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Post by Citizen Snips on Mar 30, 2019 4:07:39 GMT -5
To be fair he didn't really criticize the WWE. Certainly he's not happy with it but he didn't say anything untoward about WWE. Oh, absolutely. It’s just one of those things, even in this manner, that wouldn’t fly in any other industry without major criticism or some kind of statement from the people in charge. Half the stories about the NFL and NBA are about what the players say off the field/court. The stories that get the most attention are the ones that are critical of the league. All their "Look at all our Instagram followers, real sports!!!" graphics indicate Vince would sacrifice a couple grandchildren to get the actual attention those two organizations get. I'd bet a crisp $1 that's what's driving this, both from the workers' and company's standpoint. More clicks on the Internet are the new currency.
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mcstoklasa
Hank Scorpio
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Post by mcstoklasa on Mar 30, 2019 4:41:07 GMT -5
There's too many wrestlers on the roster to feature then all
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Post by HMARK Center on Mar 30, 2019 5:24:19 GMT -5
The scary part here is that the new brand split supposedly happened in large part to allow for more wrestlers to get featured time on TV, since the roster is just too big to put everybody on one show, even a 3 hour one like Raw. Yet here's Harper, a veteran with a ton of talent and a great track record, and he's been healthy for two months yet has writers/agents/etc. wondering if he's still injured. If you're going to split the rosters to feature more talent, then you really need to actually be paying attention to that talent.
That said, I can't stop dwelling on him using "exasperated" near the end of that post instead of "exacerbated", and it's too early in the morning for my brain to be doing that to me.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2019 6:04:42 GMT -5
Love me some Harper. I don't even need him as a main eventer (even though he got himself over working against Orton/Bray/AJ), but grizzled babyface veteran Harper trying to prove he can still hang works for me.
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Post by Brian Suntan on Mar 30, 2019 6:10:00 GMT -5
I think this is another example of the company being ok with this "reality and social media" stuff that started with Ronda and Becky and reports about the company changing things due to that. Maybe they'll see those posts and do something with the superstars now, I'm not sure. Like, I can get that to an extent but it’d be like if a bunch of employees broke NDAs and talked about how awful the set of Game of Thrones is and how we’d be hearing about “Red Wedding: Catering, makeup and set design Edition” because...that’s f***ing would be what happens. Nobody is going to keep an employee that hates their job constantly on the payroll to make everyone else around them feel like crap. I’m not even saying that is the case, they could be laughing to the Bank, but it doesn’t make me feel optimistic about stuff if the big angle for Naomi is snidely saying “Well, you might cancel the battle royale like you did our four way” when we all know there’s going to be nothing about that on TV. I don't understand why people constantly compare wrestling and Game of Thrones/Breaking Bad/Sopranos etc. They've never been anything alike, and people wouldn't want them to be either.
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msc
Dennis Stamp
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Post by msc on Mar 30, 2019 6:14:14 GMT -5
Harper IS very underused. Staggeringly so.
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Post by EoE: Well There's Your Problem on Mar 30, 2019 6:30:53 GMT -5
Reads like a crisis of confidence, and I wouldn't blame him for feeling that way. He's just come off an injury and subsequent physical rehab which is always tough, and then there's the concern about his place on the roster. I mean, he's been there a few years now, he'd be much higher up the list of possible cuts than most, and even his old spot isn't there at the moment because his regular partner is in a different role himself. He's at a crossroads. I don't know about his contract status, but Harper would be a handy guy wherever he may want to go, should he want to leave, and it'd be WWE's loss.
Anyway, I hope it works out for him. Harper v Dijakovic sounds like it'd be a f***ing banger of a match, for what it's worth.
