WWE TV 4/3 - 10/3 DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION NOW?

[KawadaSmile]

Hope he also has a hand on teaching people how to throw proper punches

[NintendoLogic]

More "Ronda refuses to follow the script" nonsense:

WWE's inability to leave well enough alone never ceases to amaze me. They were handed the most idiot-proof storyline imaginable on a silver platter, and they've larded it up with injuries and suspensions and worked shoots and adding Charlotte for no real reason-and for what? Is there a single person who is more excited to see this match now than they were a month ago? Especially since Dave has been implying recently that Becky winning at Mania isn't a sure thing.

[El-P]

"This is not a fucking promo. I'm not gonna do their act anymore."

Yeah, sorry, but this is WCW level Russoesque shooty-shooty shit, no matter what anyone says. It's the exact same shit.

[Stiva]

If they're going to go this route, I wish they'd utilise the Ronda/Mortal Kombat connection and make Scorpion and Sub-Zero tag team champions.

[KawadaSmile]

55 minutes ago, Stiva said:

If they're going to go this route, I wish they'd utilise the Ronda/Mortal Kombat connection and make Scorpion and Sub-Zero tag team champions.

Thanks bro, now I'm sad because I'll keep imagining Mortis/Wrath vs New Day and realize it'll never happen

[Strummer]

They are lucky that Becky seems to be bulletproof in this situation.  I'm sure the crowd will be on fire for the mania main event and everything will be fine at the show but think of that segment with Becky/Ronda night after the Rumble and then watch the above video.  What in the hell have they done?!

[Jmare007]

They've making the same mistake they did with Austin and Rock for Mania 17. Just a mess of a build up for a match that everyone wants to (and will) see and that will most likely be awesome. But hell, at least Austin and Rock had those sitdowns interviews with J.R.

[Badlittlekitten]

43 minutes ago, Strummer said:

They are lucky that Becky seems to be bulletproof in this situation.  I'm sure the crowd will be on fire for the mania main event and everything will be fine at the show but think of that segment with Becky/Ronda night after the Rumble and then watch the above video.  What in the hell have they done?!

Given Rousey nuclear heat.

[sek69]

Does it though? It just makes her seem like a loon from an alternate universe where WCW won the war and Russo was still in charge.

Then again she also thought Sandy Hook was fake, so *shrug*....

[Badlittlekitten]

Of course it does. Especially with the hardcore mania crowd. I’m not particularly a fan of this shoot social media game but it’s got people invested in a way that the angles on TV failed to do.

[TravJ1979]

Ronda is just a weak minded individual.  Gets finished by Holly and Amanda and wants to commit suicide. She ducks Cyborg with excuse after excuse only for Nunes to not only fight Cyborg but dismantle her. 

She can't handle getting booed in LA?  She can't handle getting owned on Twitter?  Give me a break.  Her believability is totally gone. Dan Severn is 64 and is still as intimidating as hell. Ronda's not that much more intimidating than Nia Jax which says a lot.

This program is essentially Daniel Bryan and WM 30 and if Becky doesn't win, they've completely lost their minds as that worked perfectly and any finish aside from Becky pinning (or tapping, which is unlikely because Ronda might want to kill herself again even though it was planned outcome.) is completely insane.

Let Becky tap her out and Ronda can go start her family with her dick of a husband. Maybe she can come back at next year's Mania and they can drain her for any appeal she has left. Bell to bell Ronda is more often than not fantastic.  Outside of that, she's unbearable.

[sek69]

I wouldn't say weak minded, just someone raised with a win at all costs mentality that was never properly equipped for losing.  It just boggles my mind that by all accounts she's such a big wrestling fan yet her idea for a heel gimmick is to be a Vince Russo character. I don't agree that she's getting any kind of nuclear heat with hardcore fans, if anything she's getting go away heat from them. The prevailing opinion I've been seeing is "how can they make such a mess of such a sure thing", which I guess if that's the intended reaction,  good on them. This is WWE not being satisfied with being handed a perfect angle by the fans (rejecting Becky's heel turn) and fate (Becky getting shoot bloodied and becoming Stone Cold), and just couldn't leave well enough alone. Nothing can be authentic or organic, it has to be something created in a lab by WWE. 

