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Defenestrategy posted:I think my breaking point was when they botched the gently caress out of the nexus. It was the first cool thing to happen in a very long time and it made a lot of sense, and when they hosed that up was when I realized that even with wwe handed a reall cool opportunity theyd ruin it for no reason. Made me try to think of what my breaking point was. And I really don't think it was any one thing. I mean I'd bounced on & off WWE watching for years at a time from the end of the Attitude Era. I know the start of Raw going to 3 hours was definitely a break point, but then I came back when Danielson was feuding with the Wyatt Family leading into the Mania he headlined. And then they put him in another feud with Kane & then he got hurt & I just lost interested. I kept watching NXT for a while longer, I think the Takeover where Nakamura debuted vs Zayn was the last I watched regularly. The thing is, it's a lot harder to commit to a OK 3 hour show than a mediocre 1 hour one. ECW & NXT weren't always particularly good, but I could wake up before work having downloaded last night's episode & watch it over breakfast & while getting ready. Where as 3 hours, well, it's 3 hours. But also my tastes have changed & I'm a lot less into promos than I once was, unless a promo is particularly standout.
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Apr 9, 2024 17:59
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Integrated Houston posted:I get that, and I don’t blame Vicki. Using Eddie as an angle has been defended by many, including Rey, Vicki, and Orton, as being “what Eddie would have wanted,” and they probably know better than me. But I was just really not ready for nor interested in that poo poo. Like, what kind of business loving does that? Yeah, that's sort of how I felt about the Punk/Taker angle I described above. Bill Moody/Paul Bearer was a very old school guy who you could tell from his online blog that leaned to the Bill Watts Mid-South mindset of keeping kayfabe alive. I'm very certain he'd be on-board with the idea that if he actually died that it be played into an Undertaker angle as long as his memory remained 'in character' for it. But that doesn't mean it's not gross as hell, only partly because the nature of Taker changed over time to the point where they acknowledged he and Paul were just guys doing an act.
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Apr 9, 2024 18:00
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Craptacular! posted:I feel like they eventually got the Nexus concept right with The Shield. The problem is that stables are bad for wrestling, and they eventually figured out that 3/4 man gangs like The Shield and The New Day and Hurt Business (and of course, the Four Horsemen but they'll never let themselves use that one) allow for flexibility in matches without going full blown as 10-12 man stable. This should not be news, the nWo was way more exciting with the first three guys than it was with thirty, but for reasons it took bookers a very long time to figure this out. That's the thing is that it didn't have to even be a stable, it could have just been a loose contingent of dudes who throw up the Nexus signal if someone is being particularly lovely to one of them united because vince and a bunch of lovely vets wanted to pick on the new guys and put it on television, like the best friends extended universe is with Rocky/Danhausen/Stat/Shibata/etc/etc/etc.
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Apr 9, 2024 18:25
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For me, I was watching the show out of habit and because I would write guides for the PPVs for Den of Geek at the time. With Greatest Royal Rumble, I didn't think much of it. It was a silly novelty of a show with Titus falling down and Fake Yokozuna. The Khashoggi situation on the next show (not to mention them deciding "people are pissed, might as well bring back Hogan") grossed me out enough that I wanted nothing to do with that Saudi PPV, but I still kept watching WWE otherwise. Over time, I started to realize how little I cared about what was going on, even with wrestlers I enjoyed. Three hours would go by and I would wonder what I was getting out of it. Probably the most exciting thing around the time was the Becky Lynch antihero run and that was so mishandled going into WrestleMania that even her grand victory was flat. The website was phasing out wrestling articles, so I didn't have to follow the show for work reasons, and I was playing with the idea of dropping it completely. I figured that I would use Money in the Bank 2019 as my last chance to see if I cared enough to keep going. That was the show with the surprise Brock Lesnar appearance and win in the main event. I immediately cancelled the Network. Thankfully, the first Double or Nothing was a week later. The longer I went without it, the more I realized how much I didn't miss WWE at all (well, maybe Sami). Especially since AEW was what I really wanted out of wrestling. I would watch the Rumbles in the next couple years, but they never lured me back. I was considering watching this year's Rumble because we have Peacock already, but then the nastier details about the Vince stuff came out and I couldn't bring myself to do it.
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Apr 9, 2024 18:34
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The Benoit Murder/Suicide is what turned me of WWE for a long time and the Misawa death also got me to stop watching most wrestling till New Japan became hot in the mid 2010's.
