10 Times WWE Fans Were Outraged At WrestleMania
Outragin' Climax.
This - pissing fans off to high f*cking heaven - is a relatively recent phenomenon, for WWE didn't become WWE by inadvertently or intentionally doing dumb and unpopular sh*t. WWE became WWE by generally and effectively promoting star talent in compelling storylines that accomplished things like "drawing money" and "not shaving millions of people from the audience".
Fans weren't outraged as WrestleMania developed its legendary mythology. Hulk Hogan was a magician of a worker who cast a spell amongst a sprawling vista of fans in a glorious visual of the art's appeal, grandeur, and simplistic, cathartic morality. The artistry of Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels welcomed a smaller number of those fans into a lifelong obsession, while Steve Austin attracted a generation of the browbeaten to join him in his claret-drenched, piss funny and violent rage against a symbolic machine, for at WrestleMania, the guys you wanted to win won at the pinnacle of drama and glamour.
Turns out doing the precise opposite of that is f*cking dumb.
In the interest of balance, and to get hyped about a show that is guaranteed to ignite your pop receptors at some point - when Goldberg isn't blowing out of his ass, presumably - watch out for the sister article '10 Times WWE Fans Were Elated At WrestleMania'...
10. Sheamus Buries Daniel Bryan
In an endlessly fascinating Playboy interview of 2001, Vince McMahon revealed that, as a child, his early sexual curiosity manifested in a desire to insert dried, crushed leaves into the vagina of a girl who was "in essence" his cousin.
Vince has embraced this particular kink in his advanced years, as he has taken to inserting dried, crushed leaves into all of our orifices with his abrasive, unwanted booking.
At WrestleMania XXVIII, Daniel Bryan defended his World Heavyweight Championship against Sheamus. Bryan was over as a piss-funny deluded irritant who had fused his awesome technical skill into a hugely entertaining sports entertainment-sized package. He was such an emerging megastar that it hurt your eyes to look at him, and yet Vince McMahon went with Sheamus, who had more muscles. Fans were high on this charismatic, interesting new character who was a rare, pre-NXT banger practitioner, and to get Sheamus over as a sub-Cena scamp of an over-powered babyface, he was infamously squashed in 18 seconds.
This was an omni-failure. It formally turned Bryan face, and made Sheamus look less smart, and more opportunistic - a word drilled into our poor heads for years and years as a heel trait.
Randy Orton Vs. Kane was besieged by "Yes!" chants, and the toxic feeling carried all the way over to the post-RAW WrestleMania - over two years, even.