LogFAQs > #895542502

Zeus posted...

Well, excluding Asuka's boring undefeated streak.

You find it boring, but it's probably worth noting that she's only been on the Raw roster for about three months, and yet she's basically the second-most over woman on the brand and probably the third-most over in the company as a whole.

And when she was in NXT, that same type of booking basically made her the most popular woman the brand had.

Booking a wrestler as an unbeatable unstoppable force just tends to work. It's basically how Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior got over in the 80s, it's how Goldberg got over in the 90s (to the point where he still generates huge nostalgia pops, in spite of how badly he was handled in the 00s), and it's basically how they got Braun over in the last year or so (which is why it was especially telling why he lost a bit of heat when he got beat by Brock, and they had to rebuild him a bit from there by having him flip garbage trucks and pulling down rigging).

The downside is that you have to feed those sorts of pushes by sacrificing other wrestlers, but if the alternative is a bland 50-50 booking style where everyone "gets their win back" after every loss, then nobody is getting over anyway.

It's similar to their current perception that "titles don't matter, they're just props" (a statement that shows a profound lack of understanding of what a prop actually IS and what purpose it is supposed to serve narratively) - Road Dogg basically summed up their point of view by saying flat out that "wins and loses don't actually matter". But they do. Because wins are absolutely what helps convince the audience to care about and cheer for a wrestler, while constantly jobbing is the best way to convince the audience to stop caring about that wrestler entirely (just ask Dolph Ziggler).



Zeus posted...

Matt Hardy is *exactly* the kind of wrestler who got over huge at another company and who they brought in as a result. If not for that stupid lawsuit, he may have been a main event guy. After all, WWE's comedy writers would *love* a chance to do goofy shit there.

At this point, that's not even remotely Matt's problem. The lawsuit is over, he's got the rights on lock, and can pretty much be broken whenever he wants (and "woken" in the WWE itself just for merch rights and future-proofing), and they're still fucking him up left, right, and center.

He's the perfect example of the modern WWE's desperate reliance on a team of writers who don't actually seem to be very good at their jobs, at the expense of wrestlers with natural charisma and the ability to get themselves over, who are told to shut up, stop improvising, and just read the lines they're given (which is why so many of them sound so wooden and unnatural in promos these days). The way he's being written in his feud with Bray seems to capture exactly none of the things that got him over as broken in the first place. It feels like there isn't a single writer in their conference room that actually understands what fans liked about Final Deletion and the gimmick as a whole, so they're focused on superficial stuff like Matt laughing, and you can clearly see crowd interest in Matt slowly dying with every passing week.

Bringing in Borash could theoretically help, but I don't see them actually giving him any power or influence in any meaningful way that would change things, so I doubt it will. My crystal ball outlook is that they basically just keep wasting Matt until his contract runs out and he goes back to doing RoH or New Japan shows, resparking fan interest once he can actually start writing his own stuff again.


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