The Man in Blak

Doesn't Seth Rollins come out of this looking better? He's the new WWE Champion, he's the first guy to cash in MITB at Wrestlemania (and in the main event, no less!), and all of his character motivations for breaking up the Shield are paid off in full. He has reams of material to fuel his chickenshit heel act for months or even years, if they play it right. Rollins has never wowed me as a heel -- I think his actual performance has been less of a factor in his success than the super careful booking and presentation of his character (such as the addition of J&J security) -- but he is unquestionably in a better place than he was six months ago.

The Lesnar signing does makes the possibility of a Reigns/Lesnar double-turn seem awfully enticing, but I think it's just as likely that Reigns goes over clean, leading to a Rollins cash-in with the Authority's help that ends up drawing out Orton and, eventually, Rock for the save. On paper, Rock and a victorious Reigns at the closing moments of Wrestlemania serves as a call back to what they intended to be Reigns' big moment at the Rumble, as well as a sort-of blowoff for the break-up of the Shield. I'd say that Triple H wins over Sting in some sort of screwy finish, so that the feud can (sadly) continue. Cena goes over Rusev. Undertaker goes over Bray Wyatt, though I'm hoping for some sort of Wyatt Family reunion for a post-match beatdown. Bryan wins the ladder match. Rollins sneaks away with a cheap win against Orton. The Bellas win the Divas tag, as Paige makes like Rick Martel and leaves AJ mid-match. I think Sheamus does end up winning the Andre battle royale, even with it being moved to the pre-show. K-Swiss retains the tag titles.

Sure, that's totally what's being said here. Keller was criticizing Stephanie, not the WWE as a whole. Of course, he could have also (rightfully) pointed out that Stephanie's comments aren't doing Bryan -- or any other employees that are actually doing the hard work when WWE participates in charities -- any favors. Eh, I agree to a point. Wade's not immune to coming across as sanctimonious so, even if he wasn't offended, I could understand how someone could take that away from his response here. I mean, my gosh, his jaw dropped when he read that tweet.

Moving over from the WWE thread: I think it's less about the tweet itself -- which Keller himself said later was gauche (and it is), but hardly news for corporations -- and more about the time and place of it. Stephanie is out, front and center, on Twitter all the time with their charity work, so a tweeting a comment like that out on the same account/presence makes her look disingenuous. And on the same day that they're doing an honorary induction for Connor? Yes, I think Wade is occasionally a little too eager to grind an axe over WWE's "corporate citizenship," but I think there's a legitimate criticism here. It doesn't really work as marketing, though, when a company explicitly calls it out as a successful strategy for (ugh) #brand management.

EDIT: Moving my response to the Keller thread.

I'm pretty much in the same place, except that I'm not even interested enough to watch the car crash happen in real-time - I think I voted "low enthusiasm" before, but I'm a definite "not watch" now. I feel like all of the interesting questions about Wrestlemania actually have nothing to do with the presented storylines or the in-ring matchups, so I don't feel like I'm missing anything by not watching and by rubbernecking via the ongoing PPV chatter here and elsewhere.

Like I said, I'm not holding my breath. I'm not going to watch Wrestlemania anyway and they've killed my interest in the product so thoroughly that I haven't really been actively watching for almost half a year now, so the cancellation itself is probably long overdue. But, other than an email that probably require a miracle or some form of blood sacrifice to be read by an actual human being, cancelling is the most direct line of feedback to WWE that I've got, so I'm taking it whether it's ultimately futile or not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I ended up cancelling my WWE Network subscription today, exactly one year to the day after I picked it up to watch Wrestlemania 30. I specifically waited to cancel on the heels of Raw in hopes that it might send up some sort of red flag in their metrics, but I'm not holding my breath. Either way, I don't feel like it's hyperbole to say that this has been a historically bad Wrestlemania build. He did have a mostly clean victory over Daniel Bryan (in Bryan's first match on Raw since the injury!) in the go-home Raw before the Rumble, so there's that.

