10 Modern Wrestling Tropes We're Totally Sick Of
Robotic commentary, overused dives, and everything in between.
It's easy to start feeling like you've seen everything in professional wrestling, particularly in this modern era.
Every major promotion in the world is available within a few clicks. The WWE Network is an impossibly vast treasure trove, AEW is on FITE for those who can't catch it on live TV, NJPW World unlocks Japan's biggest promotion, sites like IndependentWrestling.tv give smaller stages a big platform. Even YouTube is stuffed to the gills with free, legal content. Spend any time dipping into these deep, deep services and you'll likely see every recurring theme, motif, or device a thousand times over.
Here, we break the most tedious of these overused tropes down. These are the bits and pieces that leave us sighing, rolling our eyes, and losing our suspension of disbelief. They aren't all inherently bad (though some definitely are), but each has been made trite and ineffective thanks to frequent spamming.
Some of the tropes within would be fine if used in moderation and yes, there are only so many ways to tell a wrestling story, so some repetition is to be expected. Still, the extent with which they're currently leaned on breeds tedium...
10. "OHHHHH MYYYYYYY!"
Michael Cole does exactly what his employers ask of him. In this regard, he is the perfect employee and should be absolved of much of the blame for his robotic commentary style. What he's doing is nothing more than what his boss wants, with his constant sloganeering, rehashed catchphrases, and formulaic shilling consequences of the restrictive framework under which every WWE main roster announce must work.
But good grief, is it hard to listen to.
"It's Boss time!" is tedious and "here comes 'The Big Dog!'" more so. Nothing, however, comes close to "ohhhh myyyyyy!", Cole's go-to line whenever someone returns.
You can set your watch by it. Really, there are times when SmackDown's play-by-play man might well be replaced by a monkey operating a soundboard, so repetitive is his approach. Again, this is the production style's fault, not Cole's, as each of his fellow announcers is afflicted by the same condition to varying degrees. When Cole steps away, a Tom Phillips or Vic Joseph will step up and become just as tedious.
At least you feel what Mauro Ranallo is saying on NXT, as eyeroll-worthy as his reference spam can be.