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Wrestle Mania 32... Live As It Happens


goodhelmet

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That show was sort of a reminder to me that WWE will never really be what I'd love for it to be, no matter how talented their roster is. And I don't even say that to complain -- they had better things to do than try to craft a show to appeal to me. I'm just peacefully stepping away from it for the most part. It does more to cause me frustration than provide enjoyment. I had made peace with this once before, then Daniel Bryan came along and I got lured back in. He was an anomaly, not a signal of a better functioning WWE. And that's ok -- they drew 100K people last night and the people who complain the most vocally about their booking are the ones who fork over the most money. It's a model that's working even if there's no precedent for it. But as long as it's working, it's guaranteed fans looking for change will have no peace. It's just not for me. Someone call me when they are building around Samoa Joe and Sami Zayn as their top stars, promos aren't scripted verbatim, the announcers sound like real people, the heavy-handed, self-serving PR stops, fans cheer and boo in a way that's aligned with WWE's vision and the McMahon family aren't TV characters and maybe I'll reconsider.

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Okay as bad as Shane's MMA was I am still convinced he would beat the shit out of CM Punk.

 

Fuck AT&T stadium sideways as that was an incredibly horrible experience to get in the building. According to reports the ticket scanners were screwed up because the WiFi was really bad. missed entire pre show. Then get in about 20 mind before main show and it is complete chaos with fans pushing and shoving cause apparently there was problems getting on the floor. If you were claustrophobic you would thought you went to hell. At least the food was good in concessions

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I also agree with Loss's sentament. I had more or less stopped watching the main roster shows over the last 2-3 months. That is why I am not really mad about what I watched last night... I just to a point where it doesn't make sense to me. I would watch a hulu raw or smackdown here or there while I ate breakfast or cleaned or something and I did a little catching up this week to make sure I was up on all the "build" for this show, but I have more or less checked out. As a friend said to me a few years ago, "that wrestling isn't for me and there is plenty of wrestling that is". This isn't like an epiphany or even a change for me, I am just echoing that Loss's post resonates with how I generally approach the E.

 

I will still watch major shows and generally keep tabs on things because there is too much talent up there to just ignore. The E has also just taken too prominent a role in the wrestling landscape for me to completely check out. They have brilliantly positioned themselves and designed a product that I will probably continue to pay for despite not being very interested in new output and I am generally ok with that.

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Okay as bad as Shane's MMA was I am still convinced he would beat the shit out of CM Punk.

 

Fuck AT&T stadium sideways as that was an incredibly horrible experience to get in the building. According to reports the ticket scanners were screwed up because the WiFi was really bad. missed entire pre show. Then get in about 20 mind before main show and it is complete chaos with fans pushing and shoving cause apparently there was problems getting on the floor. If you were claustrophobic you would thought you went to hell. At least the food was good in concessions

I basically said I imagined that would be how it was to my wife. I was at XXX and it took me 30 minutes to walk from the ticket gate to my seat just because people were basically shoulder to shoulder trying to go in every different direction and about 20% of those people were not being cooperative humans. I can only imagine that this was much worse, especially with the scanners having problems.

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This show really felt like the ultimate realisation of Vince's vision for pro wrestling. The culmination of over 30 years of work. A procession of polished, pre-packaged WrestleMania Moments in front of a giant crowd.

This is pretty much why I loved it so much. Because Vince is going to do what he wants at the end of the day and I have no idea why the most stubborn parts of the audience just won't accept it and move on with their lives.

 

If you grew up loving a certain restaurant and then suddenly it went to shit and started serving really awful food, wouldn't you just stop going? Or would you engage in a ridiculous ritual of still regularly paying money to go and be disappointed in hopes of it getting better?

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I used to read a ton of comic books, and it got to be the same thing for me there. There were gems here and there, but the majority, especially the events, were just me buying and reading and hoping things would get better. In 2008 I finally realized that the majority of product from the big two (Marvel and DC) were not for me and it was time to move on. I still read the old stuff and I still pick up things that interest me, but they are few and far between. This is what wrestling feels like now to me too, although there isn't a 'big two', it's really just WWE and everything else is on different levels but all below in terms of reach and influence. But life goes on. I'll check out Raw tonight and hope it's fun, but after that I'll go back to the things I really like and enjoy until something else either good or bad enough to interest me in checking out WWE again happens.

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Guess I'm going to follow goc's advice here. There is a house show coming here to Albany in May. I had wavered on going but after last night I've decided to pass. I haven't spent money on wwe since 2013. Don't have the network and don't plan on ordering. TV is free so I probably will still watch and of course pay attention online

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I keep seeing references to "trolling the live crowd" at Mania. The live crowd ate up HBK, Foley, Austin, Rock, Cena, Taker's entrance, ladder match, women's match, Shaq O'Neal, Shane's big dive, and New Day's entrance. For the majority of the crowd, I don't think Styles losing to Jericho or the actual result of some other match really overshadowed the fact that they got to see Austin stun people and Shane nearly kill himself.

 

Sure, the main event sucked. But everyone knew it was going to suck and went to the show or bought it anyway. If WWE truly was trolling last night's audience, they failed miserably and will have to try harder.

