WRESTLEMANIA 33 POST SHOW THREAD

[OSJ]

Oyaji gets it... Like I said earlier, the smart thing to do is turn Roman to monster heel for about a year and then do the self-rediscovery redemption bit to turn him face. It would be huge. The short-term loss in merchandise sales during the heel phase will be readily eclipsed by the boom when he turns baby. 

As far as ringwork, Reigns is very much like Lex Luger and that's not a bad thing, he's exactly as good as whoever he's working with. He's probably not the guy to call the match, but he can keep up with whatever he's asked to do. I have absolutely no problem with a guy that can do that. History is showing that Lex was a hell of a lot better than most of us gave him credit for at the time. His mishandling by VKM was one of the great tragedies of wrestling. 

[Greggulator]

12 minutes ago, Oyaji said:

Dude, they booked him to get those big moments. Of course he was going to get cheered loudly and stand out! People love a bad ass.

If you can't understand why people are rejecting Roman Reigns, who is so manufactured and phony...

 

I think the smart-mark audience reaction to Reigns is manufactured and phony. It just became this smart-mark theme for no real reason whatsoever. The guy got big moments scripted for him and delivered. Just like every other guy who got to the top of the card. 

It's just that when he was shelved, a lot of smark marks started hating on him for no real reason -- they certainly weren't hating on him a few months earlier. It became a trend for no real reason whatsoever. There were like two bad promos written for him. But everyone was hating on him before those promos. 

There's no real reason for it at all other than wrestling fans are a bunch of tools.

[peterien]

Few points from what ive watched so far;

AJ/Shane had no right to be that good. 

AJ is the man.

I dislike Nikki Bella more than any female (yes, including Steph) on the roster so that proposal was lost completely on me.

Steph wearing leather is always a winner in my books.

Hunter is one of my all time favourites so he can live out his weird dress up fantasies all he wants.

That Hardys return is one of the best things I've ever seen.

[Overly Critical Man]

If 1987 Lex Luger showed up in the WWE today, he'd be the biggest blue chip prospect with the biggest push in the history of professional wrestling. Man, was he great. Vince would be so happy he wouldn't even know what to do with himself.

[JohnnyJ]

Why do i care about shield matches? That was three years ago. A lot of people have been very over at specific points. I don't see anyone advocating for Kofi Kingston as the face of the company.

Reigns is great in the ring and keeps on getting better. That doesn't change the fact that he has stink on him. The idea that people are arguing it is imagined is insulting. 

[Roman]

I only watched a forty-minute 'highlight reel' of this show, but even that crushed me as much as listening to Bonnie "Prince" Billy's entire discography in one go.

[OSJ]

1 minute ago, JohnnyJ said:

Why do i care about shield matches? That was three years ago. A lot of people have been very over at specific points. I don't see anyone advocating for Kofi Kingston as the face of the company.

Reigns is great in the ring and keeps on getting better. That doesn't change the fact that he has stink on him. The idea that people are arguing it is imagined is insulting. 

Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

[Overly Critical Man]

1 minute ago, JohnnyJ said:

Why do i care about shield matches? That was three years ago. A lot of people have been very over at specific points. I don't see anyone advocating for Kofi Kingston as the face of the company.

Reigns is great in the ring and keeps on getting better. That doesn't change the fact that he has stink on him. The idea that people are arguing it is imagined is insulting. 

Yeah, the stink of SUCCESS.

 

[Dolfan in NYC]

Reading this thread has made me realize how much wrestling fans despise other wrestling fans.

Christ on sale. 

[odessasteps]

1 minute ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

Reading this thread has made me realize how much wrestling fans despise other wrestling fans.

Christ on sale. 

Rippa's Rule # 1

[JohnnyJ]

3 minutes ago, Overly Critical Man said:

Yeah, the stink of SUCCESS.

 

[Fallacy!]

22 minutes ago, Greggulator said:

I think the smart-mark audience reaction to Reigns is manufactured and phony. It just became this smart-mark theme for no real reason whatsoever. The guy got big moments scripted for him and delivered. Just like every other guy who got to the top of the card. 

It's just that when he was shelved, a lot of smark marks started hating on him for no real reason -- they certainly weren't hating on him a few months earlier. It became a trend for no real reason whatsoever. There were like two bad promos written for him. But everyone was hating on him before those promos. 

There's no real reason for it at all other than wrestling fans are a bunch of tools.

The reason is that the WWE itself - through its onscreen booking of authority figures and its off-screen perception by smart fans – is the biggest heel the company actually has.

Wrestling fans in 2017 hate nothing more than being told what to like, so as soon as it became apparent that the "machine" was behind Roman Reigns, it was over for him with a large segment of the audience.

