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| If WWE knew more about alignments, this wouldn't've been hilarious Photo Credit: WWE.com |
The poll went up on RAW this past Monday, and it seemed pretty obvious to set up one outcome in particular - with the choices for Randy Orton's opposition being two former champions in the Miz and Dolph Ziggler next to barely babyface Big E. Langston, it seemed to be a landslide leading to watchers breaking out the Ziggler Scale and waiting to see what the median would be after the RKO was said and done.
While the landslide was delivered, the victims were the name guys. Langston had trucked his way into a star-making match by a hearty 3:1 margin. Seeing this occur put another thought to mind; hell, maybe these things aren't rigged after all.
While Langston is a recent emigre to the side of facedom - and, hopefully in 2014 a tidal wave of supporters chanting FIVE! as he Endings somebody to the nth - he is a barrage of things Ziggler and Miz aren't besides a fresh face to hopefully take down the Authoritah's Face of the WWE. Physically imposing should be considered as a factor as to why he may've won, obviously. The fact both Ziggler and Miz have gone up against Randall in the past few weeks only to get dropped on their heads but good is another, and maybe the most important.
But for your consideration - the reason Langston dominated the poll as he does a good plate of kielbasa has nothing to do with who he is. It's the way he is; namely, in a troika of guys who'd risen to prominence by donning the black hat, he feels and seems the most natural to be a good guy. Whether or not the former NXT champion ends up becoming appointment television for the masses is a question only answered by the future. A question the recent past brings up is a simple one to the ones that failed miserably in this poll; what happened to you guys?
The answer is a multitude of things, so let's start here.
1) Right place, wrong time.
To look at the WWE's roster from stem to stern is akin to being newly a single straight man with a golden ticket to the Playboy Mansion. It's not merely enough that Stamford is the home of the Worldwide Leader in Sports Entertainment, but it has through hours and years of works alongside their developmental system that is beloved by many (read: me, others) brought up people who are not merely serviceable wrestlers but good wrestlers, and a few great ones as well.
Part of the reason RAW's expansion to three hours was able to happen is the segments of time and the heat generated by "let's put up 3 guys against the Shield" alone. Throw in the Cesaros/Bryans/Punks of the world, and that gets you past an hour mark easily in maybe three matches. Miz has been in a series of good but not great matches over his career. He's a 9-7 NFL team, a first round bounce in the NHL, outside of his figure-four abhorence, but the sort of steady hand that a roster needs to survive.
Ziggler has had some great matches, and a couple holdings of the World Heavyweight Championship. But due to injury, His Moment still seems to be in the future. It's easy to see The Moment when other WWE superstars are thought of: Punk in Chicago in July 2011, Edge cashing in on Cena at that New Year's Revolution, Austin Stunning McMahon, Jericho debuting, the Rock uranaging Triple H, Cena in the aisleway making his surprise return at MSG. The stuff highlight reels are made of. Ziggler just doesn't have that yet. Seeing him be one of the premier sellers in the company and seemingly risking death every time he leaves his feet is nice but nothing DVDs get sold off of. It seemed the moment was here the night after WrestleMania and a long run as World Champion was what 2013 held in store for DZ, but then his injury happened. That changed everything, and not for the better.
2) You, sir, need to live up to your nickname.
When the annual wrestling hipster convention known as the RAW the night after WrestleMania happened and Ziggler came out the arena went, for lack of a better term, banana. The subsequent victory was merely crumbled-up cookie things on the sundae and the 21st century Shawn Michaels archetype seemed to be set for Ziggler. The biggest problem besides the subsequent concussion happening at the worst possible time career-wise? Ziggler's transition from one side of the ledger to the other should have been rooted in how great a wrestler he is. It's part of what made him cheerable in the margins, after all.
A story as old as sport itself - bragging is allowed, but you have to be the best at it. In a way, Ziggler was (is?) almost penalized for being really good and not the overlord of the squared circle. If LeBron woofed more, he would have an easy shut down to the myriad of critics still kicking around; how many rings do you have? Gold medals? MVPs? Any ofthat consecutive? Hmm? David Ortiz curses in a public, solemn moment, and it just adds to his legacy. Why is that? Well, it's because when the playoffs came he had everyone shook like a 7.4 on the Richter and was jacking balls into New Hampshire on the way to his formerly moribund franchise putting up their third world championship in under a decade in part thanks to his barrage of homers.
