10 Modern Wrestling Tropes We're Totally Sick Of

The great irony of distraction finishes in pro-wrestling is that they're designed to keep the victim protected in defeat but rarely result in anything other than the complete opposite, making the poor sap look like an idiot.

These things rarely work. The loser invariably comes off as an absent-minded dolt who took their eye off the ball and was taken out of their game by something as simple as an entrance theme hitting or a manager hopping onto the apron. The victor gains little either, as they're often portrayed as lucky fluke artists who had no business being in the ring with the person they've just "bettered" in the first place.

At best, distraction finishes are a mildly annoying way to prolong a storyline without somebody taking a more definitive fall, but at worst, they are a credibility-shredding disaster (see: Asuka, Carmella, and James Ellsworth). That they still go down every single week is maddening, too. What happened to in-ring storytelling? Have we forgotten how to spin a yarn around an old-fashioned clean fall? Presumably yes, and it has created a reactionary environment in which more definitive defeats are immediately met with calls of burials online.