10 Easy Ways Of Injecting Realism Into WWE
5. Consistent Pushes
The case of Finn Bálor is a curious one.
The man captured the Universal Championship in the same timeframe in which Hulk Hogan won his first WWF Title. That is a sobering thought when one considers the extent to which his star has fallen in the two years since; now another victim of WWE's corrosive 50/50 booking, Bálor's role isn't just poorly-defined and dispiriting. It makes zero sense. This inability to reconcile the champion and loser aspects of the character ruins both emotional investment and any notion of realism.
Bálor's haphazard win/loss record depicts him as a prop. He cleanly defeated Seth Rollins for the Universal Championship at SummerSlam '16 before falling prey to a catastrophically mistimed shoulder injury and not immediately challenging Brock Lesnar for the belt the Beast won in the interim. This almost understandable plot hole cast him as weak, a perception WWE actually managed to reinforce in a goofy and pointless feud with Bray Wyatt in 2017. A major win over AJ Styles at TLC was retconned 24 hours later as WWE sought to build Kane as a filler challenger for Brock Lesnar. Ultimately, it was here that several fans gave up on Bálor as a top-tier performer.
Instead, he is simply a moving part in and endlessly incoherent machine that demands its parts fit wherever the next week takes it. Bálor is a sputtering cog, completely directionless, an effective character one week, ineffective the next, in an overarching universe that makes no sense whatsoever. Is...is Finn Bálor, looking at WWE as a fictional universe, a player?
It is impossible to determine, and thus impossible to buy.