Confidence is the word people use to give the word arrogance a more positive patina, and it usually comes on the heels of last-second comeback victories and/or championships. You see it happen all the time; people who aren't the absolute apex get labeled mouthy, cocky, brash. These same people earn their way to the top and suddenly it's about their big-game experience, their rock-solid assurance in their own skills, the confidence to lead themselves or their squads to the promised land. Unearned confidence reads as delusion. Earned confidence marks as charisma. To put it in sellable t-shirt terms, It's Not Showing Off If You Back It Up. This was the same game plan they seemed set to follow with Ziggler before injury intervened.
Then in the loss of the world championship, the story was the double-turn with Alberto Del Rio regaining his edge and the belt in the process.
(Sidenote: remember Del Rio? Remember how they took a perfectly awesome Million Pesos Man and turned him into a Mexican-American fifty-ninth rate Cesar Chavez for about a season? Another thing Ziggler got swept up in the tide of beyond his reckoning.)
When Ziggler fell victim to his woman and his former heavy, that took up the prime time that could've been his to shine as an attention seeking and more importantly deserving World Champion. With that narrative in place, all would've been forgiven. Hell, we might've gotten babyface Big E. months back in the summer if they'd all used Ziggler's popularity for a trio of flips to "good" than isolating him out on an island. That smirk on Ziggler's face, the pelvic thrusts, the headstands during otherwise mundane chinlocks all would've fallen under the popular "but when the bell rings, the World Champion backs up everything he says". If you wanted to have gotten really reductive, you could've just referred to the shirt.
And now?
And now Dolph Ziggler, the man who was known for really good wrestling is unable to get his head above water in a sea of really good wrestlers and mucking around with the underneath title holders for a few shows here and there. What happened to stealing the show? The concept of Full Rollins wasn't a thing in 2012. Bryan wasn't the choice of the people, Goldust had yet to drink the entire Fountain of Youth, and the Wyatt Family was busy down in the swamp crocing or making human sacrifices or whatever it is those wacky nuts do. Add the Shield to Rollins, and that's eight more really talented dudes vying for TV time and taking up booking oxygen. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed jack is king. In the land of aces with 20-20 vision? Well, that's actually a fight.
But things could always be worse for Ziggler.
After all, he could be the Miz.
3) Haters found.
Nobody watches SmackDown but myself and a few other like-minded lunatics. Team Blue is sort of like a vestigial tail that could grab 10% of anything you attempted--not wholly worthless, but mostly ineffective and occasionaly surprising with something that intended to get in the hands of those that wanted it.
MizTV Friday night was one of those things. Miz came out, frothy over the abuse he's suffered at the hands of Randy Orton. Out to rebut came Randy Orton, who mocked the Miz and then RKOed him when the Ohioian was about to retort.
That's it; that's all that happened. No heroic babyface comeback, not even a blow landed, Miz opened his mouth and Orton shut it before a word got out.
Comedy gold.
While we'll come back to that, let's jump to the poll where Miz came in a far last place Monday night. He was on Backstage Fallout being pretty frothy about it, really. Of course, were you proven in a national forum to be less popular than an average Congressman, perhaps you too wouldn't be exactly adept at masking your dismay. This still gets to his point: the poll had enough motivation for him to be the one who went in against Orton. Instead of winning, he was the bottom rung on a totem pole that marked him as the Big Bang Theory and Big E. as Breaking Bad.
What happened?
The seeds of what made the RKO Out Of Nowhere (™ WWE) so hilarious Friday night - the initial turn wasn't really a real turn, and Miz is just hateable. When the turn came, it came with Alberto del Rio (hey! again!) in defense of the Spanish announce table. Not another wrestler, but a living, breathing plot device. They didn't rush to the rescue of a popular grappler, or Be A Star and stand up for a Diva, say, but stopping 3MB from beating up the Spanish announcers. If Dickens was writing that sentence, he would say along the lines of "it was the who cares of times, it was the who're they of times". Taking 3MB as a serious threat is like trying to get high by snorting Fun Dip. The JAGUARS would be two-touchdown favorites in a trios match against 3MB.