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Apr 9, 2024 19:26
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Craptacular! posted:The problem is that stables are bad for wrestling My friend, this is just WCW and WWE being bad for wrestling. Dragon Gate will show you the way.
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Apr 9, 2024 19:59
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Yeah, I should have added "except stuff like Bullet Club which actually works", but it's a bit out of my wheelhouse.
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Apr 9, 2024 20:16
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I was already not a fan of their work with Saudi Arabia and then sending Stephanie out to be all "lol who cares?" on live television after Khashoggi's murder was it for me.
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Apr 9, 2024 20:33
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I didn't have a breaking point as much as I cut the cord sometime in the mid 2000's and once a habit is broken it becomes difficult to pick back up. Even once the network came out and at a very reasonable price point I never subscribed. The last time I regularly watched wrestling was pre-NJPW World when Russians would upload G1 shows to....Daily Motion?...and that's how I watched about a decade ago, sludging through Shelton Benjamin and Yujiro and Doc Gallows matches to get to the good stuff. Now days it's a match here and there that I find on social. I don't have the patience or wherewithal to sit through these marathon shows anymore; it took me three days to get through the ROH/NJPW MSG show when they posted it for free. I get annoyed when my Fire Pro recordings go past half an hour.
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Apr 9, 2024 21:20
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My first WWE breaking point was that Mania XIX when Michaels went over Jericho and Triple H went over Booker. It just became so obvious that nothing was ever going to change and it would always be the same old bullshit. I came back at some point a couple years later and watched sporadically, but definitely not as avidly as I did. I checked out on the main roster completely at some point after NXT became a thing and started having insane PPVs and would just check in around Mania most of the time. Then I drifted away from NXT after a while and couldn’t get into it at all when it went to actual TV. Finally, the Saudi stuff and probably something else I can’t remember drove me off completely. I feel like there was a second thing but can’t remember what it was, or maybe I’m just misremembering.
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Apr 9, 2024 21:27
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It was a combination of seeing Samoa Joe vs. Kenta Kobashi in ROH and Eddie Guerrero dying a couple months later (I think is the timeline) that caused me to drift away and nothing I heard really made me want to start watching again.
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Apr 9, 2024 21:55
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I never watched WWE and I never will. I knew about Mankind through osmosis and I thought he was cool. My dad thought wrestling was dumb and I didn't want to be dumb.
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Apr 9, 2024 22:06
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I thought Cactus Jack seemed cool as a kid but stopped paying attention to fake wrestling nonsense for years. I got back into it later and found out that he was now a guy that wore a leather mask and a shirt and tie for no discernable reason, and this seemed totally fine.
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Apr 9, 2024 22:12
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I watched Cactus Jack get powerbombed on the concrete by Vader, then he disappeared and came back as some amnesiac homeless guy and brother, let me tell you about the first of many breaking points with WCW...
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Apr 9, 2024 22:39
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I definitely checked out of WWE mentally as soon as Cena beat Bray at Wrestlemania, that was the easiest layup ever to build your new monster heel and...no, rapadoo, thanks for coming. Probably followed it out of habit after that but I remember little of it
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Apr 10, 2024 02:10
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Halloween Jack posted:Eighteen Seconds. 
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Apr 10, 2024 02:16
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DeathChicken posted:I definitely checked out of WWE mentally as soon as Cena beat Bray at Wrestlemania, that was the easiest layup ever to build your new monster heel and...no, rapadoo, thanks for coming. Probably followed it out of habit after that but I remember little of it Bray didn't even have to win. Cena could have won by being goaded into "going too far". I would have killed for Cena to ham it up, looking at his hands "what have I become?" ending. Instead we got the definitive LOL CENA WINS.
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Apr 10, 2024 02:40
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Were ecw and Sabu the first to do the lights out lights on sabu is there thing?
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Apr 10, 2024 04:06
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I didn't have a breakup with WWE as much as I had a fadeaway. I fell off watching week to week because there were other shows I wanted to watch or things I wanted to do on nights when their shows were on. I was keeping up with some indies, more through clips and news reports than watching or going to shows. Then Bryan Danielson was announced for NXT, and there was enough buzz that I watched it and enjoyed it, but didn't watch their other shows. And after that I just started to fade away again as I got more into the indies, although nonestly I was mostly falling out of caring about wrestling much at all. And then in 2018 I subscribed to New Japan because people had been telling me how good it was. One of the first shows I saw was Dominion 2018. At that point, what the gently caress is a WWE and why should I care?
