10 Ways WWE Disrespects Its Fans

Alright, let’s have a little bit of a moan. Honestly, I’ve tried to avoid skewing negative against WWE since I started doing lists again.

Lists of the worst things in wrestling are fun, they’re fun to write, typing the word bad into thesaurus.com and getting creative with ways to talk about what is essentially silly entertainment, but I’ve to avoid overtly coming after Vince’s Brigade of sweaty charades.

But honestly, right now, man it’s hard to avoid how dumb it feels to follow modern WWE. The fact that fans have been back for a little bit and some of WWE’s worst habits have intensified rather than relaxed, it gets proper dispiriting after a while and if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to dedicate one full list into trying to examine what these habits are, and how all those roads lead to one thing, WWE not really giving a hairless monkey ass about wrestling fans.

Fans have their own bad habits, but I honestly believe, at the end of the day, we want to enjoy wrestling. We want to be able to sit and watch a show without the constant specter of questionable decisions constantly needling and forcing us to examine, why, why do we still… care?

Because at this point, I’m not sure that I’ve always got an answer. And it goes beyond simple stuff like ‘I don’t like the doll’ and I don’t like the doll, but it’s more than that, and I’ll try to explain why.

I’m Adam from partsFUNknown and here are the 10 Biggest Ways WWE Disrespects Its Fans.

---

10. F**k Tag Team Wrestling

I’m really going to try and make this list purely about WWE and not spend the whole thing comparing them to other promotions, but for this first one, you can’t not bring up AEW, but hey those guys have their own problems, but they seem to understand one thing, tag team wrestling is fun.

Team psychology, creative tag cheating, the hot tags, the double teams, the fact that tag wrestling has structured moments for stars to rest, meaning the overall workrate’s a bit higher.

I do not understand why WWE seems so dead set against denying its fans the simple pleasure of good tag wrestling, with its myopic obsession of creating short-term moments by imploding all of its goddamn teams, rather than letting them have an actual division.

The Revival split, The Good Brothers got released, The Hurt Business broke up, Heavy Machinery imploded, each brand has what… two, three teams at most?

It’s baffling that WWE had so many people on their roster, and five hours to fill each week that they weren’t swelling their tag roster with teams, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s so disheartening for tag wrestling fans to see a vital part of wrestling essentially shrivel up and drop off like a c**k in a blizzard. 

---

9. Manipulating Crowd Noise

Well, this is an easy one to unpack, isn’t it? Tell us what you want, says WWE, you’re the authority now. “We want Bray Wyatt,” fans say, “ssh,” says WWE, just turning down the crowd mic. Ssssh.

WWE has been doing it for years, where they think they can get away with it, muting the crowd’s boos at WrestleMania 32, even piping in crowd noise on recent SmackDowns. I mean, Jesus, WWE, just go back to the Thunderdome if that’s how you feel.

Must have been a dream for them, telling them when to gesture, when to move, like meat sacks covered into electrodes, occasionally shock into animation, while WWE pipes in favorable crowd noise over unfavorable Jackson Ryker.

Nothing says “WWE would much rather a world where the crowd can’t express themselves”, than literally turning them down when they go off-message, which leads us to the age-old problem.

---

8. We Choose Who You Like

It’s something that’s been talked about to death, the fact that when Vince used to take to the mic to scream at the crowd, ostensibly in character, “you like what I tell you to like” that it’s the biggest shoot in company history.

It’ll be an easier point to leave behind if the fans hadn’t been recently vindicated a whole bunch of times, with the oft-requested Heel Roman Reigns, Main Event Cesaro, Main Event Becky Lynch being, y’know, great.

Getting those things felt like a struggle, but at least we got ‘em, but it still feels like we’re having people’s value dictated to us, rather than the other way around.

The lower midcard runs of Shayna Baszler (a UFC fighter so dumb she can’t outsmart a puppet), Keith Lee being repackaged to oblivion because of percieved problems that he didn’t have, the sexy goddamn mountain, the Karrion Kross stuff, I’m not saying the fans should get to book the show, but it’s maddening to see someone get over with the crowd, and then have that reaction ignored because it doesn’t gel with how certain stars are viewed backstage. And hey, speaking of…

• Hell In A Cell
• Adam Blampied
• Roman Reigns
• wwe

Share this article with friends