More of those Black Friday Sale commissions. This one comes courtesy of AndoCommando, whose greatest wish is to see me in pain. You too can pay me to watch and write about wrestling matches or other things, over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. Ideally you have higher ambitions than to just make me watch bad stuff, but hey, dealers choice. That’s $5 per match and more if you’d like to discuss that in the DMs.
This was a Hell in a Cell match for Rollins’ WWE Universal Title.
During this whole process, I’ve realized that I have a sort of set idea about what someone gets if they pay me. I want to hit over 500 words at least, and really expand upon everything I mean. Sometimes those words don’t always come, but if they start to flow, I just sort of see where they wander off towards. Even if it’s something I hate like this and that leaves me feeling insulted by the end, I always keep in mind that someone paid for this, and generally speaking, people deserve what they pay for. It’s not like either of these two abused a teenager or anything, you know?
Before I write about this “match”, I want to talk about the WWE and the way I consume it, and my reaction to this in the moment.
Ever since 2017 or so — save a six or seven month run in 2018 when 205 Live was often something worth watching live — I’ve consumed the WWE just like I would New Japan or Takeshita-era DDT or something like that. A company with a lot of talent, but whose booking frustrates me and whose lesser shows are rarely worth a start-to-finish watch. Cherry pick what looks decent or what’s received acclaim from people you trust, but it’s really about the monthly big shows. I’ve only ever watched WWE pay-per-views live, and I’ve typically gone over to my cousin’s to do so. We have some beers and a pizza, it’s a fun time. He’s a bigger WWE fan than I can ever be and pays for the stream, so it’s also just a little bit anthropological on top of allowing me to watch with slightly less guilt (I mean, I still have a Peacock sub that I regularly forget to cancel, but that’s mostly for sitcoms. I tell myself this to make it okay).
Unless a show is entirely useless, I go over there for just about every pay-per-view and it’s a good time.
This was a real bad one.
Bad enough that even my cousin hated it, and bad enough that I walked the few blocks home, got online, and set about making every one of the people I regularly interact with online watch this match. Called it THE ENCOUNTER, described it in detail, and just hounded people until they also experienced it. Typically, a burden shared is also a burden lessened, but that’s not the case here. The load never felt any lighter, it didn’t un-watch the match. Really, I thought it was just phenomenally terrible and I wanted other people to suffer too. That saying about a burden is about real labor with an aim to accomplish something. As it pertains to parasocial relationships, if I suffer through a great ordeal, I kind of want everyone else to suffer through the same thing.
Here and now, I’ve joined a select and probably damned group of people to have watched this match twice.
I would appreciate it if everyone reading this joined the same club.
It’s still one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. None of it’s any better. It hasn’t been rendered quaint by worse things to follow in the way that some NXT matches have. Everything that sucked about this initially and immediately will always suck about it. The action is pedestrian, the booking is atrocious, and the acting is embarrassing.
However, one thing I’m always fearful of being in this space is unoriginal and this match has been discussed to death.
So, actually, fuck this.
I don’t know that you need me to break it down for you when everyone knew from the moment it started to go downhill how bad this is. Better writers than me have detailed it with gifs and videos to break it down like it’s the Zapruder film (do I think the CIA did this? hard to say), and there are countless articles elsewhere on the internet about the myriad of ways in which it’s bad, stupid, and a total failure. All of the no-selling is bad, the attempt at a horror movie finish after the match complete with blood packet like THE FIEND ripped Seth’s jaw off or something, and especially the maudlin display where the ref pleads with Seth not to use the sledgehammer as well on top of all the other steel objects to the head (gotta pay the fiddler, nobody dances for free) before a fucking Hell in a Cell match is stopped. It’s all bad, and it’s all bad in the ways you’ve always known it was bad.
Nothing that I have to say about this match is new, and I doubt very little than any of it is interesting.
What I’m left thinking about is how this whole exercise had a way of revealing people and what it is that they really wanted.
Some of you could have and did spend money on good matches. Matches that, I imagine, you wanted to know what I thought of and wanted to see me go into detail on. I appreciate that. Not only the money, but the implicit show of respect that comes with it. Times are not especially easy, although there are many far worse off than I am, and I could use it, but I’m far more comfortable doing something to earn it. This is one of the things that I’m best at and so this is my solution. I think it’s a fair trade, and it’s allowed me to mostly not pay for Christmas presents for the people in my life that I love and appreciate while also doing something I greatly enjoy.
Some of you had some weird requests though, and didn’t leave this process looking all that good. The sort of commissions that either greatly upset me or deeply confused me, that caused me to immediately raise my eyebrows, deaden my eyes, and sigh deeply. This is right near the top of that list.
Really though, I don’t know what the point of me writing about this is.
Whether intended or not, it feels a lot like being asked to dance for my money, doing something I really don’t want to do. “You want money to write? Here, write about some terrible matches!” Ask for video of me running into a wall or falling down the stairs instead maybe. It’s a much quicker thing, and fundamentally, a more honest version of what’s really going on. I know there’s an audience out there just for negative reviews, but it’s not really the sort of thing I enjoy doing when it comes to something THIS bad. I try my best to synthesize between the heart and the head, and sometimes that turns out angry and negative. I would much rather write 2500 words about something I loved, or loved most of, than write 1000 words about something like this. (the ideal, of course, is sub-500 words about something i sort of hated but that a lot of people really loved.)
Truly, I have absolutely nothing to add to the conversation about this match that hasn’t already been said over and over and over and over and over again. No turn of phrase, no secret meaning to unlock, there’s nothing here for me to latch onto in a way that I find interesting or valuable. Nothing I have to say about it is new or offers any unique insight. There is nothing of value here. No good deed is commemorated here, etc. I had just opened this blog when the match happened, and there’s a reason I didn’t write about it at the time.
It stinks, it’s rotten, and everything bad that’s happened to the WWE and the world at large sort of feels like reaping what was sown by allowing something like this. There. It’s the concept of entropy as a professional wrestling match.
This is a terrible match, but you all already knew that.
Outside of being paid to discuss a sexual abuser who is still active in wrestling, this is the most offended I’ve been at one of these yet.
HANDWERK 