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Post by Feargus McReddit on Mar 30, 2019 6:38:53 GMT -5
Like, I can get that to an extent but it’d be like if a bunch of employees broke NDAs and talked about how awful the set of Game of Thrones is and how we’d be hearing about “Red Wedding: Catering, makeup and set design Edition” because...that’s f***ing would be what happens. Nobody is going to keep an employee that hates their job constantly on the payroll to make everyone else around them feel like crap. I’m not even saying that is the case, they could be laughing to the Bank, but it doesn’t make me feel optimistic about stuff if the big angle for Naomi is snidely saying “Well, you might cancel the battle royale like you did our four way” when we all know there’s going to be nothing about that on TV. I don't understand why people constantly compare wrestling and Game of Thrones/Breaking Bad/Sopranos etc. They've never been anything alike, and people wouldn't want them to be either. I mean, my example wasn’t anything to do with the shows themselves but ok, let me use a different one. I mentioned before when I worked for Thorpe Park, one of the most well known theme parks in Europe, my contract included a clause where I could not talk about how I felt about working there on social media. If I did, I’d be repremended. It’s understandable, I say bad stuff about where I work, makes the company look bad and makes everyone else feel like they can do the same thing. If I kept doing it after warnings? I’d be fired and they’d be utterly justified in doing it. So why can I get fired for tweeting consistently about stuff to less people than Rusev can essentially making shoot comments about his “spot”? Oh, absolutely. It’s just one of those things, even in this manner, that wouldn’t fly in any other industry without major criticism or some kind of statement from the people in charge. Half the stories about the NFL and NBA are about what the players say off the field/court. The stories that get the most attention are the ones that are critical of the league. All their "Look at all our Instagram followers, real sports!!!" graphics indicate Vince would sacrifice a couple grandchildren to get the actual attention those two organizations get. I'd bet a crisp $1 that's what's driving this, both from the workers' and company's standpoint. More clicks on the Internet are the new currency. In real sports, though, reporters interview the athletes because there’s a need to get some perspective on how the player feels like they’re doing, how the team and managers are performing, how the rest of the league is doing towards a play off or a point threshold of some kind, all this stuff adds to analysis of the overall leagues and teams towards coverage. WWE has none of these things. Talking Smack was the closest but that ended because it was too far out of people’s control. There arent’t post match interviews, not much analysis about how people are doing, no ranks to climb or fall down on. Some of that wouldn’t work in WWE at least without a lot of work and patience which Vince does not have. Which leads to my overall point. Yes, internet hits do matter but social media is not a money maker; TV is, merchandise is, live shows are. The first and third are down because there isn’t an interesting product. Lana might tweet about being salty but does this make a single lick of difference to ratings? No. Will Naomi’s rants about the four way being scrapped make TV? No. Were Ronda’s idiotic ramblings? No but that “grabbed headlines” and guess what? Ratings went DOWN. The fans that tweet #FTR might root for them on social media to leave and go to AEW but they ain’t watching their tag title defense nor are they treated like they matter. Social media is a promotional tool. It’s not something you use as attention seeking, cross your fingers and hope for the best because again, it ain’t working. It makes you look like your roster has no dicipline and your boss doesn’t care. Also, social media last year made $9m for the company last year. Which, especially compared to everything else they do, that’s shocking.
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Post by Ronny Rayguns Is All Elite on Mar 30, 2019 6:41:45 GMT -5
Been a fan since the Brodie Lee days, give that man SOMETHING to do on tv
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Derk!
Hank Scorpio
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Post by Derk! on Mar 30, 2019 7:05:51 GMT -5
Dude is too talented to not be used at all. Doesn't need to be world champion, but give him something to do, even if it's a hired gun. Hell, make him a one man APA.
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Post by Ryushinku on Mar 30, 2019 7:11:21 GMT -5
I do hope better things are still ahead for him.
Harper's often felt like a man out of time to me. Like, 30-40 years out, I picture him hurling chairs at Nick Bockwinkel in a crazy brawl.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2019 7:12:41 GMT -5
I f***ing love Harper. How he’s not a main eventer is beyond me.
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Post by PTBartman on Mar 30, 2019 9:19:18 GMT -5
It seems like a really passionate note and I really want to see him pull through and find something. On the flip side, and I don’t mean to go into this again but...is WWE going to actually do anything about these tweets? Stuff like this, Lana, Rusev, Naomi, Nia...is this the new kayfabe or is this disgruntled employees being allowed to criticise the company publically? Because either way makes them look like shit, frankly. Well on the flipside Vince/Hunter could be happy that those wrestlers are not happy in their current spots and want more opportunities since it seems they are hungry for success. Guess depends on what side of the bed bear skin rug Vince wakes up on. Fixed to coincide with comunity standards and memes.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2019 9:30:27 GMT -5