[DMJ]

I feel like the above two points are kind of proving the WWE"s point.

Like, at first, everyone was just "I can't believe the WWE is scripting this fake shoot shit."

Now, there's more and more people who have been worked and are conflating the WWE's scripting of Rousey with the actual Ronda Rousey. Look no further than the above post, where a smart, respectable fan wrote, "By all accounts she's such a big wrestling fan yet her idea for a heel gimmick is to be a Vince Russo character."

This blatantly assumes that this storyline is Rousey's idea and not something that a team of writers and producers are fully controlling. (Elephant in the room: Wasn't IWC darling Paul Heyman working closely with Rousey this whole time? We all love to call this "fake shoot" stuff Russo-rific, but Paul E. wasn't a stranger to it either.)

I dislike building a whole feud around the words "fake" and "real" and "scripted" and "off script." I think its awful. But I don't think Ronda Rousey is pulling the strings and writing this angle single-handedly. This is fully a WWE production and this is what the WWE creative team is fully behind. That is what sucks about it. 

[Strummer]

Gallows and Anderson turned down a multi year contract extension with wwe and will be leaving when their contracts expire

 

PWI

[NintendoLogic]

For what it's worth, Dave said on the F4W board that they're trying to recreate the build for Mania 11 where Bigelow was told to go on talk shows and say that wrestling wasn't real, but he hated LT and was going to fight him for real once they got in the ring.

[sek69]

16 minutes ago, DMJ said:

I feel like the above two points are kind of proving the WWE"s point.

Like, at first, everyone was just "I can't believe the WWE is scripting this fake shoot shit."

Now, there's more and more people who have been worked and are conflating the WWE's scripting of Rousey with the actual Ronda Rousey. Look no further than the above post, where a smart, respectable fan wrote, "By all accounts she's such a big wrestling fan yet her idea for a heel gimmick is to be a Vince Russo character."

This blatantly assumes that this storyline is Rousey's idea and not something that a team of writers and producers are fully controlling. (Elephant in the room: Wasn't IWC darling Paul Heyman working closely with Rousey this whole time? We all love to call this "fake shoot" stuff Russo-rific, but Paul E. wasn't a stranger to it either.)

I dislike building a whole feud around the words "fake" and "real" and "scripted" and "off script." I think its awful. But I don't think Ronda Rousey is pulling the strings and writing this angle single-handedly. This is fully a WWE production and this is what the WWE creative team is fully behind. That is what sucks about it. 

 

They are definately playing off her natural heelish personality (which is the one good thing about it, she's WAY better being a heel than the Smiling Babyface she was before), and she clearly has input on the direction. None of that means people are being worked by pointing out she's coming off as a loony 2000 WCW character. 

Paul E did worked shoot stuff, but I don't recall there being any angles in ECW where Taz was calling everything fake except what he was doing. There's a difference between pushing someone as more of a threat due to a real fight background, and literally telling your audience the rest of your show is some fake shit and this is the only real thing.  Hell, WWF did it back in the late 90s when Ken Shamrock was around and they pushed him as the Worlds Most Dangerous Man due to his UFC background. Not once did he cut promos saying this was all fake but he was going to shoot on everyone. 

The worst part is that this feud doesn't need any of this nonsense, but WWE just stubbornly refuses to go along with storylines that fall in their laps.

[peachchaos]

1 hour ago, Strummer said:

Gallows and Anderson

Don't think they were ever going to fit in so this is best for everyone. 

They seem more MLW-tier than All Elite, but I'm sure they'll end up with AEW contracts since the juices are flowing.

[DMJ]

I completely agree. I was just pointing out that more and more people are making the very natural shift from "Can you believe the WWE is doing this?" towards "Can you believe Ronda is doing this?" And the WWE is banking on that shift. 

She definitely has input on her direction - but I don't think she walked into a meeting 6 weeks ago and said, "I'm going to start throwing the words 'fake' and 'real'' around and nobody can tell me not to." This is all orchestrated. This is all at the WWE's behest. They're working with her to develop these promos/vignettes and I'm arguing that the WWE's creative team is more responsible. Of all the things Ronda has been called, she's never been called a "creative." She's never been described as a genius self-promoter. She's not Connor McGregor. She's not Floyd Mayweather. I won't go as far as to call her a puppet because she's a sentient human being, but like Brock Lesnar, I don't think she's pitching storyline concepts as much as she's running with the bullet points and ideas that the WWE's producers are pushing her to do. 