Cena/Rusev didn't do anything for me, but I should probably start dishing out some disclaimers. I don't like Rusev's gimmick at all and, by and large, I haven't been as impressed with his work as everybody else here, though he has improved since he was called up. I thought the Swagger matches, in particular, made him look like a cartoon with his goofy over-the-top selling of the ankle (but not so much selling that he still couldn't do that stomp before the Accolade!). Rusev/Sheamus was a very good match, though. (Not MOTYC good for me, but very good nonetheless.) And Rusev/Ryback was solid for a TV match, though I think Ryback did a lot of the heavy lifting there. A lot of my problems with Cena/Rusev are probably more attributable to Cena than Rusev, though. In the Greatest Wrestler Ever nomination thread for Steve Austin, someone pointed out that Austin's "clumsiness" (for lack of a better descriptor) actually enhanced both his selling and the grittiness of his matches by making them feel more haphazard and chaotic; John Cena is the total opposite for me. Everything feels anticipated and mechanical, from the spot calling to the way that he runs the ropes. It makes a lot of his ground-level work in a match feel "performed" in the worst possible way for me, even if the surrounding structure of the match is telling a good story. Cena seems to work around this by giving away a fair amount of his matches and, in this case, Rusev did a decent enough job with the space he was given. But the narrative of John Cena's Will To Win Against An Overpowering Monster really isn't a new one and it's especially hollow when you still have his matches against Lesnar still in the rear-view mirror. Even with Rusev winning and Cena managing to deliver some nice offense -- the tornado DDT and the counter into the crossface were highlights -- the match still couldn't shake the tired narrative or Cena's awkwardness for me as a viewer. In a way, I guess I could say that I thought Rusev/Cena was one of Rusev's better worked matches (though still not as good as the US Title win), but the ultimate end result of the match itself was underwhelming. And I blame the booking and (in a recurring theme) the agent/producer more than Rusev for that.

Were those "CO-DY, CO-DY" chants being piped into the arena? That sounded awful. Dreadful match with Swagger too, capped by one of my least favorite tropes in Modern WWE: the entrance music distraction finish. This is getting shunted into the pre-show, right?

I need to watch the main again because that finish (GREAT in theory and in isolation, sorta anticlimactic in the larger context of the match) totally soured my impression of it. Bryan deserved much better than what he got from the layout (why kill the running knee?) and the near-burial on commentary.

I'm trailing behind the stream a little bit, but the only part of this PPV I've enjoyed was Cody's post-match beatdown and even that came on the heels of the worst match of the night. Yeah, the crowd really sensed how phony he was when they were swaying along with him while he was singing "he's got the whole world in his hands" during the Cena match at Wreslemania.

That's certainly possible, though the Shield/Evolution matches moved along at a decent clip. Even the Payback match, which was an elimination tag match, just barely crossed thirty minutes.

I'm willing to believe that 2014 Triple H (such as the Daniel Bryan match) has different ideas than 2004 Triple H about what makes a good wrestling match. Ten years is a long time. I'm not as convinced, however, that NXT is really an accurate picture of what Triple H wants to do with the WWE product at-large because, as he explained in the Stone Cold Podcast interview, NXT is serving a different audience with different stakes. He very clearly framed NXT as an alternative to WWE, rather than his vision for WWE going forward. I'm also not ready to accept the idea that Triple H has moved on from being a politician - judging by all of the backstage stuff that we hear about Triple H and Kevin Dunn, it seems just as likely to me that Triple H has just refocused his political efforts on creative/production staff, rather than on-screen talent (which, to be frank, isn't really his competition any more).

Yeah, this interview left me cold. The usual corporate bromides ("everybody works hard here") and the disingenuous skating around the questions surrounding Chyna and Punk left me feeling like Triple H isn't quite as heroic as he's often portrayed in his power/political struggle with Dunn.

The thing that really bothers me about the Ziggler/Harper ladder match is neither of the two standout spots -- Harper's suicide dive into the ladder and Harper's middle rope slingshot with the ladder -- make much sense in the match. The dive into the ladder is particularly egregious; Ziggler already has the ladder up before Harper even starts running! It's still a fun ladder match with some brutal moments being dished out by Harper, but it just doesn't have any flow between those moments for me, which further isolates the highspots in my mind and makes the "fridge logic" behind the suicide dive and the slingshot stick out even more.

Last night's Raw was the first Raw I've watched in months. I don't feel like I missed much at all. The Bryan/Wyatt match had a couple of nice moments and it's great to see Bryan back out there, I guess, but the rest of the show seems mired in the same creative slump that they've been in since the Shield breakup (or, really, since the first Raw after Wrestlemania). Nice to see that Shawn Michaels is still as obnoxious as ever, though.

I always read that as being a critical part of his character, though. Bray Wyatt's a cult leader, a snake oil salesman whose insincerity becomes part of his charm. His shifty, nonsensical rants SHOULD leap off the page. He didn't have to be a supernatural phenom like the Undertaker to lead the family; he just had to portray himself as one, which is where I think the writing team lost their way. They overplayed their hand and went from subtle (and consistently well-produced) touches to his vignettes and his ring entrance to corny, over-the-top displays of "supernatural power," like the historically awful finishes at Extreme Rules and Hell in a Cell. They had a kernel of an idea with the Jericho feud -- playing up the whole "Save Us" element of Jericho's character as a contrast to Wyatt -- but they failed to develop or build to anything beyond that, inside the ring and out. So, yeah, when your character is primarily grounded in theatrics and your creative team continually screws that up, then sure, he's going to be "exposed." In a way, I feel like pairing him with Ambrose is sort of a concession that they have no idea what to do with either guy for the moment. Ambrose's character seems to be suffering in a similar way - like Wyatt, they've taken one element that made him distinctive (the "unhinged" mannerisms) and they've severely overplayed it. Even though both characters were two of my favorites earlier in the year, I can't muster up a lot of enthusiasm for this program.

