Mochi Lone Wolf
Fry's dog Seymour
Development through Destruction.
Posts: 24,153
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Post by Mochi Lone Wolf on Jan 8, 2023 20:02:14 GMT -5
The fact that everything on the show felt like it's made by him and for him. Regardless of whether the talent or the audience likes it, as well.
The falling viewing numbers over the years would say they didn't.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2023 20:27:39 GMT -5
Combination of things, really.
For one, Vince books to his ego. Roman could have been much better received years ago if he'd just done what was necessary back around 2015 or so, as an example.
Vince is also really bad for what I call "Tik-Tok" booking, which is ironic since I doubt Vince even knows what Tik-Tok is. He doesn't tell substantive stories in his angles, he doesn't let the talent usually tell stories in the ring. Everything is built around 30 second clips of "WWE Moments", and everything else in between is just bullshit he has to do in between those moments.
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Post by theironyuppie on Jan 8, 2023 20:40:45 GMT -5
The obsession with branding. It led to no one talking like people. Everything everyone said had to always be said in a very specific way using very specific buzzwords. You couldn’t mention someone’s name with it also including their branded nickname. Commentators had to say the same lines every time someone made their entrance. Everything had a tagline, everything had a forced transparent brand forced onto it. We can’t ever talk about Wrestlemania without talking about how it will be Stupendous, Finn Balor can’t ever appear without someone saying he’s an Extraordinary man who does Extra-Ordinary things. We can’t go to commercial break without Raw Rolling On. Even just when it came to match and promo structure, everything was the same. No matter what styles they worked, every wrestler basically wrestled the same match, just the moves were different. Everyone cut the same kind of promo, with the same cadence and emphatic style. Everything had to fit a very specific mold. There was no real variety. You had to work a WWE match. You had to cut a WWE promo. You had to use the WWE words at the right WWE moments. Stale. Soulless. Yeah, everyone had the Ric Flair style of match (which is not a knock against Ric) but he always said he made sure to hit all of his classic spots in all of his matches because he didn't want to make any of the fans feel cheated... but then everyone has moves that they have to do because it's there move... whether it makes sense to happen or not... see something like when Ambrose would hit the rebound clothesline EVERY match regardless of if it killed the momentum or not. Or Charlotte always doing a moonsault to the outside... and when it came time to big matches she turned it into a corkscrew moonsault literally every time... so they would HAVE to get knocked to the outside for a long enough period of time for Charlotte to get into position and do the move... I don't mind wrestlers having signature spots and having things being X's move does help with pops... but... you don't need to do them EVERY time. .
I agree with your basic point, but Charlotte's only used the corkscrew version very rarely. She debuted it on a 2016 Raw vs Sasha, then used it at WM 33 (in a moment that's still frequently chosen for WWE highlight packages), Summerslam 2018, and Summerslam 2021. She was originally going to use it in the MITB 2021 match with Rhea but changed her mind.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2023 20:58:05 GMT -5
Combination of things, really. For one, Vince books to his ego. Roman could have been much better received years ago if he'd just done what was necessary back around 2015 or so, as an example. Vince is also really bad for what I call "Tik-Tok" booking, which is ironic since I doubt Vince even knows what Tik-Tok is. He doesn't tell substantive stories in his angles, he doesn't let the talent usually tell stories in the ring. Everything is built around 30 second clips of "WWE Moments", and everything else in between is just bullshit he has to do in between those moments. This brings to mind a quote from Tarantino about storytelling in Hollywood that I always use a preverbial lense I guess to watch most things including wrestling. "Hollywood doesn't tell stories anymore they tell situations"
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2023 21:04:34 GMT -5
Combination of things, really. For one, Vince books to his ego. Roman could have been much better received years ago if he'd just done what was necessary back around 2015 or so, as an example. Vince is also really bad for what I call "Tik-Tok" booking, which is ironic since I doubt Vince even knows what Tik-Tok is. He doesn't tell substantive stories in his angles, he doesn't let the talent usually tell stories in the ring. Everything is built around 30 second clips of "WWE Moments", and everything else in between is just bullshit he has to do in between those moments. This brings to mind a quote from Tarantino about storytelling in Hollywood that I always use a preverbial lense I guess to watch most things including wrestling. "Hollywood doesn't tell stories anymore they tell situations" I don't wanna derail the thread, but most storytelling in general these days boils down to "Watch the beginning, then watch the ending, and the rest in the middle doesn't matter"
That describes WWE in a nutshell.