Painfully transparent booking like Vince and Hunter being in collusion to stop Roman Reigns from winning the title (fucking really?) didn't help, and having idiots like JBL and Peter Rosenberg whine about how great Roman Reigns is and how stupid people are for booing him just makes matters worse. They think this stuff helps. They think the more people that come out and tell you how great Roman Reigns is, or the more Hall of Famers who tell him it's "his yard now", that all of the sudden we'll all magically wake up one day and go, "fuck man, you know what, this guy really is just the greatest."

Fans today are too "smart" to the business for that kind of booking to work. So no, it's not for no reason, there's a perfectly valid and legitimate reason for it.

[jaedmc]

6 minutes ago, jaedmc said:

People on this very board were praising Roman Reigns for outshining the other two. They all thought he was supposed to be carried by Seth and Dean but that wasn't the case at all. Actually I believe this was the year that I ran March Madness and Roman Reigns out did the other two easily.

I went back to check and that year the Final Four was CESARO vs. ROMAN REIGNS, and DANIEL BRYAN vs. GOLDUST. People believed in him. 

Of course Cesaro went on to face Daniel Bryan in the finals. I don't remember how that one went.

My point is, What Changed? It wasn't Roman Reigns. He's still awesome. Still doing his thing. It's you fans. You decided to turn your backs on him for Daniel Bryan. And where did that get you? Well enjoy chanting for hero on Total Bellas. Now it's AJ Styles. Enjoying thinking the Today Show is going to let AJ Styles on with that hair cut. It's not Roman Reigns fault that he's a real life Khal Drogo.

 

[Jiji]

1 minute ago, jaedmc said:

I went back to check and that year the Final Four was CESARO vs. ROMAN REIGNS, and DANIEL BRYAN vs. GOLDUST. People believed in him. 

Of course Cesaro went on to face Daniel Bryan in the finals. I don't remember how that one went.

My point is, What Changed? It wasn't Roman Reigns. He's still awesome. Still doing his thing. It's you fans. You decided to turn your backs on him for Daniel Bryan. And where did that get you? Well enjoy chanting for hero on Total Bellas. Now it's AJ Styles. Enjoying thinking the Today Show is going to let AJ Styles on with that hair cut. It's not Roman Reigns fault that he's a real life Khal Drogo.

 

Yeah, dude. Nothing changed.

Sufferin' succotash

[jaedmc]

Context was completely different. Still the same guy.

[Beech27]

A lack of character development over several years isn't usually considered a good thing. Ditching the last vestiges of the Shield (the vest, the music, etc.) would be a good step. (Fwiw, I think Roman is really good. Maybe not "future of the company!!!" good, but I don't have the metrics they use to decide those sorts of things, nor do I really care. His matches entertain me. That's enough.)

[Fallacy!]

But it is funny going back to read that Final Four thread and everyone being like "wait, how the fuck did Roman Reigns get this far?"

[jaedmc]

7 minutes ago, Fallacy! said:

But it is funny going back to read that Final Four thread and everyone being like "wait, how the fuck did Roman Reigns get this far?"

My god even then he suffered from being too successful. And those votes were democratic. It wasn't like the guy making the bracket fixed it for him. And yet even when the fans got their way they hated it. 

[Fallacy!]

6 minutes ago, jaedmc said:

My god even then he suffered from being too successful. And those votes were democratic. It wasn't like the guy making the bracket fixed it for him. And yet even when the fans got their way they hated it. 

 

Several names in that thread no longer post here, and I think we can squarely place the blame for that on Roman Reigns.

[steve]

People initally disliked Roman because Vince chose him over DB.

99% of people probably don't even remember that now though. They've just been doing it so long, that's how it is.

[jstout]

I actually ... kinda liked this show? Last year's was just a slog, a never-ending test of patience and will. This one was better. That said, I didn't watch everything (life is WAY too short for Orton-Wyatt), so that might have helped.

Shane got a little too much offense against the company's best technical wrestler. You knew he was gonna get in his silly spots, but some of those MMA-inspired doohickeys were borderline embarassing.

I was so pumped for Jericho-Owens after that great story, and while it had its fun moments, it underwhelmed.

The Raw tag title ladder match was just a blast.

The crowd HATED HATED HATED Rollins-HHH until the end, when they managed to get sucked back into the match. The Stephanie table bump was cute, the match was really well-done and I managed to shake off my sincere "meh" for Rollins enough to really like the match.

Goldberg-Lesnar would at least have to be in the top 10 of greatest sub-10-minute matches ever. Match was just perfectly laid out. Kinda surprised Goldberg didn't get a hero's exit, but they had to save that for later.

