RAW Deal: Truths and no consequences

Joe 'the Grappler' Marsalis

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

RAW Deal: Truths and no consequences
If you’ve ever booed a man for winning a championship in the WWE, it might be because of the WWE’s current penchant for creating monumental matches literally out of thin air

SAN ANTONIO, TX—In order to justify his spot in the Money in the Bank ladder match at… Money in the Bank, the Authority put Roman Reigns through three matches against three different people.

All three matches were for Reigns’s spot in the match. You can look at it two ways: on the anti-Reigns Authority side, the marathon was to put him through hell and force him out of an opportunity. From the perspective of Reigns’s opponents, they were all qualifying matches to get into a match whose participants are arbitrarily decided.

If you’ve ever booed a man for winning a championship in the WWE, or at the very least, did not feel enough emotional satisfaction from it—or maybe even looked at a card with a big match and went “meh,” it might be because of the WWE’s current penchant for creating monumental matches literally out of thin air. 

Take a look at your Money in the Banks, your Elimination Chambers, your Survivor Series, hell, even your Royal Rumbles. You don’t even have to go big; take a look at your Intercontinental Championships, your U.S. Championships, and your Tag Team Championships. If you’ll notice, no one has truly earned anything. Everything is spoon-fed. We’re forced to accept it.

This year’s Money in the Bank match is full of guys who, in theory, could possibly be playing for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship given the chance. No, really—Dolph Ziggler and Sheamus, always been around that picture. Neville? On a roll. Randy Orton and Roman Reigns were just in a title match last month.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? The criteria’s merely “looks like he can main event.”  Granted, the first-ever Money in the Bank match was also an arbitrary gathering of midcarders and upper-midcarders (three world champions and two future world champions, at the time) but those men, I think we can say, were products of tough tribulations. This may be totally subjective, but only half of this year’s pool feels like they’ve earned something—hell, very few on the WWE roster now feels like they’ve earned something. That’s probably why we should make them go through a few more hoops.

Conflict and tension are the wellsprings of drama. If the WWE wants to tell good stories about pro wrestling, it needs to learn how to tell these stories right. We can’t sit here and write everything off because we know that eventually, everything is going a certain way. Some things cannot be resolved in three hours, in two weeks, in one month. This is why the NBA relies on a best-of-7. This is why Daniel Bryan’s victories are the sweetest—the real tension in his career is more intense than anything the WWE can write up.

Maybe we’re the problem, as an audience. Maybe we’re too entitled to things we haven’t earned, so in return we get heroes who earn nothing. But the brain trust is enabling us, too.

 

High spots:

  • The last segment was well-done, I think. The energy was high, and the fact that the Authority never ran interference until that final moment made it even better. That means it was less plodding because they never oversaturated the show with their hijinks, like they always do. That’s how you put over an antagonistic force; for almost every bit of Authority interference, the faces always overcome. So if the faces always overcome, why should we buy the Authority as a threat? The Authority was overcome in the main event, sure, but once is not as bad a loss as thrice. And it definitely helps that Ambrose is just so magnetic as an anti-hero character, more so than Reigns. 

  • If anything, we have to commend Roman Reigns’s conditioning. Even though he was supposed to sell exhaustion, he was still pretty energetic where ordinary people would be sloppy. His charisma lies in his movement, not in his speaking.
  • Prime Time Players vs. New Day should be a lot of fun. 

  • Orton/Sheamus is as good a match as you’d expect it to be, but in the end it’s wrestling for the sake of wrestling. I thought we were avoiding this?
  • Rusev with the performance of the night. If he’s a face now, he’ll be a face I can get behind. But that little soliloquy gave me chills only Walter White could give.

 

Low blows:

  • In a vacuum, Cena’s promo was great. That’s exactly what a face should be, and that’s exactly how a face should justify himself against accusations a guy like Kevin Owens would make. Owens’s accusations do sound like sourgraping, and that’s okay because he’s a heel. The only problem is that once you remove the situation from the vacuum, you know what the deal is. Even if #GoodGuyCena is “who Cena is,” he’s not even written as a character to be that guy. He’s SuperCena, but he doesn’t even go out and carry the burden Superman does. The truth is Cena’s a real human being, and real human beings aren’t always the goody two-shoes they say they are, as much as they try to be. This is where Owens’s gripe feels truest, even if the charisma can protect the idealism and the marketing. In any case, we’ve heard this Cena promo before, and he’ll forget all about it when it’s time to save a friend from a beatdown.

  • For a great actress she is whenever she’s with Rusev, Lana is such a terrible, terrible actress with Ziggler. I don’t know if she’s just not equipped to handle being a babyface or that she has zero chemistry with anyone not named Miroslav Barnyashev, but this just is not working.
  • I want to kill Damien Sandow every time the Meta Powers (because I refuse to call them the Mega Powers) are on-screen. This is not the reaction the WWE should want for a character who got naturally over. (Is Sandow this year’s Zack Ryder?)
  • The less said about Twin Magic, the better. The less said about how they buried their referee there, the better. I swear, Vince needs to retire to that farm upstate.
  • What happens now for King Barrett, Mark Henry, and Bray Wyatt? How is the 2015 King of the Ring on a losing streak? How is the guy who beat the guy who became Intercontinental Champion last Sunday lower on the totem pole and doing nothing meaningful? Why do we even have to ask these questions?
  • One more: why did we devote three minutes to a Sonic commercial? 

Do you listen to podcasts? Would you want to listen to a local podcast about pro wrestling? If the answers to most of those questions—especially that last one—are yes, then you should check out the cleverly-named Smark Gilas-Pilipinas Podcast—featuring Mellow 94.7 DJ and PWR General Manager Stan Sy, wrestling writer Romeo Moran, and all-around multimedia person (and voice of PWR) Raf Camus! On their latest episode, they talk to stand-up comedian, Mr. Suplado himself, Stanley Chi! Listen to it here! – Rappler.com

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!