The One Problem EVERYONE Gets Wrong About WWE's Bloodline Saga
WWE television occupies a bizarre hinterland in which the characters are both aware and unaware that they are being watched simultaneously. In the ring, Roman Reigns demands that the fans acknowledge him.
Those same fans watch his clandestine plotting backstage, which is broadcast on international television. The characters have the ability to watch the show - they rally and taunt the people, who watch the show and with whom they share the same world - but they don't. It is easier for the writers if they don't, even if it makes a moron out of the characters; that way, the story is advanced.
On countless occasions, the tensions between Sami and Jey - which have driven the entire plot - could have been eased, had they taken just minutes out of their day to fire up YouTube. From those three minute-long clips, they would have seen that, ah yes, Sami was trying to help. That doesn't make for a twisting storyline, but it does make for dumb characters and a wholly illogical fictional universe that exists selectively at its own narrative convenience.
The thing is: nobody really cares. It's a stupid contrivance to which fans have been normalised over the course of years. WWE has in spite of the invisible camera told a compelling, unpredictable and massively, massively over storyline in which the promotion has united the base, made them feel the intended emotions for the first time in years and years, and spiked the numbers to a level not seen since early 2020. The success of it is so monstrous that WWE has no-sold wider trends in a TV industry that is slowly dying. Emotion trumps logic, particularly in a silly enterprise like wrestling, but that lack of logic is too pronounced to throw around the "masterpiece" label.
AEW does not utilise the invisible camera, a handful of lapses aside. Sometimes, they attempt to work around it so inelegantly that the result is equally as contrived.
Still, you could make the argument that any wrestler from any promotion could, as an example, watch the shows back and detect from the facial expressions of their tag team partner or stablemate that a betrayal is imminent. Perhaps all wrestling, a fictional universe watched live, is fundamentally flawed in that way.
CONT'D...(2 of 5)