It seems like a really passionate note and I really want to see him pull through and find something. On the flip side, and I don’t mean to go into this again but...is WWE going to actually do anything about these tweets? Stuff like this, Lana, Rusev, Naomi, Nia...is this the new kayfabe or is this disgruntled employees being allowed to criticise the company publically? Because either way makes them look like shit, frankly. For those wrestlers, their logic is that WWE has already put them at the bottom of the barrel by not putting them on television and rarely putting them on house shows (besides Nia because they want to push the Women's Tag Team division, and Nia just so happens to fit the build of a monster heel alongside Tamina), so it's not like the company can punish them any worse by burying them since they aren't even used in any significant capacity as it is. Some of them have already decided that the glitz and glamour WWE promised is not worth it if they won't even let you do anything on their programming, and a few this year have walked or will walk once their contracts are up. Anyway, some of you still remember the threads where I just pissed and moaned endlessly about why they kept having Harper lose and lose and lose and lose, and people would reply to me that something would eventually come up for him. Except, nothing ever did. I remember that Survivor Series 2016 saw Luke lose to Kane on the preshow for no reason, and then lose the rematch on SmackDown two nights later (and this wasn't the year they were trying to arbitrarily put Kane in a title scene). I remember that the only reason they had him partner with Orton and Wyatt when they were tag team champions was just so Orton and Wyatt wouldn't take the pin (which had always been a recurring theme with Luke when it came to stables up to that point), and when they would lose the belts, Harper would be blamed before Orton revealed his true intentions, and Luke would never get his revenge. I remember them going out of their way to have Luke lose by shenanigans only for them to restart the match so he could lose clean. I remembered being excited about the fact that Luke Harper finally got a pinfall victory... over Rowan. The Bludgeon Brothers, to me at least, was a corrupt-a-wish; he finally got to win matches, but the gimmick he was saddled was designed to work against him, as it required promos (not his strong suit), and a generic style of wrestling, not to mention ridiculous outfits. That note just sounded depressing, reading it. He wants WWE to give him a chance to show off his ability and that he can be more than a warm body, but it's pretty clear all they want him to do is put over a newcomer (and whatever flavor-of-the-month talent they suddenly have a renewed interest in), which he's okay with, but at the same time, being told endlessly that you're here just to put over people has to take it's toll on your psyche, I dunno. I'm not looking at it from an ego perspective, but rather from the perspective of that being of a person hired to do something and wanting to contribute the most he can, and instead being asked to do the least since he's long since deemed unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2019 9:36:03 GMT -5
The scary part here is that the new brand split supposedly happened in large part to allow for more wrestlers to get featured time on TV, since the roster is just too big to put everybody on one show, even a 3 hour one like Raw. Yet here's Harper, a veteran with a ton of talent and a great track record, and he's been healthy for two months yet has writers/agents/etc. wondering if he's still injured. If you're going to split the rosters to feature more talent, then you really need to actually be paying attention to that talent. That said, I can't stop dwelling on him using "exasperated" near the end of that post instead of "exacerbated", and it's too early in the morning for my brain to be doing that to me. It's because the writers don't know how to structure shows. RAW relies on two dozen recaps earlier that evening because they assume that their viewers have the attention span of goldfish, or they believe people will just tune in at, say, 9:27pm and need to be reminded at what happened at 8:15pm. Meanwhile, SmackDown has a smaller timeslot, but a worse utilization of their roster, considering that they always recycle the same players each week, and at least 40% of the roster can go months without a TV appearance. Factor in the issue of only RAW having access to a "B-show" of their own in Main Event, where they can put in their job division each week, and that makes SmackDown's bit players, like Sanity, Shelton Benjamin, and Gallows & Anderson, make their sporadic appearances on television stick out like sore thumbs.
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Post by cabbageboy on Mar 30, 2019 10:04:07 GMT -5
At this point Harper is a career lackey, but right now I'd say Daniel Bryan has an opening for a 2nd lackey. Why has he not been added to the mix with Rowan? It's like I keep thinking he'll do this run in and be added so they can do a 6 man tag. I mean why has this not happened?
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Perfect Timing
Dennis Stamp
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Post by Perfect Timing on Mar 30, 2019 10:23:36 GMT -5
He should be Baron Corbins bodyguard. It would actually be hilarious seeing a big hoss coward retreating with his big hoss bodyguard.
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Post by No Name is needed Bro Beans on Mar 30, 2019 10:36:21 GMT -5
See I think if Harper would have been the one to throw Flair a beating on his birthday he'd be getting a shot at the game and batista might have ended up at axxess facing Dijak. Probably not but one can hope
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Post by RI Richmark on Mar 30, 2019 11:13:42 GMT -5
Why do the WWE push Corbin when Harper does everything he can do but better? I guess because Corbin is younger and Harper's been out with injuries regularly enough that it might give them pause. That and Harper would look ridiculous wrestling in a TGI Friday's uniform.
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Post by Friday Night SmackOwn on Mar 30, 2019 11:20:06 GMT -5
See I think if Harper would have been the one to throw Flair a beating on his birthday he'd be getting a shot at the game and batista might have ended up at axxess facing Dijak. Probably not but one can hope I now have a mental image of Harper cutting the “gimme what I want promo”.
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