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Apr 10, 2024 11:46
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It was mentioned by somebody else but another thing was even if I heard of something neat - like, say, the Wyatt family - when I checked it out it was completely borked shortly there after, sometimes with a variant of LOL CENA WINS.
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Apr 10, 2024 14:36
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Dawgstar posted:LOL CENA WINS Defenestrategy posted:I think my breaking point was when they botched the gently caress out of the nexus. It was the first cool thing to happen in a very long time and it made a lot of sense, and when they hosed that up was when I realized that even with wwe handed a reall cool opportunity theyd ruin it for no reason. I don't think there was any one specific thing that drove me away for good but Cena no-selling the DDT on the concrete came drat close
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Apr 10, 2024 14:40
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Lamuella posted:And then in 2018 I subscribed to New Japan because people had been telling me how good it was. One of the first shows I saw was Dominion 2018. At that point, what the gently caress is a WWE and why should I care? I had a moment with NJPW as well - seeing Switchblade vs Juice for the US title was the first time in ages that I'd seen a show that big where the audience was fully engaged and not just making GBS threads on everything.
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Apr 10, 2024 14:45
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I had a few breaking points but they came on top of a lot of little moments. When Bryan won the title at Mania 30 I felt like that was my end - I had been watching weekly nonstop for a long time, and it was as good as it was going to get for me WWE-wise. Everything after felt like an epilogue, and of course the Kane feud happened and he eventually vacated it but I was drifting away by then. I got really into the British indies for my wrestling fix, and was watching NXT Takeovers as well, and when I eventually started wrestling training myself training was on Mondays. My whole schedule was dominated by independent wrestling and show setup. It made it easy to wean off of it, but when I left wrestling due to personal reasons and big changes in my life, I would still watch some NXT shows and WrestleMania, but eventually after the one Kofi won at I stopped that too. I don't remember what order these happened in but the Saudi show right after Kashoggi soured me beyond belief, and then the next thing I heard about was how Kofi's title run ended in a Brock squash which was just plain disgusting, and then Big E would later lose the title in almost the same way, and there was that MITB where Brock won and the Rumble that Drew won which was fine but I hated to start...but the next big blow that severed my waning interest was the COVID releases. They were horrible enough, but the firing and rehiring of Rockstar Spud was such an evil thing to do especially when they did it. Last year, I got the itch after years to finally dip back in after Wrestle Universe woke me up out of my wrestling coma. I really loved the Rumble, Sami had his hot EC run, and I was enjoying Mania very much...until night 2, because Night 2 was like a shining signal right in my face that this place will never improve in any way ever and nothing will ever change. It was more than just Cody losing, it was watching with a friend who was really into the Bloodline angle and seeing their enthusiasm for wrestling die the moment the ref counted the three. It was like, I dunno, Fool Me Once/Twice/A Thousand Times. It was just decades of utter poo poo rolling down, and between the Vince hostile takeover and this it just reminded me why I stopped watching in the first place. Thank god for AEW Revolution and DDT/TJPW for shaking the cobwebs off of my brain and reminding me that wrestling rules always because hoo boy, it was rough for a while. So yeah, combination of personal demons and an evil company that sucks at storytelling and hates their fans and their workers doing a bunch of stuff that wore me down. Now wrestling only makes me happy because I seek out matches and shows that spark joy.
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Apr 10, 2024 15:12
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They should have had Sami be the one to beat Roman. He put in so much work and frankly the reason the fed got so hot was because of his involvement with the bloodline.
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Apr 10, 2024 15:31
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There were two points for me that made me lose interest in the WWE product. Firstly, and this will sound very random, but it was Dean Ambrose vs Kevin Owens in a last man standing match at Royal Rumble 2016. I was watching the match and it was like I had seen it already or was watching it in my head a minute early because it was like every spot was so completely predictable. It wasn't even a bad match - I was just bored because it felt like I knew what was going to happen. It then started becoming more and more apparent in other matches what the "WWE match style" was and it just didn't feel fun anymore. Especially since NJPW had just had Wrestle Kingdom 10 a few weeks beforehand and had Okada finally beating Tanahashi at a WK in a fantastic match, plus things just felt so unique. The matches were exciting, wrestlers had their own individual in-ring styles, and you had matchups that would be believable regardless of who won or lost. Meanwhile, in WWE there was a clear divide between the levels that wrestlers were on the card and people getting elevated rarely felt organic. Eventually the Jamal Khashoggi murder happened and WWE's blatant propaganda for the Saudis were enough to make me give up on the company. I can't remember if I cancelled my network subscription before that specific Saudi show or after (I want to say before but I can't confirm that), but I haven't regretted it. Besides, a few months later, AEW was founded. Then a few months after that Double or Nothing happened and was fantastic and later on All Out which was also great. Finally, ironically exactly one year after Khashoggi's death, Dynamite started and I've never felt the need to go back to watching WWE since.
