There’s been a trend in the WWE where when the good guys or faces wins their brand’s championship, they morph into an ultra goodie-goodie that feels their job as champion is to defend their brand.
It’s a serious flaw in the script to show the weight of the championship and what it means to them
Seth Rollins, Bayley, Becky Lynch, and Rhea Ripley are the most recent wrestlers afflicted with the poor writing using it as an excuse to go out and have cross brand matches.
They want to make their brand relevant, they want to lift it above the others, they must defend their house from intruders and all that overused terminology that’s been heaped on us relentlessly since just before Survivor Series, and they lose their edge. At least then, it was a reasonable storyline. Now, it’s just a poor excuse to cross brands.
No brand separation
This is something we all knew would come about again as Vince McMahon and the WWE work to figure out they can stop hemorrhaging money and fan interest.
Those of us that have been championing no brand separation since forever can now sit back and watch the WWE break their own rules. But what fun would that be?
We could point out that despite the genius in the room, they can’t figure out fans want matches to tell stories and mean something instead of looking like we’re paying a video game.
We could point out there’s no need to change the characters to show the weight of defending their brand every other week and allow the to grow into the championship and make it something special.
We could also point out how a storyline is incredibly boring when it’s repeated over, and over, and over, and over, and…
Yeah, boring, right?
It’s a simple thing: take away the brand separation and it removes the lazy writing using the defense of their brand as a storyline.
Wrestlers want to win the championship
Amazing how so simple a thing has been lost through the years as professional wrestling has taken on the dreaded guise of reality TV.
For those that say we need these different storylines to tell the story, let me ask you this: Where the storyline in an NFL game, a college game, a baseball game, a hockey game, or any other sporting event?
The story is the struggle between the two teams to achieve victory. Smaller stories happen within the games as individuals develop and become a force.
The competition alone is enough to keep fans happy when fun promos are added to it. Of course, this means we have to have good matches where the wrestlers use ring psychology to put on a gripping story that’ll have us craving for more. Sadly, that art is lost on many in the WWE thanks in large part to the idea they need a team of writers to tell them how to build tension instead of studying those that came before like Dusty Rhodes, Ted DiBiase, Bruiser Brody, Roddy Piper, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Bret Hart, and Sting. There are so many names that can be added to the list.
Next time a WWE brand’s champion mentions anything about needing to prove “_____ is the best brand”, remember what wrestling used to look like and what it could look like again.
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