Reigns-Taker was more of a "what happens with the sideshow?" match than a traditional main event. Would Orlando fans boo shit out of Reigns? (Not really, they didn't really seem to care much one way or the other, which is a bad sign for WWE.) Would Reigns snap and go full-blown heel (kept waiting and waiting for this, never really happened, with a little bit of  a tease during the chairshots)?

I wonder if the "fuck it, this guy sucks, BOOOOOO! BOOOOO!" in the past for Reigns is now going to turn into "fuck it, he sucks, he's not going away and there's nothing we can do. Fuck him. (crickets)." Guess I'll find out tonight on Raw.

[Niners Fan in CT]

1 hour ago, OSJ said:

Some of y'all are forgetting an important aspect of human nature. When we go shopping to buy a certain thing, or just shopping in general, we don't like leaving empty-handed.  If Cena merch is no longer a part of the equation because he's retired, sales of whoever is being pushed will go up. Here's an example of how this works: There's a new Caitlin R. Kiernan book coming out which I want, I thought it had already been released, so I clicked on my favorite bookseller's catalog to search for it and buy it. Apparently it isn't out yet, I'm already predisposed to spending forty bucks, I'm on a website that's listing a bunch of other cool shit. What do I do? I buy two other books $18 and $20 respectively and call it good. That's the same thing that's going to happen at WWE merch tables, "Oh, you don't have any Cena shirts? Okay, gimme a Roman Reigns "Believe That" shirt!"

I'm sure this probably IS happening but I don't understand some of the arguments going on here.  First, who are the people here that are complaining about Roman beating Taker?  I don't think anyone here gave a crap about it.  Maybe elsewhere people are bitching, so they can go elsewhere and have that argument with those people.

I've accepted that they aren't going to position AJ as the face of the company even though I think that would be the best move. But that doesn't make me or anyone else a Roman hater. Whoever it was who said Roman is Orton or Luger or Batista is spot on.  But that's not the push he is receiving.

[Dolfan in NYC]

10 minutes ago, jstout said:

I wonder if the "fuck it, this guy sucks, BOOOOOO! BOOOOO!" in the past for Reigns is now going to turn into "fuck it, he sucks, he's not going away and there's nothing we can do. Fuck him. (crickets)." Guess I'll find out tonight on Raw.

This was the part that was most striking to me about the final match. Once Reigns kicked out of the tombstone, every single person in the crowd knew what was going to happen. So, the vicious boos and "bullshit" chants eventually just became... silence. (Especially after the botched tombstone reversal.)

Goddamnit guys... The motherfucking UNDERTAKER just got retired by the company's ace.

It wasn't shocking, it wasn't a huge moment, it just happened. And the crowd reacted that way. This is a bad sign.  

[Captain Kronos]

24 minutes ago, steve said:

People initally disliked Roman because Vince chose him over DB.

99% of people probably don't even remember that now though. They've just been doing it so long, that's how it is.

*raises hand*

I took most of 2015-16 off from wrestling. But the first thing I remembered when I started watching again was, "I hate Roman Reigns". I watched his HIAC match with Ambrose, and I was shitting all over RR in my comments on PWO (or maybe it was here). Then someone made some intelligent rebuttals to my mindless hate. It forced me to rethink the guy, and I am working on catching up with his matches (about to watch vs Balor from July 25, 2016 right now).

Because I had previously made an intentional decision to get over myself and give the guy a proper chance, I was able to appreciate last night's Taker match. Was it perfect? No. But Reigns had a thankless task, and he did a great job making the best of it by helping Taker go out on probably the best way possible (given Taker's exposed physical limitations last night). 

Edited April 3, 2017 by Kronos
grammar cleanup

[Niners Fan in CT]

1 hour ago, Greggulator said:

The thing that changed was when he was injured. All of a sudden, people did the whole "They're going to ram him down our throats!" deal. Yeah, they should. He's a big dude who is athletic as all get-out who has had nothing by great matches with almost everyone he's up against. But a lot of people wanted to hate him for no real reason. 

I don't remember it happening this way.  I remember 3 things that people hate and none of them are really Roman's fault but they exist. The first was that Roman Reigns got Daniel Bryan's spot. We all thought that was stupid but in hindsight it was the right move because Bryan can't even get into the ring anymore. The second and third reasons for people turning on Roman are EXACTLY why people turned on Cena.  The "overcome the odds" shit doesn't work when a guy is never positioned as an underdog. It's repetitive and boring. It worked 30 years ago. Now it doesn't. Lastly, they changed the Roman character you are describing. He was a man of few words. An ass-kicker. That's what he did. Now he cuts these cheesy terrible comedy promos and it's a channel changer.