6. Talent Not Being Allowed To Find Their Own Characters
Poor Zack Ryder. The guy develops his own character on his YouTube show and dares to get over, so he's buried 20 feet underground and resigned to selling Shopzone merchandise during the breaks. There's a famous story about how Steve Austin wanted a new character closer to himself, and used the "cold" heartlessness of famous serial killers as his motivation, and Vince McMahon immediately got the marketing department to pitch a series of ridiculous cartoon names like "Ice Dagger" and "Chilly McFreeze", thus completely missing the point. Same thing applies now in developmental, as the most ludicrously terrible names get assigned to guys so that WWE can own the trademarks. Who in their right mind would take the most awesome wrestling name ever like "Windham Rotundo" and rename him Husky Harris? Thankfully he recovered with the Bray Wyatt gimmick, but others haven't been so lucky thus far. How is "Xavier Woods" better than "Consequences Creed"? As bad as "Michael McGillicutty" was for a wrestler, at least it's memorable and alliterative. "Curtis Axel" is just boring. But this brings up the bigger point with these guys what is their character? Who is Curtis Axel, anyway? There's a bunch of guys in NXT that you can sum up with one sentence, and that at least is a very encouraging sign. Aiden English sings his way to the ring and people GET IT. This is probably heresy, but I still don't get the Wyatt Family. They targeted Kane for some reason, beat him up, and then nothing came of it. Their intro videos were cool, but they've done nothing to explain what the characters even are or what they're about. And you can't even blame the talent, because the shows are so ridiculously scripted that any deviation from the standard (like, say, the Seattle crowd rejecting HHH's promo and hijacking the segment, or Dusty Rhodes telling Stephanie to talk to the hand without a proper cue) immediately sets everyone involved into a tailspin, or fits of rage in Randy Orton's case. The writers don't know how to sell a PPV so the guys never learn how (witness the Slammys, the three hour go-home show where CM Punk was the only one to even off-handedly plug the TLC show) and instead everyone is more concerned with reading their lines and doing wacky comedy skits where guys puke and/or there's midgets dressed as bulls for some reason. The most common problem during WWE's bad times has always been confusing a gimmick with a character. They come up with the one-dimensional hook for the gimmick easily enough (Funny dancing fat guy! Not so funny dancing skeevy guy! Super genius snob!) but it's only when there's a relatable character behind that gimmick that people can get over. Daniel Bryan and CM Punk are indy guys who have to fight for their spot because love the business, despite being "too small". People can relate to that struggle and thus get invested in them. John Cena goes out and tells stupid jokes as scripted and people boo him, but he speaks passionately about the importance of the title match from the heart and suddenly people like him again, because hard-working everyman Cena is relatable and poopy pants Cena is a cartoon character. Cody Rhodes has a million goofy gimmicks as "Dashing" Cody and supervillain masked Cody and gets nowhere, but takes a week off to get married and gets screwed over by on-screen management before fighting back for his family and winning his spot back and the tag titles. And now suddenly he's over, because that's a great story! You know what's not a great story? Damien Sandow wins the Money in the Bank briefcase for no real reason, and disappears from PPV for four months before he loses the match with John Cena where he cashes it in. But it kind of speaks to my next point...