- babyface star interrupts heel promo (beginning)
- heel attacks babyface after babyface wins a hard fought match (beginning) - "epic entrances" (beginning)
- The match finish and the 30 seconds there after (the ending)
That is how WWE books, now. "Moments". Moments that are usually built on things that have diminishing returns, such as legends that get older and less mobile by the year, and signings from other companies that mean less and less because most of them already went through the WWE system anyway.
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Mochi Lone Wolf
Fry's dog Seymour
Development through Destruction.
Posts: 24,153
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Post by Mochi Lone Wolf on Jan 8, 2023 21:08:41 GMT -5
I gave up on WWE over 15 years ago in large part due to the booking, and it does seem some of the worst aspects of it got worse as the 2000s wore on. There's a lot of issues that have been hammered home pretty well here: overly scripted promos, the show format being repetitive (especially the super lengthy show-opening promos), running the same matches week after week in lieu of telling any kind of story, the list of well-told issues goes on and on. For me, I used to sum up my big issue with his approach by saying that too much of what happened on WWE shows felt like when you could make your own cut scenes from 2K video games by taking a pre-made sequences and inserting any wrestlers into them. Vince liked to go on and on about "making movies", "telling stories", "building characters" or whatever, but way, way too often in WWE it just felt like most of the booking was "oh hey, some stuff happened." Not stuff directed by character motivation, not stuff that showed character or plot progression, not stuff that took into consideration past events to shape future developments, just...stuff. Again, like a 2K build-your-own cut scene where you could insert Big John Studd to fake a run-in on an Alberto Del Rio match or something so that Alberto gets rolled up by his opponent, it's just stuff that happens, not anything that's happening because of specific character motivations or goals. What then made it worse is that WWE's in-ring style too often doesn't feel motivated by stories or past events or what have you; they're too often just built around the basic "hot babyface start, heel cuts off babyface, build heat for awhile, babyface comeback, build to finish" routine. That then created the feeling that the actual matches themselves, and the action that happened in them, weren't important, and then by WWE's own admission at the time "wins and losses don't matter", so you've got feuds that don't really tell a story, matches not really telling a story, and match results that don't matter, all adding up to, uh, what, exactly? Getting into other promotions really made it sink in how lacking the storytelling felt in WWE, and a lot of that revolved around Vince's whole "shit just kinda happens on this show, I dunno" approach. Worst case of that was that awful Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins match from TLC 2018. These two are having a blood feud and they had the most basic WWE wrestling match. That was the moment I was like "This is not a wrestling company. It's a band always being advertised to me at all times. A billion-dollar infomercial. Nothing more."
