storytelling rules for you to play with, as well as shortening the gap of understanding between the presentation and the audience, so everyone’s on the same page, and everyone understands why the breaking of certain rules should make us angry, happy or whatever.
You know, not getting in the way of the audience and their emotions, stories, basically.
Instead we live in a world where people eliminated from the Rumble can’t eliminate current competitors, except when they do, refs are willing to let main events brawl on the outside, except when they don’t, tag matches are allowed to break down into skirmishes, except when they aren’t, hitting your opponent with a tiny bit of the announce table doesn’t draw a DQ, except when it does, and Hell in a Cell matches can’t end in no-contests, except when satan pisses directly in our brains.
Every single time WWE pulls this, it makes match engagement harder and honestly just comes across like “ah f**k em, they’re too dumb to remember the rules anyway” and hey I may be dumb, but I run a goddamn board game channel I can REMEMBER RULES.
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