It was emblematic of what was to come in Miz's run as man of the people, indifference eventually ceding ground to "why are you still here?". They even tried to have him boost off of the launching pad of Ric Flair's popularity, something that would've been greatly more believable had his figure-four been a perfectly executed monster rather than a seventeen-eyed chartreuse and teal pigdog on three legs who could only vomit and cry out "please kill me". His Intercontinental Title reign earlier this year was about the length of this sentence, and that's what he's been doing for the better part of the last year and a half, kicking around the toxic wasteland of the secondary championships. Of course, that was still theoretically a rung up from feuding with Fandango with no good reason, but that doesn't seem to be happening anymore, either.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that seemingly in el mundial real, Miz envisions himself as the actual non-Cena face of the company. Talking head on a DVD, commentary on Main Event, red carpets, you name it, his face will be there with something to say. Who else could be signaling a possible heel turn by using Backstage Fallout, for crying out Danielson? This is the dictionary definition of the difference between confidence and arrogance, of perceived value to actual worth.
You have a better chance of seeing Gabourey Sidibe join the cast of Girls before you will see John Cena on Backstage Fallout. This is because John Cena is pressed for time, in and out of the ring. When your schedule is as wide open and your star has fallen as far as the Miz's, time is a wide expanse with more openings in it than a comedy club's open mic night. As Randy Orton jumped him in his hometown, not even his own dad could muster up a reaction to him getting beaten up. This was the biggest evil in the WWE almost literally coming into his backyard to jack him up and the man who put him into this world could barely even muster a shrug.
As a wise man once perfectly articulated, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth. Miz's moment? It doesn't come from the cash-in on Orton, or the awesome video package set to Hate Me Now he got before the WrestleMania he kinda-sorta headlined; it's him and Truth in cuffs at Hell In A Cell having just gone crazy in the babyface iteration of a Triple H regime. This is because something shocking had just occurred but also because Miz had done something evil. And in the WWE narrative with Orton being his photo negative, this matters.
It matters since the biggest booking decisions in 2013 seem to have at least some basis in reality. You think Triple H and Stephanie are rich self-centered delusional jerks? Now playing rich, self-centered delusional jerks, ladies and gentlemen, Stephanie and Triple H! Daniel Bryan is the plucky underdog who doesn't fit WWE's image? Hey, let's see if we can get this Daniel Bryan character to play a guy who doesn't fit WWE's image and will serve as a plucky underdog. He will? Yes! Yes! Yes! Randy Orton is a douchebag who doesn't deserve to hold the biggest prize in the game and got here on his looks, his name, and a possibly accidental Patrick Bateman impersonation? Pedigree at Summerslam, superkick at Hell in a Cell. Oh wow. WWE Champion. Such venom. Much RKO. Very Viper.
Miz being must-see stopped being true a long time ago, and his level of swagger veers much wildly towards arrogance than confidence as a result. He beat Wade Barrett for a secondary title this year? I think Estonian Thunder Frog did the same last winter. His face turn, like Del Rio's, was a bad idea made worse by shoddy execution.
Sure, most people are a confluence of light and dark. Great moments have been made by somebody embracing the light or joining the dark, but that's still 98% of the world. There's a percentage of saints, the same way there's a percentage of sinners. I have no interest in booing Sami Zayn at anything, ever.If he executed my parents I would assume he was a timecop from the future and that they were somehow planning a future terrorist attack that he thwarted.
Similarly, I'm now a LeBron fan. It's amazing watching the prime of a Hall-of-Famer's legendary career, and laughing at the people who go into meltdown over him winning is hilarious and has been for years; under their delusional gaze he's the black Raef LaFrentz who just lucked into his position by conspiracy.