I went ahead and re-upped for another six months, even though my interest in the current WWE product is virtually non-existent at this point. The Nitros were the big hook for me, since I totally missed out on the first year or so of these back in the day. I'm still holding out hope that we'll get some of the Saturday Nights and the other satellite shows as well but, for now, going through the Nitros has been a blast. The "anti-heel" booking for Luger, in particular, has been really interesting to watch percolate through 1995.

I'm guessing he was planning on being back maybe? That or he knew he was quitting and they wanted the Horsemen to get extra heat. IIRC Disco jobbed to Paul right before the promo. I can confirm that this is true, thanks to the Nitro episodes that have been uploaded to the Network. Orndorff beats Disco in the match, complete with one last boogie-woogie elbow for the road, then they immediately follow-up the match with the Horseman promo and beatdown. The idea behind the segment has some problems to begin with, as it tries to establish Flair and Anderson as a dangerous heel threat to Hogan and Sting for the main event, even though they're in Charlotte and in Horseman country. Benoit being absent here doesn't help either, especially since he's the newest member. But Pillman, who was still feeling out what would eventually become his Loose Cannon persona, would make a bad idea worse with his rambling turn at the microphone Calling out Hogan's walk on the dark side to emphasize that the Horsemen are the real bad guys makes sense, but taking shots at the American Males and current-broadcaster Steve McMichael seemed beneath the Horseman, even in their reduced state at this point. If Pillman wanted an excuse to call out Orndorff for the segment, he didn't need to take an extended tour through the undercard; he could have just called out the guy that was in the ring right before that interview and left it at that. Naturally, all their intentions here go nowhere, as the crowd turns on Hogan anyway once the main event rolls around.

I've still got to catch up with a lot of Cena's run but, from what I've seen of him this year, I actually have the exact opposite impression of him. I feel like he adds very little to his matches, primarily because he's so loose and downright awkward with a lot of his moves, but his promo work is what sets him apart. Now, to be fair, I don't dispute that the content in a lot of his promos is lousy Rock-lite stuff, but I attribute that more to the creative team than Cena. If Cena has more sway over what he's saying, then I agree that he deserves some criticism. But, in terms of sheer delivery, the only other in-ring performer right now that comes across better on the stick than Cena for me would be Bray Wyatt.

I feel like calling the Monday Night War series a hagiography doesn't even do it justice. This is straight up propaganda. What a disappointment. "History is written by the victors," indeed.

Finally caught up to last night's Raw on DVR...and I really wish I hadn't. Setting up a "Hall of Fame forum," just for the express purpose of talking about how John Cena has no chance at all in a rematch against Lesnar? (And a rematch that seems to have an alarming lack of heat, I might add.) Rusev literally stomping Swagger into defeat while occasionally deciding to sell that pesky ankle injury? Rollins turning what should have been a home run heel promo on Ambrose into a heatless "WHAT"-fest until Reigns showed up? Goldust and Stardust turning heel, after months of rebuilding them as a face tag team, because the idea of a face vs. face tag match is terrifying to WWE creative? (And to little, if any, response?) The Bella Twins having a Razzie-worthy segment with a truly dreadful "I wish you died in the womb" stinger from Nikki as the climax? Feeding Bray Wyatt to John Cena in a squash-lite that was deliberately laid out to mimic the Cena/Lesnar fight, all while Harper and Rowan just frittered around on the outside, waiting for their cue? And then follow that with an impromptu six man tag where Cena effectively destroys the Wyatt Family on a hot tag for the finish? Even with Brock Lesnar's fantastic pre-taped promo and the five-minute Miz/Sandow alliance, that was a candidate for the worst Raw of the year because the bad segments were REALLY bad. It's absolutely the worst Raw I can recall watching since I've started following the business again.

I agree with you that the booking did them no favors. And I strongly agree with you on Reigns in general; this was a test to see if he had "another gear" for a high profile singles match and, regardless of who was ultimately in the driver's seat, he didn't pass. That said, I don't think the issue for Orton is the amount of offense he had, as much as the quality of it. If he had completely emptied out the bag of tricks instead of settling for chinlocks (plural) and standing around, they could have established a narrative for Reigns being incredibly tough: "he took everything Orton could dish out." But grinding things to a halt with restholds made it feel like a mediocre TV match, like they were trying to work around commercial breaks that weren't there.

Yes, Cena was probably quite foolish to take those brutal German suplexes with his neck history. That's what made this match work, though; they basically laid it out like a shoot fight, with some theatrics in the middle. And, in a shoot fight, why wouldn't Lesnar try to blow up Cena's bad neck with a dozen German suplexes?