 

On a separate note - I'm not knowledgeable of NJPW, but I don't "get" the Good Brothers. They were super, super funny on Austin's podcast, but I didn't see them do anything great in the WWE context. That's probably unfair, but I don't know, Mark McKinney was brilliant in Kids in the Hall, but outside of that context, he didn't burst from the screen the same way on SNL. Now, he's killing it on Superstore. Context matters even  when the talent level is high.

The Good Brothers, whatever they're supposed to be, just weren't in the WWE. Weren't over. Weren't entertaining. Weren't special. I don't see the Good Brothers leaving as any kind of loss to the WWE. Maybe they needed an NXT run to establish a gimmick?

[sek69]

Sometimes guys just don't fit with a company for whatever reason. I get the impression that Gallows and Anderson fell victim to someone finding out they were funny guys and booked them that way instead of as credible threats. Plus there was the visual of them facing smaller guys in New Japan that made them look more badass that was lost in WWE.  They just had an aura of cool in NJPW while in WWE they just came off like....well.....nerds.

[Strummer]

anyone find it weird Dave is defending this Ronda booking to death while the majority of net fans seem to hate it?  It's like almost always the other way around with Dave being accused of a bias against WWE and him slamming their booking.  Now he's sticking up for them here.  Yeah I know it's probably just because Ronda and Heyman are involved but still strange

[sek69]

It's especially odd since he's been repeatedly stating this is different than WCW, despite "this is real, everything else was fake" being one of his big pet peeves of that era. 

[Johnny Sorrow]

Now Gallows and Anderson are an act that will definitely end up in AEW. One of the main reasons they wanted to stay in WWE was that they liked living at home. Now they can do that and work somewhere else where they'll be bigger names and in better spots than now.

[Johnny Sorrow]

20 minutes ago, Strummer said:

anyone find it weird Dave is defending this Ronda booking to death while the majority of net fans seem to hate it?  It's like almost always the other way around with Dave being accused of a bias against WWE and him slamming their booking.  Now he's sticking up for them here.  Yeah I know it's probably just because Ronda and Heyman are involved but still strange

It doesn't surprise me at all. Dave has become a Twitter drama guy himself. He knows that this shit gets attention.

And again, I really hope this "It's scripted " shit stays on Twitter and doesn't make TV. The HHH ," This isn't the character, it's me, Dave!" promo was how you do this shit well on TV. That worked. I can't imagine Rhonda going on RAW and saying " It's all fake!"

[RazorbladeKiss87]

21 minutes ago, Johnny Sorrow said:

Now Gallows and Anderson are an act that will definitely end up in AEW. One of the main reasons they wanted to stay in WWE was that they liked living at home. Now they can do that and work somewhere else where they'll be bigger names and in better spots than now.

In AEW they will have the benefit of being bigger than most (all?) of the roster which was a big component (from what I saw, I didn't follow it super closely) of their success in NJPW. I'd like to see them end up there, personally. 

[C.S.]

21 hours ago, DMJ said:

On a separate note - I'm not knowledgeable of NJPW, but I don't "get" the Good Brothers. They were super, super funny on Austin's podcast, but I didn't see them do anything great in the WWE context. That's probably unfair, but I don't know, Mark McKinney was brilliant in Kids in the Hall, but outside of that context, he didn't burst from the screen the same way on SNL. Now, he's killing it on Superstore. Context matters even  when the talent level is high.

The Good Brothers, whatever they're supposed to be, just weren't in the WWE. Weren't over. Weren't entertaining. Weren't special. I don't see the Good Brothers leaving as any kind of loss to the WWE. Maybe they needed an NXT run to establish a gimmick?

I feel the exact same way.

I think they have the potential to break out as big personalities, but their ring work has never wowed me. I'm surprised they weren't a massive success, actually, because character > in-ring in WWE usually. Then again, it's not like they got a chance to show off their natural charisma and charm anyway.