Some people are actually awesome and not just using it for a catchphrase. Conversely, if Chris Brown died tomorrow the urge to post something snarky would probably overtake me before his body cooled. Assuming Dick Cheney ever dies, that urge would ratchet up by a factor of hundreds of thousands. There are people in the world whose deeds uplift us all, and in so doing put us in their corner. Then there are others who just cause a primal narrowing of eyes. It's unexplainable at times but always primal, a voice from the gut going "EFF THEM."
You know, the Mizes of the world. What Punkian odds has he had to overcome? What Cenaesque heroic comebacks has he launched over a period of time and not after being in a chinlock for 20 seconds? He doesn't even have the benefit of a Goldust since he's never been away for a long time and come back at a peak since outside of filming straight to DVD sharknados he's always been around. And familiarity can surely breed contempt; ask Alabama and Auburn if you don't believe me.
Miz leaned so hard into making himself an arrogant douchebag obsessed with fame that without a backstory to build off of, attempts at his joining the side of the angels seems false. Hell, even his fiancee knew better than to try to win the fervor of the fans. She had "bitchy and foreign" on lock, she did it as much as she wanted, and then she bounced to do her own thing.
If we are still in the days of a Reality Era, it is to accept incongruity and complications in a world that's based around being simple for simplicity's sake. It's unfortunate Miz is taking on the sins of alignment perception, but it's more unfortunate that the WWE hasn't found a way to capitalize on it. Keep in mind this is the same company employing Jack Swagger as Biff from Back to the Future, while down in NXT Tyler Breeze is being chanted and feted and Bo Dallas is being derided for drawing a breath and not being Sami Zayn. They do know how to do this in this day and age.
It's no longer about somebody turning themselves up to 11, but rather the perception of those who see them. If technology has turned everyone smarter and smarker, from the champions on down their characters should be in line with the fans perceive and damn the torpedos. Sufficiently hated, a heel can draw enough fans in the seats the same as a good guy perceived to be one can get a crowd behind him even if everyone's aware they're just putting on a show. In an era of this virtual monopoly during a downturn, the WWE should be using that to test the waters and take more risks, not fewer.
An avowed libertarian making a decision to nakedly serve his own self-interests even if it means having to be at the occasional beck and call of an evil conglomerate makes all the sense in the world.
Here's to hoping the rest of the midcard gets a once-over, a couple of matches, and is fueled by logic from there as well.
While the landslide was delivered, the victims were the name guys. Langston had trucked his way into a star-making match by a hearty 3:1 margin. Seeing this occur put another thought to mind; hell, maybe these things aren't rigged after all.
While Langston is a recent emigre to the side of facedom - and, hopefully in 2014 a tidal wave of supporters chanting FIVE! as he Endings somebody to the nth - he is a barrage of things Ziggler and Miz aren't besides a fresh face to hopefully take down the Authoritah's Face of the WWE. Physically imposing should be considered as a factor as to why he may've won, obviously. The fact both Ziggler and Miz have gone up against Randall in the past few weeks only to get dropped on their heads but good is another, and maybe the most important.
But for your consideration - the reason Langston dominated the poll as he does a good plate of kielbasa has nothing to do with who he is. It's the way he is; namely, in a troika of guys who'd risen to prominence by donning the black hat, he feels and seems the most natural to be a good guy. Whether or not the former NXT champion ends up becoming appointment television for the masses is a question only answered by the future. A question the recent past brings up is a simple one to the ones that failed miserably in this poll; what happened to you guys?
The answer is a multitude of things, so let's start here.
1) Right place, wrong time.
To look at the WWE's roster from stem to stern is akin to being newly a single straight man with a golden ticket to the Playboy Mansion. It's not merely enough that Stamford is the home of the Worldwide Leader in Sports Entertainment, but it has through hours and years of works alongside their developmental system that is beloved by many (read: me, others) brought up people who are not merely serviceable wrestlers but good wrestlers, and a few great ones as well.
Part of the reason RAW's expansion to three hours was able to happen is the segments of time and the heat generated by "let's put up 3 guys against the Shield" alone. Throw in the Cesaros/Bryans/Punks of the world, and that gets you past an hour mark easily in maybe three matches. Miz has been in a series of good but not great matches over his career. He's a 9-7 NFL team, a first round bounce in the NHL, outside of his figure-four abhorence, but the sort of steady hand that a roster needs to survive.
