It's Official: WWE Has Debuted A New Era
As authority figures continued to make matches next against an unchanging and charmless LED set, those fans struggled to form a consensus on how to define the times.
'Reality' and 'Network' were floated around, but really, this half-facetious take wasn't remotely incorrect with hindsight; by 2018, and deep into 2021, WWE entered its So-Bad-It's-Good era as a total laughing stock. Crown Jewel 2018 was a perversely hilarious disaster for longtime fans. With no competition, and inability to create new stars, the promotion was insistent that the old guard, who had fended off the supposedly existential threat of WCW, were something more than legendary. They were 'Phenoms', 'Kings of Kings'. To watch as they embarrassed themselves more than Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair ever did in 2000 was a remarkable indictment of such arrogant rhetoric.
A deadly worldwide pandemic was just as effective as 10 minutes of dire slow motion action at removing the mask from Kane's face. The Undertaker bumped for blowing a strand of hair out of his face, where he once wouldn't bump for Diamond Dallas Page. Triple H tore his pectoral muscle off the bone. An unrecognisable Shawn Michaels sat somewhere between Ricky Steamboat and Roddy Piper on the WrestleMania 25 legends scale, and compared to the other three, he was working like it was October 1997. 2019 was an hysterical disaster, and this year followed a late '18 period so fantastically awful that the McMahon clan had to apologise for it on national television. It wasn't a full-scale abomination. Planet's Champion Daniel Bryan was a great bit, and he wasn't quite the rule-proving exception, but Jesus Christ, almost everything else was such a creative atrocity that lapsed hate-watchers sprinted into the away end of Wrestling Twitter with their shirts off just to gleefully rip the absolute piss out of it.
This is key: WWE was so bad that a lot of fans buried it as a hobby.
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