LogFAQs > #943676694

Aaantlion posted...

Was never a fan, tbh. She's hot, but her delivery and acting always kinda sucked

I cut her slack because the thing most people criticize her for (when she was on commentary) was also the point where she was least capable of being "herself". When you've got an insane old man screaming at you in your headset talking about local medical facilities and championship opportunities and awkward forced marketing slogans for every "sports entertainer" ("He's an ordinary man who does extraordinary things!"), it's hard to be anything other than terrible. Even Michael Cole - the posterboy for literally everything wrong with WWE commentary - is apparently pretty good at the job when he doesn't have Vince in his headset.

That's honestly a problem with a lot of the people in the WWE today - it's not so much that they're all charisma-vacuum dullards who can't act their way out of a paper bag (which is how most of them come across), it's more that when you overscript and overproduce every single line of dialogue, you get wooden performances. Just ask George Lucas.

Renee got a lot of praise for Talking Smack (where Vince had the least influence), and she's got praise for being a pretty good wrestling analyst before she worked for the WWE (it's what got her hired in the first place).

I could easily see her being an effective interviewer/analyst/commentator on AEW if she goes that way, or just a general sports analyst if she decides to try for a job with someone like Fox or ESPN instead (apparently she's gotten multiple offers from legit sports over the years and turned them down to stay with WWE, so if any of those offers are still on the table she's got multiple options).

But then again, Mox is AEW champ, so there might be motivation to go there so the two can travel together and spend more time together.



Aaantlion posted...

As much as I dislike Cena, could you imagine him sitting out all this time when he was the golden boy?

To be fair, if Cena had an immune deficiency disease of some kind where he could literally die from going to work, because his boss was a psychotic lunatic who thinks you can will away all disease if you try hard enough and that everyone who gets sick is just a pussy, I could easily see him saying "You know what? This isn't worth it."

Cena was mostly the company golden boy at a time when he didn't really have all that many other options or obligations. It was before Hollywood was calling, and he was single and healthy and there wasn't a massive pandemic, so obviously when Vince starts furiously masturbating and telling you he's going to push you to the moon and everyone else in the company is going to job to you, you're going to play ball. It's easy to be the corporate guy when you've got nothing to lose and everything to gain (hell, Roman basically WAS that guy until earlier this year).

With Roman, he's got a wife and kids, he's got health issues, and the WWE's "precautions" for dealing with Covid are pretty much a joke that borders on criminal irresponsibility, so he's got way more reasons to just sit out.

It's like when people will occasionally shit on Steve Austin for "taking his ball and going home". Sure, you can say he didn't care about the business or he was being selfish or whatever, but when you actually know all the details, Austin was kind of 100% in the right in that situation, and pretty much fully justified in saying "Yeah, no, that doesn't really work for me". When you say stuff like "Oh, he didn't care about the business/fans/etc!", all you're really doing is parroting back the WWE party line that they used to kind of slander him at the time because god knows no one in that company will ever take responsibility for anything.

Though honestly, why SHOULD anyone ever be loyal to that company in any way? If you're not one of Vince's pre-picked chosen few destined for greatness (or at least destined to be forced into the main event as hard as you can no matter how much the audience may hate you), he's never going to push you, and he's going to go out of his way to suppress and squelch any attempt you make to actually get yourself over. The company has repeatedly shown that it isn't loyal to its own employees (except in a rare few cases), so why should any of them be loyal to it?

Hell, earlier this year was a good example of that, where it was kind of shown that WWE tries to lock employees into these iron-clad contracts where you have pretty much zero rights and they own everything you do and everything you are, while having almost no obligations of their own to you in return. When you sign a 5-year deal, YOU can't leave for 5 years (or even longer, if they start exploiting loopholes to tack injury time onto the end of your term), but THEY can arbitrarily fire you at any point for whatever reason they like with no consequences for themselves. All while forcing you to pay your own travel expenses and refusing to offer you health care because you're an "independent contractor".

At this point, the paycheck is pretty much the only reason TO sign with the WWE. Then you just have to hope they don't decide to fire you a few weeks after you sign because they changed their minds (yay job security!).
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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