Ziggler has had some great matches, and a couple holdings of the World Heavyweight Championship. But due to injury, His Moment still seems to be in the future. It's easy to see The Moment when other WWE superstars are thought of: Punk in Chicago in July 2011, Edge cashing in on Cena at that New Year's Revolution, Austin Stunning McMahon, Jericho debuting, the Rock uranaging Triple H, Cena in the aisleway making his surprise return at MSG. The stuff highlight reels are made of. Ziggler just doesn't have that yet. Seeing him be one of the premier sellers in the company and seemingly risking death every time he leaves his feet is nice but nothing DVDs get sold off of. It seemed the moment was here the night after WrestleMania and a long run as World Champion was what 2013 held in store for DZ, but then his injury happened. That changed everything, and not for the better.
2) You, sir, need to live up to your nickname.
When the annual wrestling hipster convention known as the RAW the night after WrestleMania happened and Ziggler came out the arena went, for lack of a better term, banana. The subsequent victory was merely crumbled-up cookie things on the sundae and the 21st century Shawn Michaels archetype seemed to be set for Ziggler. The biggest problem besides the subsequent concussion happening at the worst possible time career-wise? Ziggler's transition from one side of the ledger to the other should have been rooted in how great a wrestler he is. It's part of what made him cheerable in the margins, after all.
A story as old as sport itself - bragging is allowed, but you have to be the best at it. In a way, Ziggler was (is?) almost penalized for being really good and not the overlord of the squared circle. If LeBron woofed more, he would have an easy shut down to the myriad of critics still kicking around; how many rings do you have? Gold medals? MVPs? Any ofthat consecutive? Hmm? David Ortiz curses in a public, solemn moment, and it just adds to his legacy. Why is that? Well, it's because when the playoffs came he had everyone shook like a 7.4 on the Richter and was jacking balls into New Hampshire on the way to his formerly moribund franchise putting up their third world championship in under a decade in part thanks to his barrage of homers.
Confidence is the word people use to give the word arrogance a more positive patina, and it usually comes on the heels of last-second comeback victories and/or championships. You see it happen all the time; people who aren't the absolute apex get labeled mouthy, cocky, brash. These same people earn their way to the top and suddenly it's about their big-game experience, their rock-solid assurance in their own skills, the confidence to lead themselves or their squads to the promised land. Unearned confidence reads as delusion. Earned confidence marks as charisma. To put it in sellable t-shirt terms, It's Not Showing Off If You Back It Up. This was the same game plan they seemed set to follow with Ziggler before injury intervened.
Then in the loss of the world championship, the story was the double-turn with Alberto Del Rio regaining his edge and the belt in the process.
(Sidenote: remember Del Rio? Remember how they took a perfectly awesome Million Pesos Man and turned him into a Mexican-American fifty-ninth rate Cesar Chavez for about a season? Another thing Ziggler got swept up in the tide of beyond his reckoning.)
When Ziggler fell victim to his woman and his former heavy, that took up the prime time that could've been his to shine as an attention seeking and more importantly deserving World Champion. With that narrative in place, all would've been forgiven. Hell, we might've gotten babyface Big E. months back in the summer if they'd all used Ziggler's popularity for a trio of flips to "good" than isolating him out on an island. That smirk on Ziggler's face, the pelvic thrusts, the headstands during otherwise mundane chinlocks all would've fallen under the popular "but when the bell rings, the World Champion backs up everything he says". If you wanted to have gotten really reductive, you could've just referred to the shirt.
And now?
And now Dolph Ziggler, the man who was known for really good wrestling is unable to get his head above water in a sea of really good wrestlers and mucking around with the underneath title holders for a few shows here and there. What happened to stealing the show? The concept of Full Rollins wasn't a thing in 2012. Bryan wasn't the choice of the people, Goldust had yet to drink the entire Fountain of Youth, and the Wyatt Family was busy down in the swamp crocing or making human sacrifices or whatever it is those wacky nuts do. Add the Shield to Rollins, and that's eight more really talented dudes vying for TV time and taking up booking oxygen. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed jack is king. In the land of aces with 20-20 vision? Well, that's actually a fight.