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Apr 10, 2024 15:36
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I almost never watched WWE until I was convinced to go to Rumble 2008, loved Cena and would watch the Cena stuff, then sometimes whole Raws but never would buy PPVs or anything else until the Network. I figured 10 dollars was fine, look at this big back catalog. By October of 2016 I realized that I was incredibly bored during every PPV and there was plenty of stuff to watch with New Japan and CMLL plus indies that I didn't need to watch old stuff so I cancelled and haven't watched since Goldberg/Lesnar which was the last match before my subscription ran out. Beyond realizing that the company had been doing so much to make me forget it wasn't evil it was just so boring that I couldn't imagine spending any money on this.
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Apr 10, 2024 15:41
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My main fandom of WWE probably ended around 2005 (when I graduated high school) but I was a part of so many wrestling boards that I still kind of "kept up" with everything. Now I'll tune in every now and then but I'll never be an every week watcher again. Sometimes it feels like I never left because of consuming IWC content. I know the names and career trajectory of several wrestlers I've never seen and probably never will.
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Apr 10, 2024 16:12
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I sometimes wonder how many people were like me and never watched the weekly shows since I never had Fox8 where they aired. I started watching in 1999 and until I got World in January 2015 I'd never followed show to show, it was just whatever videos were available to rent and later on which Chikara or PWG torrents had the most seeds
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Apr 10, 2024 16:18
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My breaking point probably began when I realized they weren’t gonna give Al Snow a main event push. Erverybody loves head, how could they not see that! And then I’d say the breaking point was finalized when they got rid of Raw Underground. I thought that was a really fun and fresh take on pro wrestling and they just threw it out the window
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Apr 10, 2024 16:28
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Al Snow got more of a career than he deserved
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Apr 10, 2024 16:31
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The head and shoulders bit was worth his entire career imo
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Apr 10, 2024 16:37
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Mick's jokes about Al weren't demeaning enough
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Apr 10, 2024 16:55
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I fell out of wrestling for decades when Goldberg started tackling people and that was supposed to be more devastating than like slamming someone on their head
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Apr 10, 2024 17:04
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I stopped really watching WWE week-to-week around 2003 or 2004, for no particular reason I can think of, but I never really stopped following it completely. I always had at least a basic grasp on what was happening. I would get back into sporadically at various points in the 2010s, notably with Punk and Danielson’s big moments, but inevitably I’d lose interest as those stories went south. It was really AEW beginning that made me realize I still loved wrestling but just have grown to hate the WWE style. Even now after they’ve apparently improved so much, I’ll sometimes check it out and just be so turned off by their whole style and presentation. Plus obviously the Saudi and sex trafficking stuff makes it really easy to not want to support them.
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Apr 10, 2024 17:04
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The only good spear is the gore I remember channel surfing when I was a kid and coming across ECW on one of the lovely cable channels full of boring old man shows I usually ignored and practically the first thing I saw was Rhino absolutely destroying somebody with it Love that move
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Apr 10, 2024 17:13
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I don't like the spear as a finisher either. It should be a tempo-change move like a pounce.
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Apr 10, 2024 17:16
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History Comes Inside! posted:The head and shoulders bit was worth his entire career imo I've attempted to rewatch the attitude era multiple times, and I keep forgetting that this bit happens and it pops me every time it happens. I don't think al snow is as much of a blight on the roster as Deadlock makes it out to be, but I think he did about as well as his ceiling was. History Comes Inside! posted:The only good spear is the gore Does the pounce count as a spear?
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Apr 10, 2024 17:22
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Kaitlyn's spear was great but probably only because she was doing it to AJ Lee who weighed like 38 pounds
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Apr 10, 2024 17:44
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History Comes Inside! posted:The only good spear is the gore The Gore is literally just a spear with a different name Also Goldberg's finisher was the Jackhammer
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Apr 10, 2024 17:48
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Elephant Ambush posted:The Gore is literally just a spear with a different name No poo poo????
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Apr 10, 2024 18:05
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