It was only a few weeks ago where I was specifically expressing my state of “meh” in regards to the Wrestlemania card and the buildup associated with it. However, kudos to WWE for doing a decent enough job with Raw this week because I now find myself feeling a sense of excitement about Wrestlemania. However, I’m sure the real culprit of those feelings are more due to April 7th getting closer.
As almost always, I sing the praises of Our Punk of Perpetual Baddie and his promo work to open up the show. Sure the feud seems to be now surrounding the possession of an urn but its seems like Punk’s promos could validate almost anything these days. I essentially took that promo as Punk teaching everyone a lession on just how silly over-symbolizing inanimate objects can be, but that could just be me ironically over-analyzing it.
I go back and forth on how little Undertaker is talking. On one hand, he’s kind of allowing his record and reputation speak for itself in a lot of cases. However, Taker is not exactly terrible on the mic and I wouldn’t mind seeing him in a spar of words with Punk. The only downside to that is I’ll get pretty tired with his typical “Taker tone.” The challenging issue about this story really is the colliding of these two personalities. We have a guy in Punk whose tone is heavily sarcastic and his rhetoric is very “smark” friendly and believable. On the other hand, we have guy in Undertaker whose character demands a certain suspension of disbelief from the audience. You put those two types of characters together and the dynamic could play on the line of absurd if one were to lean too heavily to either side. So far, Punk and Michael Cole came close to that line in reference to the urn but both kinda bought it back. I was going to give Taker credit for coming out without the jacket to sort of play down the mythical creature bit but causing the lights to die at his command sort of ruins that.
Also, my fondness for Fandango seems to be growing as we learn of his match against Chris Jericho at Wrestlemania. Don’t get me wrong, the milked his debut and refusal to wrestle thing for a bit too long but I’m digging the character he’s developed (I still think it’s sort of an extension from his NXT Redemption character). He’s sort of a heel version of Brodus except for being a lot smaller and actual wrestling ability. Besides, Jericho facing him at Mania sort of gives us that “Jericho seal of approval” and that’s pretty much good enough for me.
I’m actually sort of exciting for Twice in a Lifetime now too. I know, I know, everyone take a breath and get over the shock of it.
With the exception of that mess of an ending, the final segment of Raw actually added quite a bit to the match, at least it did for Cena. We actually got a human moment out of that robot of a character we know as Super Cena in his admission of how he lost last year’s match and Rock’s response of essentially “yeah whatever, get over it” exemplified Rock’s inability to further proves his inability to deviate, in any way, from a character using the same material from 10 years ago. Now what does all this have to do with how anything plays out at Wrestlemania? Probably not much but resonates with me being a writer. A story is a really good way to hook me into a feud, especially when new things are added into a longer feud. Hence why I had such a low tolerance for the summer feuds for the WHC the past few years because they all involved feuds that never changed and never built anything to sustain and justify such a long feud. Cena having an actual reason other than “I have to” hooks me in a little bit better than just seeing their faces plastered next to each other.
What I’m still not excited for:
Brock and HHH. Nothing’s changed since Summerslam. The two men just attack and threaten to kick each other’s ass. That’s the entire storyline. That’s it. This is a match that just takes up card space when they are trying way to hard to make it a marquee match. I saw it once, it was incredibly underwhelming. No thank you.
Del Rio and Swagger. Swagger got one week of heat at the start and it’s gotten absolutely stale ever since because you can only cut hate speech so many ways before it gets repetitive and boring. Sure, they’ve added more to it in an attempt to draw more interest by Swagger targeting Ricardo but I keep getting this feeling that they’ve drawn from that well too many times. The challenge of this scenario is drawing depth out of two characters that are about as shallow as any. Both have made attempts to add depth to their character, Del Rio now cares about Ricardo and Swagger now cares about booting illegal immigrants, but it just isn’t enough, not for me.
That still leaves 3 matches (of what’s been made official) that are still in the “meh” zone but considering how I felt about the entire card a few weeks ago, I’d say that was a win for WWE.
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Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do twice,
Chris
The Answer: Chris Masters is a super hero that needs to get resigned to WWE ASAP. What did you say? No, that’s just how I feel about him. Why? Did something happen recently?