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Dub H
Crow T. Robot
Captain Pixel: the Game Master
I ❤ Aniki
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Post by Dub H on Jan 8, 2023 21:51:07 GMT -5
That is what broke the preverbial dam as a fan for me , that period of late 2014 till 2018 going into 19 is both what showed me and IMO changed the views of alot of fans. Because that was when the mainstream wrestling was really in a serious down turn and western fans were introdouced to how much better things could be and how much worse they are in WWE. NJPW blew open the doors to new eyes on how great outside WWE the in ring stuff could be. LU showed up and showed how creatively bankrupt WWE (and just mainsream wrestling as a whole at the time) was both in terms of telling cohesiv and consistent storytelling and the characters by putting out the best written wrestling show of all time. And the indies were in a golden age especially creatively. But it was IMO NJPW and LU that really showed how badly WWE is on both fronts...getting NJPW's rise with western audiences and LU's arrival at pretty much the same time just opened so many eyes to how much better things could be creatively. But Vince is an old carny f*** who lives in a bubble that only echos his own thoughts and views and everything has suffered because of it. For me it was getting into ROH back circa late 2004/early 2005 that blew open my perception of what wrestling storytelling could be, specifically when I picked up the Joe vs. Punk II DVD. I went in knowing it'd end in a 60 minute draw, but I still found myself completely into this match involving two guys I had never actually watched before that point, where the key was "they've already gone 60 minutes once, so Punk is retrying his 'headlock first, wear Joe down' strategy but realizing it's trending towards a draw again and tries to change it up, only for Joe to make enough adjustments to bring it to the time limit." Like, there: that was a story, and it was incredible to watch unfold. What modern NJPW showed me was twofold: one was the way that, much like when I got into ROH, you could see the matches telling stories, but beyond that was how the key to the booking wasn't "these two wrestlers had a run-in backstage, so now they have a match/feud" (though that's not unheard of), but instead "these characters are going through arcs and rivalries, and the matches they're in will help develop those arcs based on what happens in the ring and the match outcomes". Like just this past week, watching Ospreay and Jay White having their post-loss meltdowns were great, but they weren't just great promos, they drew from the stories told in their matches, and it just made them resonate as you watched these two guys snap and fall apart in their own ways. And yeah, Lucha Underground then showed "Oh, so you want to see how a scripted wrestling show could actually be done *well*? You want to see over-the-top gimmicks and 'sports entertainment' done in a way where the matches still matter but you get all the insanity you like, too? Here." Yeh lucha underground was my first experience in watching weekly outside of wwe. I'm then I watched the njpw mini series that told all the years long storylines. Never was easy to go back to wwe after that. I loke my stories connecting with each other and actions having consequences down the line
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DichEvans
Samurai Cop
Lenny Lazy Lane Stinks
Posts: 2,245
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Post by DichEvans on Jan 9, 2023 0:58:56 GMT -5
Oh, let me count the ways: 1. Odd obsession with not mentioning that the world outside of WWE exists. 2. Stubborn, wouldn't ever adjust his booking on the fly unless people really, really fought him on it like they did Daniel Bryan. 3. Screaming at his commentators to act like robots.4. Juvenile humor that sucks. 5. His inability to book a top babyface. Well, his inability to really book anybody. It's not a coincidence that most top guys actually FEEL like top guys now, and only now. 6. Championships matter more. 7. Events matter more. 8. Women matter more. It can't be understated - Vince coming back would be catastrophic for the WWE product. Maybe investors won't care, but people will tune out. He overproduced Cole so much that he become the biggest villain on the internet. if people did not like personality from their commentators, Bobby Heenan and Monsoon would not be so beloved.
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asuka007
Fry's dog Seymour
Posts: 23,661
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Post by asuka007 on Jan 9, 2023 1:23:21 GMT -5
The fact that the show is booked around Vince’s whims. What HE likes, what HE thinks is good, what makes HIM laugh, etc.
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Post by "Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay on Jan 9, 2023 2:58:11 GMT -5
Giving no shits at all about continuity.
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Mozenrath
FANatic
Foppery and Whim
Speedy Speed Boy
Posts: 121,989
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Post by Mozenrath on Jan 9, 2023 6:53:47 GMT -5
His inability to book decent faces because it turns out he thinks decency is weakness.
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Post by Cvslfc123 on Jan 9, 2023 8:20:18 GMT -5
That time when Sami Zayn would tell the fans they were toxic and needed to be held accountable for their "crap" was obviously Vince communicating through him to hide his awful booking.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 9, 2023 13:03:07 GMT -5
20 + years of the company being the heel.
It worked for a short amount of time as lightning in a bottle.
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