But things could always be worse for Ziggler.
After all, he could be the Miz.
3) Haters found.
Nobody watches SmackDown but myself and a few other like-minded lunatics. Team Blue is sort of like a vestigial tail that could grab 10% of anything you attempted--not wholly worthless, but mostly ineffective and occasionaly surprising with something that intended to get in the hands of those that wanted it.
MizTV Friday night was one of those things. Miz came out, frothy over the abuse he's suffered at the hands of Randy Orton. Out to rebut came Randy Orton, who mocked the Miz and then RKOed him when the Ohioian was about to retort.
That's it; that's all that happened. No heroic babyface comeback, not even a blow landed, Miz opened his mouth and Orton shut it before a word got out.
Comedy gold.
While we'll come back to that, let's jump to the poll where Miz came in a far last place Monday night. He was on Backstage Fallout being pretty frothy about it, really. Of course, were you proven in a national forum to be less popular than an average Congressman, perhaps you too wouldn't be exactly adept at masking your dismay. This still gets to his point: the poll had enough motivation for him to be the one who went in against Orton. Instead of winning, he was the bottom rung on a totem pole that marked him as the Big Bang Theory and Big E. as Breaking Bad.
What happened?
The seeds of what made the RKO Out Of Nowhere (™ WWE) so hilarious Friday night - the initial turn wasn't really a real turn, and Miz is just hateable. When the turn came, it came with Alberto del Rio (hey! again!) in defense of the Spanish announce table. Not another wrestler, but a living, breathing plot device. They didn't rush to the rescue of a popular grappler, or Be A Star and stand up for a Diva, say, but stopping 3MB from beating up the Spanish announcers. If Dickens was writing that sentence, he would say along the lines of "it was the who cares of times, it was the who're they of times". Taking 3MB as a serious threat is like trying to get high by snorting Fun Dip. The JAGUARS would be two-touchdown favorites in a trios match against 3MB.
It was emblematic of what was to come in Miz's run as man of the people, indifference eventually ceding ground to "why are you still here?". They even tried to have him boost off of the launching pad of Ric Flair's popularity, something that would've been greatly more believable had his figure-four been a perfectly executed monster rather than a seventeen-eyed chartreuse and teal pigdog on three legs who could only vomit and cry out "please kill me". His Intercontinental Title reign earlier this year was about the length of this sentence, and that's what he's been doing for the better part of the last year and a half, kicking around the toxic wasteland of the secondary championships. Of course, that was still theoretically a rung up from feuding with Fandango with no good reason, but that doesn't seem to be happening anymore, either.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that seemingly in el mundial real, Miz envisions himself as the actual non-Cena face of the company. Talking head on a DVD, commentary on Main Event, red carpets, you name it, his face will be there with something to say. Who else could be signaling a possible heel turn by using Backstage Fallout, for crying out Danielson? This is the dictionary definition of the difference between confidence and arrogance, of perceived value to actual worth.
You have a better chance of seeing Gabourey Sidibe join the cast of Girls before you will see John Cena on Backstage Fallout. This is because John Cena is pressed for time, in and out of the ring. When your schedule is as wide open and your star has fallen as far as the Miz's, time is a wide expanse with more openings in it than a comedy club's open mic night. As Randy Orton jumped him in his hometown, not even his own dad could muster up a reaction to him getting beaten up. This was the biggest evil in the WWE almost literally coming into his backyard to jack him up and the man who put him into this world could barely even muster a shrug.
As a wise man once perfectly articulated, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth. Miz's moment? It doesn't come from the cash-in on Orton, or the awesome video package set to Hate Me Now he got before the WrestleMania he kinda-sorta headlined; it's him and Truth in cuffs at Hell In A Cell having just gone crazy in the babyface iteration of a Triple H regime. This is because something shocking had just occurred but also because Miz had done something evil. And in the WWE narrative with Orton being his photo negative, this matters.
