10 Ways WWE Was Made Worse By Being Lazy
6. Jobbing Out Champions
On last night's SmackDown - and indeed most episodes of SmackDown, and most episodes of RAW - a non-champion went over a champion purely to engineer a Championship Opportunity. It is an Opportunity for a Championship Opportunity that systemically weakens the actual champions, whom the audience conflates with every other member of the roster, reducing almost each and every one of them to the status of losers.
It's stupid, it's lazy, and it's also infuriating. This is the company that "tells stories" "no different to the works of Shakespeare", and their version of a story is putting a whoopee cushion on the f*cking Iron Throne.
Chris Jericho just got his belt stolen from him, and he still looks like more of a champion than the vast majority of those in WWE.
They build matches by presenting the same match (?), and the one with meaning behind it is rendered meaningless because the champion no longer feels insurmountable, the challenger no longer a threat. That threat has already been carried out. WWE tells stories by surgically extracting drama. Sensational.
New Japan Pro Wrestling uses this trope, too, but Gedo does so with far more logic and finesse. Minoru Suzuki preyed on a beaten Kazuchika Okada after his gruelling G1 Climax run, resulting in their recent cauldron at Royal Quest.
He won with a roll-up, and sold it as if his mother just bought him an early birthday present, except he didn't, because that would be a f*cking stupid thing to do.