10 Reasons Why WWE's Stagnation Will Never End
4. Everything Is Manufactured
Above all else, modern WWE storytelling is focused primarily on "making history" and "creating moments." Storylines have deteriorated to a point where it feels like many angles and feuds are designed solely to write the participants' names into the record books. WWE are no longer content to let these landmarks occur naturally, but now race towards them with single-minded focus, creating a broken, disjointed storytelling model that has sapped all the emotion from those moments when the wrestlers finally reach their grand accomplishment.
The New Day's record-breaking Tag Team Title run ultimately meant nothing, and neither did John Cena's 16th World Championship win, or Sasha Banks and Charlotte headlining Hell In A Cell 2016. Why? Because they were done just for the sake of doing them. They were manufactured, not organic, and this made them entirely unsatisfying.
Such stunted storytelling has become so commonplace that an angle like Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins' reunion feels genuinely refreshing, as it's one of the few recent occasions where the company haven't shortcutted their way to a "historic" conclusion. Stories like this are key to WWE moving forward again, but appear to be a dying art.