It matters since the biggest booking decisions in 2013 seem to have at least some basis in reality. You think Triple H and Stephanie are rich self-centered delusional jerks? Now playing rich, self-centered delusional jerks, ladies and gentlemen, Stephanie and Triple H! Daniel Bryan is the plucky underdog who doesn't fit WWE's image? Hey, let's see if we can get this Daniel Bryan character to play a guy who doesn't fit WWE's image and will serve as a plucky underdog. He will? Yes! Yes! Yes! Randy Orton is a douchebag who doesn't deserve to hold the biggest prize in the game and got here on his looks, his name, and a possibly accidental Patrick Bateman impersonation? Pedigree at Summerslam, superkick at Hell in a Cell. Oh wow. WWE Champion. Such venom. Much RKO. Very Viper.
Miz being must-see stopped being true a long time ago, and his level of swagger veers much wildly towards arrogance than confidence as a result. He beat Wade Barrett for a secondary title this year? I think Estonian Thunder Frog did the same last winter. His face turn, like Del Rio's, was a bad idea made worse by shoddy execution.
Sure, most people are a confluence of light and dark. Great moments have been made by somebody embracing the light or joining the dark, but that's still 98% of the world. There's a percentage of saints, the same way there's a percentage of sinners. I have no interest in booing Sami Zayn at anything, ever.If he executed my parents I would assume he was a timecop from the future and that they were somehow planning a future terrorist attack that he thwarted.
Similarly, I'm now a LeBron fan. It's amazing watching the prime of a Hall-of-Famer's legendary career, and laughing at the people who go into meltdown over him winning is hilarious and has been for years; under their delusional gaze he's the black Raef LaFrentz who just lucked into his position by conspiracy.
Some people are actually awesome and not just using it for a catchphrase. Conversely, if Chris Brown died tomorrow the urge to post something snarky would probably overtake me before his body cooled. Assuming Dick Cheney ever dies, that urge would ratchet up by a factor of hundreds of thousands. There are people in the world whose deeds uplift us all, and in so doing put us in their corner. Then there are others who just cause a primal narrowing of eyes. It's unexplainable at times but always primal, a voice from the gut going "EFF THEM."
You know, the Mizes of the world. What Punkian odds has he had to overcome? What Cenaesque heroic comebacks has he launched over a period of time and not after being in a chinlock for 20 seconds? He doesn't even have the benefit of a Goldust since he's never been away for a long time and come back at a peak since outside of filming straight to DVD sharknados he's always been around. And familiarity can surely breed contempt; ask Alabama and Auburn if you don't believe me.
Miz leaned so hard into making himself an arrogant douchebag obsessed with fame that without a backstory to build off of, attempts at his joining the side of the angels seems false. Hell, even his fiancee knew better than to try to win the fervor of the fans. She had "bitchy and foreign" on lock, she did it as much as she wanted, and then she bounced to do her own thing.
If we are still in the days of a Reality Era, it is to accept incongruity and complications in a world that's based around being simple for simplicity's sake. It's unfortunate Miz is taking on the sins of alignment perception, but it's more unfortunate that the WWE hasn't found a way to capitalize on it. Keep in mind this is the same company employing Jack Swagger as Biff from Back to the Future, while down in NXT Tyler Breeze is being chanted and feted and Bo Dallas is being derided for drawing a breath and not being Sami Zayn. They do know how to do this in this day and age.
It's no longer about somebody turning themselves up to 11, but rather the perception of those who see them. If technology has turned everyone smarter and smarker, from the champions on down their characters should be in line with the fans perceive and damn the torpedos. Sufficiently hated, a heel can draw enough fans in the seats the same as a good guy perceived to be one can get a crowd behind him even if everyone's aware they're just putting on a show. In an era of this virtual monopoly during a downturn, the WWE should be using that to test the waters and take more risks, not fewer.
An avowed libertarian making a decision to nakedly serve his own self-interests even if it means having to be at the occasional beck and call of an evil conglomerate makes all the sense in the world.
Here's to hoping the rest of the midcard gets a once-over, a couple of matches, and is fueled by logic from there as well.
Written by Butch Rosser of The Wrestling Blog
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