A big part of the appeal of modern pro wrestling lies in the fact that the fans have a major say in the end result. We know its all worked out in advance, so we know we can affect it. Paradoxically, you can support a sh!t football team every day of your life, screaming your lungs out from the terraces every Saturday afternoon and yelling at the televised replays later that evening, but it wont make much difference if the team is sh!t. A sh!t team is a sh!t team, after all... Wrestling, however, is essentially about good guys and bad guys and the guy you root for can (and more often than not, does) win in the end. Moreover, the louder the fan reaction and the more money your chosen star makes for his employers, the greater your chance of seeing him elevated to the top of the card will ultimately be. Case in point: WrestleMania XXXs main event was obviously designed as a vehicle for Batista. He was going to come back, win the Royal Rumble and end the tyrannical reign of the despicable Randy Orton at the biggest wrestling show of the decade. However, the fans didnt want Batista, they wanted Daniel Bryan. In fact, the WWE faithful made such a fuss that Bryan was pulled out of an unconvincing program with The Wyatts and finally anointed as WWEs next big star. If that doesnt prove the point for you, skip this section and go on to the next bit. There is nothing else for you to see here... The sad fact is that WWE fans had to really go to bat for Bryan. They mercilessly booed John Cena at every turn and were downright disrespectful to Rey Mysterio when he entered the Rumble match (in what they felt was Bryans rightful place). In fact, WWE fans are still extraordinarily vocal about what they want to see and who they want to see doing it but yet WWE creative consistently ignores them. In no other form of entertainment would this happen. If Hollywood will alter the endings of its movies based on test audiences that constitute much less than 1% of the films final viewership, why wont WWE listen to thousands upon thousands of screaming fans? Obviously, WWE cannot let its fans run the show, but it really should give them what they want every once in a while. It is painful to watch popular stars working damn hard to get themselves over with the fans only to be buried a few weeks later, as other, less popular stars are pushed in their place. Pro wrestling companies should swim with the current of fan reaction, not against it.
I am a professional author and lifelong comic books/pro wrestling fan. I also work as a journalist as well as writing comic books (I also draw), screenplays, stage plays, songs and prose fiction.
I don't generally read or reply to comments here on What Culture (too many trolls!), but if you follow my Twitter (@heyquicksilver), I'll talk to you all day long!
If you are interested in reading more of my stuff, you can find it on http://quicksilverstories.weebly.com/ (my personal site, which has other wrestling/comics/pop culture stuff on it).
I also write for FLiCK http://www.flickonline.co.uk/flicktion, which is the best place to read my fiction work.
Oh yeah - I'm about to become a Dad for the first time, so if my stuff seems more sentimental than usual - blame it on that!
Finally, I sincerely appreciate every single read I get. So if you're reading this, thank you, you've made me feel like Shakespeare for a day! (see what I mean?)
Latcho Drom,
- CQ
