I think they’re building up Rusev to be Cena’s next rival. They’ve been feeding the all-American hero characters to him one by one, and once Big Show jobs to him at HIAC, there won’t be much further for him to go.
Poor Rusev. Look what happened to Brag Wyatt. The building star rises to the upper card only to be knocked back to mid-card by Cena. Something needs to change.
I gotta say, I think Bray’s descent was entirely on him and had nothing to do with Cena.
His character got REAL boring REAL fast. It was broken down to long-winded rants about nothing to a particular guy for no real reason…then he loses a PPV match.
Then goes to the next guy for no real reason…rants and raves about salvation and evil…then loses at a PPV
Rinse and Repeat…
It isn’t all on him that he’s being booked to lose rather than being booked strong.
BONESAW is READY!!!
Sorry, I’ll let myself out.
Well, to be fair, none of it is anyone’s fault since they’re just characters in a giant play 
I was just talking from a kayfabe perspective
This isn’t exactly right, from what little I understand, though it’s closer to this than it used to be.
If this were a normal scripted TV show, you’d be right; nobody ever puts it on the actor when their character gets shot or put on the bus. In, say, 20 years, if WWE goes the way I think Vince and some other folks want it to go, this’ll be true of [del]wrasslin’[/del] sports entertainment as it is of any other show on TV.
As it used to be, and as it still is to some extent, so far as us marks can tell, it’s not as simple as just auditioning for the role of Bray Wyatt and then playing him up on the “stage”, and if the writers decide to write him out, then that’s just how it goes.
Instead, what we see every week is responsive to an array of factors that are changing day to day. Some of them we can see: We can tell how over a guy is getting based on the crowd reactions on Raw and PPVs. (I’m not sure that they don’t “sweeten” these as well, but we’ll operate under the assumption that we get honest crowd reactions on “live” events.) We can tell if a guy is “maximizing his minutes” or not. Some of them we can’t: We don’t know who’s pissed who off backstage, and we don’t know what the hell makes Vince tick.
Between those and a thousand other things, we get the product we watch every week. And since we don’t know what’s going on in the [del]booking meetings[/del] writers’ rooms, and we usually don’t know when Vince has demanded a re-write thirty minutes before air, all we can do is look at the tea leaves we get every week and try to figure it out. It’s part of what makes wrestling fandom unique: We don’t just get to critique the decisions the writers make, we get to speculate about why the hell they made those decisions and fantasy-book alternate decisions we would make if somebody had the good sense to put US in charge!
Anyway, when you look at Bray and the Family Wyatt’s booking from Mania to today in that light, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem to make much sense, which is why we all speculate about burials and a rather short-sighted Vince and so on.
Jericho’s newest book is a great read, just like the two before it.
Isn’t the newest Wyatt rumor that he’s freeing Harper and Rowan (only one of which will probably have a future) so that he can adopt new people…and that it’s going to be the Ascension?
I don’t like that idea and here’s why…the Ascension have the GREATEST ENTRANCE MUSIC EVER. It’s so badass and I’m going to miss it if they become Wyatts
I can see them bringing up the Ascension as Wyatt’s new goon squad without changing their gimmick. They’ve already got the pseudo-mystical ramblings about the Fall of Man and TOTAL ANNIHILATION going for them.
I’ve read today that NXT’s next live special, Takeover 3: The Legend of Hunter’s Gold, will be airing on December 11th. I’ve stayed away from spoilers for the upcoming tapings, but at this time I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be seeing Neville vs. Zayn for the title, something involving Hideo Itami and Finn Balor (possibly a shot at the tag titles?), and probably Charlotte vs. Sasha Banks for the Women’s title.
The rumor going around is that the following special, Takeover 4: NXT Takes Manhattan, will take place in the Bay area on the Thursday before Wrestlemania. I don’t know whether that’ll bear out or not, but it would definitely be a great way to expose NXT to more viewers, and possibly even set up an NXT title match for the big event itself.
Wait, Takeover 3: The Takers Become The Taken won’t have a Charlotte/Bayley match for the title? And honestly I’d think a Bayley/Sasha battle would happen because of the way that Sasha is treating/disrespecting Bayley. But I guess if the thought is to call up Charlotte to the big show than you would have her drop it to Sasha who would in-turn drop it to Bayley.
Although I am all for Neville vs. Zayn for the title, and if Kent…Hideo is happening against Prin…Finn than he needs to be debuting soon, any word on that?
Lastly, is Takeover 4: STaken Not Stirred gonna feature Kevin Steen finally? Or is he being given a stupid name too
HAHAHHAHAHA!!!
