I'm sorry, I know it is the obvious one but I've just gotta say it too.
It is, without a doubt, easily the worst storyline I can remember (well like aside from the ones that were flat-out offensive ie Katie Vick or Mysterio/Orton). There have been numerous bad storylines, but at least you understood what they maybe were trying to accomplish and simply messed up. It was like the WWE purposely booked this terribly because there is no other reason. Who the fuck was like, "hey, we should have our hottest superstar in the company interact with Kevin Nash! Then when we realize he can't wrestle anymore, have him lose to Triple H!" ???
Reigns/Triple H was terrible too. The writing wasn't so bad as much as it was nobody wanted either of them to win the WWE Championship in the main WrestleMania.
Talk about burying a stable in one month. Another story where it felt like the WWE botched it on purpose. And then that whole shindig where Cena is forced to join the Nexus, then is fired, but still appeared every week. That was a dark time in the WWE.
Any time a new champion is crowned and he has a wealth of new potential opponents as champion, but instead gets thrust into a program against Kane, things tend to plummet right down to the bottom of the barrel very quickly. But the angle between Kane and Seth Rollins was particularly terrible.
Kane spent months threatening Rollins, but the two still somehow co-existed on the same team. Then Kane started actually beating the shit out of Rollins occasionally, but they were still somehow on the same team. Rollins became afraid of Kane, but only when Kane was wearing a mask. When Kane wasn't wearing a mask, Rollins was not just unafraid but openly antagonistic, acting as if Corporate Kane was an entirely different person. One face of Kane made the new champion look like a coward, the other face of Kane made him look like an idiot.
Corporate Kane's ankle was shattered, but he put the mask on and his ankle was healed immediately, making us all look like idiots for watching this shit.
Triple H and Stephanie treated Kane and Rollins like squabbling children this entire time, instead of firing Kane for being a maniac and putting their chosen champion in danger.
An anonymous whistle-blower issued a complaint to HR about Kane's behaviour, and he was put under review. That review lasted for the duration of an episode of Raw (what), and Kane was found innocent of all wrong doing (what), which means that the people in WWE's HR department clearly don't have a clue what happens on the television show, where Kane was trying to murder Rollins on a weekly basis. Stephanie then outed Rollins as being the whistle-blower on live television (what) because that's something a company is apparently allowed to do.
Then Rollins got injured in a house show match against Kane and what was supposed to be a great title reign ended on the terrible and disappointing note that it had truly earned.
Undertaker and Kane vs The Wyatt Family from around Survivor Series a few years ago. Does anyone remember this one?
So The Wyaat Family had attacked The Undertaker and Kane and then carried him to the back, or taken them hostage or something. Then Bray came out on Raw and claimed he had "harvested the souls of Kane and The Undertaker". Over the next few weeks he would make the lights go off and summon pyro on the ramp. Apparently he had absorbed their powers? This sounds cheesy but keep in mind that this was by far the most dominant the Wyatt Family had ever been booked by that point. So there was a certain level of intrigue to see where the story went.
Alas. Kane and Taker randomly show up on Raw and challenge the Wyatts to a match at Survivor Series. They then proceed to beat the Wyatt Family in a 10-minute match at Survivor Series despite the 4-on-2 advantage the Wyatts had over them. And that's 4 big dudes including Braun Strowman.
Vintage Wyatt. It was a a real chance to legitimize the Wyatts as a feared stable, but they totally dropped the ball. You could still have had them lose to the good buys in the end, but at least make it a traditional Survivor Series tag match and add two more guys to Taker and Kane's team.
Messiah wrote:It was like the WWE purposely booked this terribly because there is no other reason. Who the fuck was like, "hey, we should have our hottest superstar in the company interact with Kevin Nash! Then when we realize he can't wrestle anymore, have him lose to Triple H!" ???
