okay seriously, I've wanted to share my piece on this all week so now that I know I've got a minute or two, here goes:
I don't watch Raw all that much anymore. May catch a segment here and there, certainly read recaps and feel like I understand the angles a whole lot better taking a few minutes to read about what goes on in the opening promo than 20 minutes of rolling your eyes and wondering when it would end... This week, I went out of my way to catch the show, because WWE hooked me in to watch something. A Divas' title match with very high - arguably historic - stakes where the defending champion Charlotte faces off against Nikki Bella.
Just to get the controversial opinion out of the way: I see money in Nikki Bella. Lots of it right now. She's the perfect antagonist right now and has all the ways to get heel heat in 2015 nailed down: she's a model first, wrestler second, the star of a heavily-pushed reality TV show "they're using her to get over", having catfights with Kelly Kelly as the last remaining symbols of the "piss break" era best left forgotten that the company's trying to erase, she's sleeping with the top star and has plenty of backstage pull, and, no matter how much she's improved, she's simply not as talented as the other girls. She's the perfect chick to play Honky Tonk Man with the title before one of the other girls Warriors her in impressive fashion and feel like that would get a HUGE pop. There's some merits to having her break the record, this was just not one of them.
Shoot, if you handed me the books, I'd book Brie to run in for the DQ in less than a minute. Nikki retains. Confetti falls from the ceiling, Alicia runs out with wine coolers, HUGE sarcastic celebration for this DQ, they hoist Nikki up the way they did while the faces give their best annoyed faces before clotheslining her from the top, Charlotte spears her in half, challenge set for NoC. You wouldn't be very happy with that, either. But at least then the heat would go onto Nikki and we'd avoid whatever this was. All this accomplished was making the company look bad. In kayfabe, they can't keep their rules straight because they were able to restart a match just THIRTY MINUTES LATER. Out of it, they overbooked a complete clustermess which and got a fanbase that is losing patience with Raw faster than Peyton Manning is losing media support yet another reason to change the channel, to the benefit of no characters whatsoever...
Lets go back in time a bit and visit one of the lesser stated reasons that the fans love NXT so much and, consequently, get so upset when stuff like this goes down on the main product. When NXT was rebranded, it was in the era of "Well, AJ's a pretty good lil' worker, I mean, if you mute the crowd and really pay attention, there's a good amount of solid action in there..." in the division, but there was still dead silence in the arenas. Then this unknown girl from Norwich kicking all sorts of ass and delivering some devastating-looking offense and whispers started to emerge of "seriously, there's this woman in wrestling you need to check out!" It was unheard of at the time. A real potential star in the Diva's division, the first in many, many years. Then you see Summer Rae go from LFL player to ring announcer to playing a very strong character and playing said character out in the ring as the perfect antagonist, and cult hero Emma showing off how Lance Storm can train women, too, before they got their big special, and at NXT Arrival this little "women's revolution" for the newly-created Women's Championship (where "women" became a term of endearment") got a big stage and bright lights and Paige vs Emma delivered to be one of the best women's matches (at the time) in WWE history, and the long-awaited moment that we can show a WWE special event to our friends and watch the girls come on and say "No, really! You oughta stay and watch this, it's pretty cool!"...
That's great on it's own, but the byproduct of that is fan confidence. If you make the fans happy, they'll be more than happy to be happy to watch what you're doing. When a former indy jobber who seems to know a few moves while seeming very nervous in front of the camera shows up, it's not the end. Be patient, eventually that girl will become the Boss and be simply untouchable in every regard. When an Irish girl doing jig-taunts in the ring happens, wait a couple of months, she'll show up in orange hair and run out with metal horns before flying around opponents delivering devastating highkicks and armbars. When a former gymnast with no wrestling experienced is rushed onto TV because of her last name... in less than 3 months, they'll trust her with 16 minutes of non-stop action with Natalya and they'll put on what's unanimously- at that point - the best women's match that has ever happened... at that point because at every single show, the women's division has one upped that match. Yeah. It got even better. And better. And... I didn't even bring up Bayley...
We watched these girls grow up in the business right in front of our eyes. We watched the Revolution happen to where the women's match went from "piss break" to the biggest guarantee of a show-stealer on any wrestling show anywhere. It's been truly tremendous, but the downside of NXT is while we see these chicks be nurtured and loved and cared for, they've gotta leave the cuckoo's nest eventually and go up to a Raw show where fans are angry and jaded and cynical and the women have always been second rate... even though the fans believe in the girls and their talent... And then we get this spectacle of why.
I don't know what happened here, but you're free to believe whichever dirtsheet report you want to believe about it. The most famous one was John Cena going up to Vince to politic his way to getting Nikki to keep the strap. The obvious one is they're upset about CM Punk leaving and wanted to spite him. I'll throw out the famous UseYourVoice tweet AJ sent directed at Stephanie, assuming that because Steph had to be the last one sticking her nose out to drive the dagger home on AJ's title reign and also why Lesnar isn't still WWE champion... But what do all of these have in common? None of this has anything to do with wrestling. None of it has anything to do with the on screen product or the characters or stories or even the matches themselves, we watched the last 300 days of a Divas' division revolve around either a guy in jorts satsifying his sexual fetishes or the sick vengeful mind of one of the higher-ups to spite someone who hasn't been in the company in almost 2 years. That's why people are so upset after watching all this amazing progress in NXT, it's still mindboggling to watch THIS on Raw.
But... in a weird way, maybe it's for the best. There was a match earlier this year when Paige tagged with Emma to face the Bella Twins, and the sisters ganged up on Emma and pinned her in 30 seconds. It wasn't much of a match, but an angle. Paige was being bullied and beaten down on a weekly basis by Brie and Nikki, and needed a friend to help her out, but Paige couldn't find many people willing to help a weirdo like her (bitches be judgemental, right?) so she was stuck digging at the bottom of the barrel for the class clown, who wound up not being any help at all. She needed much better. Someone else was going to have to ride in on her white horse to save the day... and that person was AJ Lee, and the reunited Frenimies (ugh) took out the trash at 'Mania and the good girls sometimes win...
The fans didn't see this as an angle, though, as GiveDivasAChance was trending on Twitter after people blasted this, saying "How could you have such little faith in the girls? Just 30 seconds? If you gave them more time and brought in more talented girls, we'd have a GREAT division! Look at NXT, they're doing it right, your show sucks!" while failing to see this was supposed to be an angle they're comparing with a showcase, partially because it was an angle buried in the "Is this show over yet?" portion of a Raw show that's two hours too long... So in this case, WWE DID listen to the fans. They called up the NXT girls. They gave them the long matches we've grown to love on NXT. Bah god, the Womens' Revolution on NXT has hit the big stage!!!... and now fans saw Bayley vs Sasha compared with "wins and losses not mattering" as Nikki herself said and shit all over the Hashtag-Divas-Revolution and wish they could get stories like that...
Anyway, stay tuned right here on Monday Night Raw for Sting vs Big Show in 2015!
Snow, out.
