I really just want to add an addendum to my last post about my frustrations with the Bray Wyatt character. I caught in the replay a segment I had missed from Smackdown, in which Bray Wyatt accused Chris Jericho of having promised to always be there for his fans, and then abandoning them. To which I say, really dude? This is the best they can do with a character they build to such grand heights?…
Author: Andrea
Imagine the narrative complexity of the fatal fourway that awaits us at Battlground on Sunday. Any man can pin any man and become the champion. At first it will start more or less as two against two. But then it will start to break down, there will have to be a parallel storyline outside the ring. Cain will most likely turn on Randy Orton, that much has been telegraphed. There will be battles within battles.…
Lana is a character who can fill a stadium with ironies that refuse to resolve themselves. She lectures us, America, about our tendency to always solve our problems with violence, that we are saviors who cannot save ourselves. She likes to tell us that our country is crumbling, warns that pride always comes before the fall. Mean girl as she is, she’s not wrong about these things. Then, inverting her lecture into a ruthless satire,…
The WWE Network turned up a gem: HBK vs. the Undertaker at Wrestlemania 25 in 2008, smack in the middle of the epoch when I lost track of wrestling. We didn’t even have cable for a while there. HBK came down from above surrounded by heavenly white pyro and choir of angels music, exquisitely dressed in a white western outfit looking at first like a flamboyant man of God and then perhaps like God himself.…
A markish confession: the biggest reason I’ll never turn on John Cena is his entrance music. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a vaguely ethnic-sounding intro with a hook featuring horns. The trilling guy who says something in Spanish I can’t quite catch is pretty rousing as well. So the trilling guy and the horns do their thing, and I’m all primed to be excited about whoever comes out on stage. I will…
I see a rather interesting place that this could go — John Cena finds himself in a quandary. He will somehow be in a position “to play the role of hero while everything around him burns,” as Bray Wyatt described him, and what will be burning is Roman Reigns. Will he sacrifice the belt or let Roman Reigns burn? The answer to this question will determine the next step for his character. If he doesn’t…
Though of course I was cheering for Roman Reigns, I’ve decided I do support a John Cena championship at this time. I wholeheartedly support the tweening of John Cena. This is rather unique — Hulk Hogan, if you will remember, turned heel when his fans were getting sick of him. And his whole complaint, if I remember correctly, was that his fans were turning on him, so screw them. John Cena, on the other hand,…
There’s something wonderful about Sandow dressed as Abraham Lincoln losing to Big E. Very postmodern. Such a complex irony to unravel. Quoth Lana: “You foolish American. Don’t you know that pride cometh before the fall?” She speaks hard-luck wisdom to us in the guise of a mean girl heel. Really, she’s offering tough post-Soviet love. I gush: Roman Reigns, entering not from the stage, but through the audience. And Dean Ambrose, too, and the Shield…
One of the most exhilarating types in wrestling to watch is He Who Cannot Be Kept Down. The Comeback Kid, we might call him. We now have this in Roman Reigns. We’ve needed one of these for a long time. Not Daniel Bryan — he is the underdog. We need the persecuted hero who always prevails in the end. These are difficult times, aren’t they? We’re prone to following false prophets, like Bray Wyatt. We…
I think many wrestling fans who were watching that night more than a decade ago remember when Brock Lesnar said “Where’s Funaki?” It became something of a cult meme, and that was back when only the most effete intellectuals I knew were calling things memes. Why was this tiny moment so memorable to us? Brock Lesnar was so scary when he debuted! He was a snarling, teeth-gnashing, bicep-flexing meat-headed monster, a goon who would beat…