Rather than purposely booking it terribly, it was more like they were making it up as they went along. Remember the whole "who sent Nash the text?" angle, then it turned out that Kevin Nash had sent a text to himself
It also led to the introduction of John Laurinitis as an on-screen character, which is one of the worst decisions in the past 10 years in itself.
I'm sure they were making a lot of that shit up on the fly. Because you couldn't write that down in advance and agree to go forward that plan. But some of it had to be deliberate by Triple H and Nash and Vince. If the biggest wrestling star in years just drops into your lap, you don't accidentally overshadow and job him out for months. If they really were booking things from week to week, most of those weeks would have been "Punk cuts a scathing promo on a bitch" or "Punk kicks somebody's ass".
You couldn't convince me that there wasn't an element of sabotage there. They looked at how popular he was becoming, didn't want him to be the top guy, and tried to figure out how to transfer that heat to someone else. Though they did a spectacularly bad job with that too.
Throwback to these cryptic promos which went on for weeks and weeks, generated a ton of intrigue, then turned out to be for Chris Jericho, of all people - who returned, said nothing, and left.
Even after Jericho settled in, that was a shit run.
I remember the amount of Jericho fans desperately trying to defend that return, and find something clever about it. Or just insisted that the angle was going somewhere, when it never did.
Hanley! wrote:I remember the amount of Jericho fans desperately trying to defend that return, and find something clever about it. Or just insisted that the angle was going somewhere, when it never did.
I must admit, I found it hilarious at the time. It was just so bad, and was the ultimate anti-climax considering the build. I love it whenever WWE shoot themselves in the foot.
I remember the topics popping up on WWE-Club about who the girl was in the video, why she was relevant, and what role she had to play. People were speculating about the likes of Sting, Goldberg, and loads of other high-profile names. Then no, it was Jericho. The videos weren't relevant to his character in any way, and no explanation was given other than him saying "it's the end of the world as you know it" once, and that was it.
Talking of disappointing and dull returns:
I remember people speculating that this was Sting, Goldberg, Kharma, and various other people. Nope, Undertaker. Whose return was interrupted by Triple H, who initiated a 6-minute long staring contest, didn't say anything, then left.
For what it's worth, the Katie Vick story is more than 15 years old now.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the two epic Hornswoggle storylines. I mean it's tough to choose between Hornswoggle being the anonymous RAW GM and Hornswoggle being Vince McMahon's child.
Speaking of which, who on the RAW writing team thought, "you know, we did such a great job with Vince's illegitimate child storyline we should go back and repeat it with Kurt Angle?" That person's judgment should be eternally questioned.
The Legend wrote:Hornswoggle being Vince McMahon's child.
That was a dark time. I'd almost banished it from my memory.
I heard that allegedly the plan was for Mr Kennedy to be his illegitimate child and then receive a huge push, but then he dropped Orton on his head and was generally a bit of a dick backstage. Anyone would've been better than Hornswoggle though.
Kennedy was great on the mic and decent in the ring. I would have liked to see what he brought to the table as a main eventer. In any case, it would brought a new player to the main event scene, and might have put a dent in the narrative that WWE didn't create any new stars in the Cena/Batista era. Dude just kept getting injured ove rand over again though, and also made some bad choices. Kennedy's WWE career was so cursed.
Vince's limp exploding was so wild when it happened. Possibly a really stupid idea. But original too. I want to know where that was going. The thing is, Benoit's death happened right after, so they had to scrap the story immediately.
The Undertaker cryptic return videos were weird, and I wonder if the goal behind it was to gauge how interested people might be for Sting in WWE. Because I don't see what purpose those vignettes served otherwise. They could have announced Undertaker officially returning, then had HHH come out as a surprise and it would have been the same thing.
TNA parodied the promos for Sting's return to TNA, which happened a short time later:
Styles/Nakamura probably doesn't deserve to be in this conversation, but I feel obligated to shout it out. How has the WWE managed to screw-up something that was so easy to do?