In this article, JBL calls Michael Cole Maggle!
That’s priceless!
DON’T BE GETTIN INTO NO FIGHTS NOW MAGGLE
Is anyone else seeing the “RKO out of nowhere!” vines?
WWE homepage has a bunch, Deadspin has a bunch, and you can always see good ones on Youtube (the Giraffe!)
I sit here giggling like an idiot for every one!
Well, since nobody else has commented on it, here’s my 2 cents on this week’s NXT:
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Sami Zayn picks up a big victory over Tyson Kidd. This was a good match, and it’s good to see Zayn finally not choking in the main event - he needs to be built up some over the next few weeks if he’s going to be in the title scene for the next live special.
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The Lucha Dragons had another impressive match, but I’m not sure this duo has legs for a long-term run. Presumably the objective here is to build up Kallisto to where he can be successful as a singles wrestler, but that’s hard to do when he and his partner are wearing almost identical costumes. I have a feeling they’ll be dropping the belts to the Vaudevillians at the next special.
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Baron Corbin in another squash. He’s impressive, no doubt about that, and they’ve done a good job putting him over as a powerhouse. It remains to be seen how he’ll do in longer matches, though - hopefully they can put him into a program with another big guy, say Bull Dempsey, that will allow him to work some longer matches.
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In the proud WWE tradition of breaking up tag teams in the vain hopes that one of them will go on to be a blockbuster star like happened that one time 25 years ago, Marcus Luis turns on Sylvester Lafort and beats the crap out of him. With his hair and eyebrows shaved off, Marcus has kind of a Kane-ish quality about him - my guess is that they’ll use this opportunity to repackage him as a monster heel, and leave Sylvester to run with the evil foreigner gimmick.
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Becky Lynch. I like the punk rocker gimmick they’ve given her much better than the stereotypical Irish dancing gimmick she had the first couple weeks she was on TV. She’s definitely a talented wrestler, but I’m not sure they know quite what to do with her - she’s jobbed pretty consistently, she’s lost to Charlotte twice in a row, and it’s a pretty safe bet she’s going to lose to Sasha Banks on next week’s episode. I hope they find a direction for her.
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Carmella. Ugh. I’m really not feeling this - the whole origin story is ridiculous and convoluted even by WWE standards (she goes from being a hairdresser who gets fired despite the fact that video proof of her innocence was streamed online for the world to see, gets enough ring experience to make a TV debut in two weeks, and gets a job because William Regal wants to help Enzo get laid?), and her character is basically just a Jersey Shore-ified face duplicate of Sasha Banks. Her head-scissors submission hold is one of those things that looks impressive, but just plain makes no sense (much like AJ’s Black Widow hold, which the holdee could easily break by walking over to the ropes or just plain falling down), and extremely impractical to boot when you could much more easily go for an armbar. You know it’s bad when the audience is actually cheering on the nameless jobber in an X-Men costume (seriously, even the commentators caught on to that.) The fact that they’ve dedicated so much screentime to building this character tells me it’s someone’s pet project - you know, just like Fandango, Curtis Axel, 3MB, or any of the other countless gimmick characters in wrestling history that have been introduced with massive builds, an inappropriate amount of fanfare, and disproportionate amounts of screentime and then proceeded to go nowhere with it (Glacier comes to mind). I really hope they either seriously revamp the character or just drop this angle altogether.
Louis and LaFort haven’t been around long enough to establish names for themselves and go solo, IMHO. I think they’ll establish a Kane/Daniel Bryan dynamic to the team, where the two hate each other but somehow win matches. Louis doesn’t do much more than grunt and grimace right now, and LaFort needs to be his mouthpiece for the time being. Besides, the arrogant foreigner gimmick gets overused to death, so this new angle could be beneficial for them.
I agree that Carmella’s debut was anticlimactic, but it could be because NXT didn’t have that much air time available. This show had 6 matches when they usually have 4. I’m wondering if they’re going to turn her heel, since all the other NXT ladies except Sasha are faces. Maybe she’ll be the Yoko Ono to Enzo and Cass.
Anyhoo, I hope we don’t have to wait that much longer for Sheen and Devitt to debut.
I’m enjoying Carmella. I think you misread Regal’s motivation–he gave her a shot because he saw her looking impressive in the ring (admittedly after Enzo’s request which was basically about trying to get laid).
So far as I recall, Devitt debuts in this set of tapings, so just be patient a little while longer…
But Devitts new name is soooooooo stupid. I don’t look forward to it because Prince Devitt sounds so deliciously evil, and Finn Balor sounds like a wrestlers name