https://www.bodyslam.net/2020/08/11/its ... wmjXYpCi9g

This popped up on my Facebook feed and thought it was an interesting read.

He's not wrong about the term being overused, but you could write an article like that for a lot of different terms.

That being said, his defense of some of this isn't the best. You can't tell me that Fiend getting squashed by Goldberg was about building up some bigger story, because it wasn't. It was about getting the belt off of Fiend and onto Goldberg so that Fiend could feud with Cena and Goldberg could drop it to Roman. The Fiend wasn't hurt too much by the loss simply because WWE basically decided to ignore it, which they were able to do because of their piss-poor storytelling. If they had actually told a story explaining how The Fiend's power works and why Goldberg was able to obliterate him when Rollins, Bryan, and Miz had so much trouble with him (like the "The Fiend is powered by your fears" theory that people had been batting around), it would have killed him because why doesn't every babyface use that same strategy? Essentially, the only reason that match didn't hurt The Fiend is because WWE stuffed it in a vacuum.



I think my thoughts on this article are really best summed up in my reaction these paragraphs:

Bottom line is – If your favourite wrestler loses, it doesn’t mean they are buried. Asuka was NOT buried. The Fiend was NOT buried by Goldberg. WWE are building compelling and long term storylines with big payoffs at the end. With Sasha Banks and Bayley we know exactly how the Two Woman Power Trip will end and just how good it will be. Going by Sasha’s booking history on rematches we may even see Asuka as RAW Women’s Champion again as soon as SummerSlam.

Then that of course will lead to the people who cried about Asuka being ‘buried’ instead complaining about how Sasha has now been buried… for WWE it will always be a case of “dammed if they do, dammed if they don’t.”

He's not wrong about the way people overreact to every loss, but the defense of everything as "WWE are building compelling and long term storylines with big payoffs at the end" betrays what seems to me like an inability to understand where some of the frustration surrounding these things is coming from, because the people who find WWE"s current storylines to be compelling or well-built are few and far between. I think more people would have been happy for someone to lose that match cleanly because they're tired of the f*ck finishes, and this was the second f*ck finish in a row in this feud- and it's not like this is the only feud in the company, either- , and they're not really being done in ways that build on each other, either. There isn't a real narrative moving forward.

So this guy's main point is correct, but it's hard to read because he comes off like he's operating in this alternate reality where WWE actually is building up good, long-term, compelling stories, instead of just doing rinse-wash-repeat.

Right. It's not that WWE fans don't have valid gripes. But there are much less pedantic ways to say, "Oh no, a wrestler who's work I enjoy lost/won in a way I didn't appreciate"
I think this is why WWE (rightfully) dismisses fans outcries, however, and why I get a sadistic joy out of WWE's antagonizing booking, because everything is Defcon 1, everything is the end of the world, no matter what they do.

NWK2000 wrote: ↑Aug 12th, '20, 00:23 Right. It's not that WWE fans don't have valid gripes. But there are much less pedantic ways to say, "Oh no, a wrestler who's work I enjoy lost/won in a way I didn't appreciate"
I think this is why WWE (rightfully) dismisses fans outcries, however, and why I get a sadistic joy out of WWE's antagonizing booking, because everything is Defcon 1, everything is the end of the world, no matter what they do.

You've got the timeline wrong, though. Fans didn't start acting this way until after WWE mishandled (and in some cases very much did bury) fan favorites who had gotten over in the first half of the 2010s (Ryder, Dragon, Punk, Cesaro, Kofi, Ziggler, Del Rio, even to an extent). WWE was dismissing fans' outcries because they "know better," and that's always a dangerous way to do business.