Survivor Series 2015 thread

[goc]

Slasher's post is pretty spot on. Everyone on the roster has gotten the stop-start treatment even Roman Reigns. Owens just seemed worse because he started all the way at the top but after debuting in a feud with Cena where do you really go? The only way he goes "up" from there is winning the WWE title which I don't think should have been considered a realistic expectation.

[supremebve]

I don't really think that Owens' place on the card is a problem. The problem is that they do not give people in that upper mid card spot anything interesting to do. Owens should be in a hot feud with another upper mid card wrestler, but they treat the intercontinental championship like a prop instead of a coveted title. It isn't enough that he is just carrying around a belt, that belt needs to be the proverbial bullseye on his back and other wrestlers need to want it. It doesn't matter if he's fat, skinny, muscular, or anything else, if there is no reason to care about anything he does.

[cm funk]

 

I have no problem with fat wrestlers as long they can work well, so even if Owens is a fat guy, obviously he can still go so it isn't really the hinderance those people think is.

In some ways, I think his work style is a hinderance, when you're in a company which is as ludicrously obsessed with certain types of people having certain types of bodies as the WWE is. Owens's problem with the office (and everyone who's been trained to parrot the office's views) is that he's a workrate guy with a fat tummy. They don't know how to process that in the WWE, they never have. Think of all the years that they'd bitch about Big Show and Mark Henry being too fat; when did that complaining finally stop? When those guys gained even more weight and changed their styles from "surprisingly athletic big guy" to "slow plodding monster who just kills people and doesn't sell much". WWE is fine with fat monsters (think Bray Wyatt), they always have been; they're not fine with fat guys who are supposed to be top-shelf athletes (think Braden Walker or latter-day Matt Hardy).

 

Management doesn't think of Owens in terms of guys like King Kong Bundy or Yokozuna; he's an indy workrate guy. He gets compared to Cesaro, to Bryan, maybe even to his possibly-poor-word-choice namesake Owen Hart. And Vince & Co. are utterly flabbergasted at the very idea of a fat guy who does workrate sprints and lots of MOVEZ. They don't like it, they assume nobody else likes it and that such a performer couldn't possibly be an effective draw. Their idea of an effective fat worker is a big mean guy who mostly squashes smaller performers and maybe takes one big bump at the end of the match for token selling purposes. Vince and his yesmen have always insisted that athletes must have those toned muscular bodies, or else nobody in the crowd could possibly believe that they can win a fake fight.

 

 

Bray Wyatt is a fat monster? You lost me there. Bray Wyatt works a hard hitting fast paced athletic style generally. He is so not a plodding "fat monster"....nor should he be, because he's not that big, and he's very athletic and agile for his size

 

I like Bray Wyatt as a bell to bell wrestler more than I do Owens. Is that a controversial opinion? I don't think Owens could have as good a match as Wyatt and Bryan had at the Rumble in '14. Wyatt's gimmick and character overshadow how damn good he can be as a wrestler.

 

And I like Owens, don't get me wrong, but I'm already getting sick of his "indy-riffic" video game matches where you can see the spots coming a mile away. Same with Ambrose, who I really like too, but has fallen into the same trap. It's an easy trap to fall into in WWE. I'd be happy to never see another rebound clothesline from Ambrose or Corner Cannonball/Senton/Pop-Up Powerbomb from Owens for a long time. They're the signature spots that they work into almost every match and it's rarely creative or natural when you as the viewer at home see it coming a mile away. But hey, gotta get the moves over for the kids that buy videogames I guess, and pop the crowd

[pol]

I was surprised at the praise for the main event on the podcast. To me it seemed like 2 minutes of back and forth followed by 7 minutes of near falls, and was a sign that the agents have no clue how to lay out a compelling but short main event match.

[Jingus]

Bray Wyatt is a fat monster? You lost me there. Bray Wyatt works a hard hitting fast paced athletic style generally. He is so not a plodding "fat monster"....nor should he be, because he's not that big, and he's very athletic and agile for his size

 

I like Bray Wyatt as a bell to bell wrestler more than I do Owens. Is that a controversial opinion? I don't think Owens could have as good a match as Wyatt and Bryan had at the Rumble in '14. Wyatt's gimmick and character overshadow how damn good he can be as a wrestler.

You answered your own point: his gimmick and character overshadow his work. He's a guy who plays a demented hillbilly (and Vince has never had problems stuffing his rings full of fat hillbilly gimmicks over the years) who spends lots of time on promos and vignettes and stopping matches dead in their tracks to do creepy spider-walking spots; and he is also a cult leader who makes his henchmen do the majority of the work. All that extraneous stuff takes the focus off his actual wrestling in the matches. He's not a guy whose entire persona is based on "I bring it in the squared circle when they ring the bell!", which Owens is to a large extent.