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It's funny because when I first got internet in 1999, I'm reading today in 2016 the same arguments against pro-wrestling that I read then. The "if you don't like it, stop watching" argument is nothing new, but for some reason, today it resonates with me & makes a lot more sense than it has over the years. After Royal Rumble this year, I pretty much stopped watching WWE until last Monday to see the go-home RAW for Wrestlemania. Then I watched Wrestlemania last night... and it all just feels lackluster to me. I feel disenchanted, like the magic is gone. I'll watch RAW again tonight, as I'm curious what the new angles they set-up are... but I fully expect them to just run a bunch of rematches again.

 

I used to argue that you couldn't compare pro-wrestling to other forms of entertainment, be it television programs or sports. I'm not sure I feel that way anymore. WWE have went out of their way to make RAW, particularly, feel like just a TV show. If anything, they treat it as if the actual in-ring wrestling just gets in the way or is used to kill time. So looking at it in that way, it's not pro-wrestling, it's people without any acting talent trying to act & recite lines written by mediocre writers with a dunce in the production truck that doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

 

It's not really that I have lost my love or passion for pro-wrestling. I think my involvement with the GWE Project showed me that. I'm just out of favor with the main WWE product.

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The reason to keep watching wrestling we don't like is that as a moment's notice, it could get better. Even if the change is not permanent, WWE has a tendency to have moments of greatness that come out of nowhere. So I actually *admire* people that complain and keep watching because it shows their love for it, and belief in its potential to be awesome. My decision comes because I realize it will never be a hybrid of territory and Japanese wrestling adjusted to 2016 times with more glitz and huge crowds, with Vince completely discarding his bias for big guys and shameless pursuit of mainstream respectability. I held on to that hope way, way longer than I ever should have, which is on me. I leave in peace.

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I quit watching full-time after Benoit, coming back for spurts and trying to find something worth watching. If you told me in 2008 that Brock Lesnar, AJ Styles, Kevin Steen, El Generico, and Consequences Creed would have WrestleMania matches I would've laughed. Now I see it , I watched it, and it only cemented how far removed my interests are from what Vince is willing to present.

 

WWE is that old fling who you still have feelings for. You run into them and hit it off, start seeing each other again, but every reason it didn't work back then is amplified now. It's not that they're a bad person now or that you are, either, but you're just wildly different people after having your respective experiences. That kid inside you will always pine over them, but the adult you have become knows it won't work.

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That's where the people who complain and still watch are so important. We know they don't blindly love everything WWE churns out, so if they are praising something, it's worth seeing. A WWE where only people who loved it watched would leave the rest of us with no compass at all.

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WWE is that old fling who you still have feelings for. You run into them and hit it off, start seeing each other again, but every reason it didn't work back then is amplified now. It's not that they're a bad person now or that you are, either, but you're just wildly different people after having your respective experiences. That kid inside you will always pine over them, but the adult you have become knows it won't work.

But it feels more like people treat WWE like that old fling that they can't get over and desperately stalk on social media despite the other person having totally moved on.

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To me, getting so bothered by people who don't blindly love everything WWE does and still care enough to get mad when they do stupid stuff is far more of an issue than people who still watch and complain.

It has nothing to do with people not "blindly loving WWE" it's about the idiocy of spending hundreds of dollars a year on something that you do nothing but complain about. And continue to justify it with this lie that "well if I just go to the show and give them a reaction they don't like, they'll change!"

 

How can you scream from the hilltops how much you want WWE to change while giving them the financial security that ensures they don't have to?

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It's also easier than ever to dip in and out. They have 4 minute raw/smackdown recaps on youtube. If there's a great superstars match you miss, it's on the network to catch. Etc. It's not a big commitment to keep a toe in the water. It's barely even a conscious decision. If they put together a good card next month, we'll watch. If not maybe we'll watch something else. And there's always the month after either way.

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To me, getting so bothered by people who don't blindly love everything WWE does and still care enough to get mad when they do stupid stuff is far more of an issue than people who still watch and complain.

It has nothing to do with people not "blindly loving WWE" it's about the idiocy of spending hundreds of dollars a year on something that you do nothing but complain about. And continue to justify it with this lie that "well if I just go to the show and give them a reaction they don't like, they'll change!"

 

How can you scream from the hilltops how much you want WWE to change while giving them the financial security that ensures they don't have to?

 

 

Because it worked once (with Daniel Bryan) and there is the belief, however misguided, that they can force WWE's hand again.

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To me, getting so bothered by people who don't blindly love everything WWE does and still care enough to get mad when they do stupid stuff is far more of an issue than people who still watch and complain.

It has nothing to do with people not "blindly loving WWE" it's about the idiocy of spending hundreds of dollars a year on something that you do nothing but complain about. And continue to justify it with this lie that "well if I just go to the show and give them a reaction they don't like, they'll change!"

 

How can you scream from the hilltops how much you want WWE to change while giving them the financial security that ensures they don't have to?

 

 

Because it worked once (with Daniel Bryan) and there is the belief, however misguided, that they can force WWE's hand again.

 

This is just a lie though. It didn't work with Daniel Bryan. They did not turn around and change their entire philosophy and decide they were going to go whole hog with pushing Bryan. They were just going to give him a short token run until he got squashed by Lesnar at SummerSlam and then went back to the mid-card.

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