10 Things Everybody Gets Wrong About WWE
9. WWE Is The Promotion That Best Tells Stories
"I find it hard to get into other promotions because I like stories."
WWE tells the most basic stories.
The idea is to make comprehension as easy as possible as to appeal to the broadest possible audience. The babyface/heel divide is often unmistakably binary, and is clarified through dialogue and character arcs so explicit that it borders on the perversely amusing. Chad Gable is an underdog. WWE's treatment of such a character manifests as 'Shorty G', a character defined solely by a characteristic. He's such an UNDERDOG that it's a wonder he doesn't wear a Graveyard Dogs t-shirt. If Chris Jericho dreamed up his AEW 'Le Champion' character in WWE, they'd have him wearing a beret and using a stale baguette as a foreign object. The Fiend is a nebulous 'supernatural' character, and so he must play a horror movie monster as if transplanted from the final scene of a horror movie.
This is the level of craft and subtlety at which WWE operates. Wrestling style and ethos doesn't inform storytelling, nor does experience or confidence. Wrestling is an inherent physical storytelling medium that WWE tacks TV stories onto, often unnecessarily. It's a soap opera produced by Peter Engel, full of "inspirational stories" and detestable zinging protagonists. WWE is the storytelling company.
It's the sh*tty storytelling company.