Hooker

I'm sorry, are we claiming that crazed Cactus Jack/Mankind was a bigger star than lovable post-HIAC Mankind/Dude Love/Mick Foley? Yes, I agree that Foley was a product of competition and would be far less likely to get the opportunities he did in the late 90s. In fact, that's exactly my point. Chris Hero looks fine. He just doesn't look like all the other wrestlers on RAW and Smackdown. For some reason, this is a bad thing.

Mick Foley

I thought about Orton, but he's had periods where he's the company's best worker. I think his problem is just not giving a shit.

WWE: Look more bland!

Honestly, not to add to the Danielsonmania around here, but if I could pick one person to have a match with Austin, it would be Daniel Bryan. Benoit matched up so well against Austin during their feud and nobody has the Benoit style in-ring intensity and relentlessness more than Daniel Bryan does. It's such a great foil against Austin's brawling / one-deadly-strike-could-end-it matches. Plus, with Bryan's more MMA-focused style, he wouldn't have to adjust his style much to accommodate Austin's neck issues.

Yeah, DDP/Goldberg is one of the biggest carry jobs I've ever seen, but man was it ever not Goldberg doing the carrying. DDP doesn't deserve to be on a list like this at all. I think part of the problem with this is that if a guy continually has great matches with people due to working with great wrestlers, that guy gets called a great worker as well. So, I'm going to throw out a piece of criteria here: it needs to be a wrestler that never or almost never has/had good matches with similar or worse wrestlers than him/herself. By that criteria, Undertaker stands out huge.

Or Punk whines about everything.

That'll make him look even worse!

I suppose it's too much to hope for WWE employees to get pushes as a result of mainstream press this time?

I'm still angry about that conversation. I think people must have been influenced by the current wrestles-once-a-year-in-a-match-that's-worked-on-for-months-leading-up-to-it Undertaker and not horseshit-effort-against-jobbers-every-week-on-Smackdown Undertaker. Even when Shawn was on auto-pilot, it was a pretty great match.

What can I say? That never really bothered me. The Shawn/Bret Ironman match is actually my favourite wrestling match ever. Most great matches that at 20-30 minutes feel their length, or at least feel like a sizeable chunk of time, but the 60+ of that one just glides effortlessly by for me. It's one of the few matches I would compare to poetry. Intellectually, I realize when people say things like that, they're trying express a frustration they felt reasonably, but emotionally I'm always upset when people complain about that part of the match; how can people get hung up on something so irrelevant and ruin their chance of having the great experience I had watching it?

All the Hentai forums I visit use comic sans.

I would say that Kurt Angle vs Shawn at WrestleMania is Kurt's best match. And I imagine there won't be many to agree with me, but I think the Ironman match is Bret's best match. EDIT: Why on Earth is the forum just butchering my font formatting?

People didn't start booing things they didn't like yesterday. The reason crowds didn't shit on the nWo was because it was riveting. The Wyatt Family, while people on here seem to be half in love with it / half picking it as a hill to die on, is not a riveting angle. Furthermore, in creative mediums, there are a lot of vague terms to describe understood elements of each individual medium. In movies, for instance, there is a general idea of whether something works or not. A movie could load up on exposition (a general no-no) but the movie still works or it could do its best to avoid exposition (a lofty goal) but the movie nevertheless doesn't work. It's a useful vagueness to describe elements of a movie that are intangible or hard to explain. Similarly, in many artistic mediums (movies, books, video games, music, etc.), there is a concept of getting the audience on the entertainer's side. The difference between the puerile jokes in, say, There's Something About Mary and Meet the Spartans would be that the former had already won the audience over while the latter had wasted their time. During the Attitude era, the WWF had certainly won the audience over, but they have long since lost that. An audience back then might have been more receptive to a shallow cult gimmick, but the WWE has been wasting the audience's time with nonsense for so long now that the audience is understandably frustrated and cynical about what the WWE comes up with. You guys have an admirable level of patience with the WWE's storylines (this > The Shield > Ryback > angles I've forgotten > Lord Hentai > more angles I've forgotten > The Nexus), but with the exception of the recent two, which are too new to comment and still in the parent's protective bubble respectively, they've all gotten lost in the wilderness at some point. By all means, be excited about each new thing the WWE comes up with, but let's not pretend that other people's exasperation is anything other than completely understandable and even expected.

The people chanting Husky Harris and Goldberg are less cynical than you are? I'm sort of an outlier. I like wrestling in general, but I watch the WWE with a friend I've known for over half my life who also enjoys watching bad things. Every week, we get together and watch RAW, Impact, and some bad movies / TV we scrounge up. I wouldn't (and don't) watch either WWE or TNA by myself. I get a lot of enjoyment out of this, which is why I continue to watch, but I doubt my experience translates to most fans. Maybe those people have specific wrestlers they like to watch and support, or they've been watching RAW for so long that they feel obliged to keep watching. Who knows? There's also, I would venture, a significant number of people at any live event that don't watch regularly or stopped watching altogether, but have knowledge of what has happened in the past. In any of those scenarios, those people are the types that might shit on something. I'm also going to break from the ranks here and say that, thus far, the Wyatt family is a pretty lame gimmick so far. It seems to be a combination of hillbilly (which is always midcard death) and cult (the last two cults being the failed Punk-led Nexus and the midcard Smackdown act Straight Edge Society). There's very little depth to the gimmick thus far, pretty pretentious, and it's hardly a new direction or change in tone for the WWE writing style. Someone dissatisfied with the product would obviously love to chant something to take it down a peg.

It's a general protest of the WWE product, I'd say. Although, in Albert's case, that gimmick was some of the freshest, most pungent dogshit the WWE has tried to serve up in years.

It's been years since I read the book, but isn't killing Tywin on the last few pages of the book? How is that episode nine?

Do people not realize that there is a significant protest element to fans chanting "Albert," and they aren't just illustrating that they've seen a wrestler before? I agree with the shit the bed and now you lay in it idea, but when the fans reject everything they get served, the cook's at fault. The WWE needs a lot better writing and the paying customers have every right to demand that. You don't get mad at the fans when they boo the home team and you don't get mad at the fans when they tell you your product is garbage. Like it or not, if you're doing a thing with American audiences, they're going to have their say. It's actually one of the best parts of wrestling once you get past the why-can't-people-like-the-things-I-like issue.

Goodbye, rep. We had some good times, you and I. I'll never forget you.