Wrestling Fans Are Pretty Pissed Off About How The Royal Rumble Ended

While some of you were out celebrating the Hottest 100 or snagging up a barbecue or sculling goon from a clothesline or other traditional activities used to observe Australia Day, the real greatest day of the year was in full swing as the WWE‘s annual Royal Rumble event sprang forth onto TV screens worldwide.

And while the event in and of itself was a perfectly adequate time – punctuated by a particularly great Triple Threat match for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship between incumbent champion and flesh mountain Brock Lesnar, pastel coloured walking cliche in John Cena, and the license to print money that is Seth Rollins – the Royal Rumble match itself managed to make a mockery out of the entire company, and fans have been really, really pissed off about it.
How pissed off? The hashtag #CancelWWENetwork remains, at the time of writing, one of the top trending topics on the web, and for a good period the WWE Network‘s subscription cancellation page was down due to high traffic. Fans were so outraged about this they’ve actively decided to turn it off.
For those of you not so grapplingly inclined, or for those that missed it, the reason people are so up in arms surrounds the ending of the annual Royal Rumble Match – a 30-man, over-the-top-rope battle royal that determines which wrestler gets the right to challenge the champion at WrestleMania.
The company’s burgeoning new golden boy is handsome behemoth of a man named Roman Reigns, and such is the nature of the rocket currently being strapped to his back, he was booked to win the Rumble. Unfortunately in doing so, the WWE – a company already notorious for at times baiting or flat-out ignoring the voice of its fanbase – managed to flip a middle finger to everyone with emotional investment in their product.
In attempting to make Reigns look as strong as possible, the match ended up using other organic fan favourites such as Daniel Bryan, Dolph Ziggler and Dean Ambrose as little more than cannon fodder. The instant Bryan was eliminated the crowd turned on the product, booing Reigns relentlessly and derisively chanting “We want Rusev” to the point where even a surprise appearance by Reigns’ real-life cousin The Rock couldn’t save things.
Whether or not this unprecedented negative fan reaction is enough to force the company to change their creative direction again – much like last year’s meteoric rise of Daniel Bryan to the main event of WrestleMania XXX – remains to be seen.
At the very least, they’ve got a week to think about things – today’s instalment of the weekly live TV megalith Monday Night Raw has had to be cancelled due to the thousand feet of snow that’s about to be dumped on the US Northeast.
(Seriously, though. What harm does having Ziggler, Ambrose, Bryan and Reigns be the final four do? Literally none. No harm whatsoever. Everyone comes out looking like a legend and the crowd buys into the match 100%. Not a single person actually believes there’s even the slimmest chance that either Kane or Big Show is going to win the Rumble match in 2015. Boo. And while I’m at it, you can waste ten seconds on Titus O’Neil somehow managing to fuck up being eliminated straight away but you can’t toss five minutes of ring time to Sami Zayn to boost the eyes on NXT? Give me a freakin’ break.)

via Uproxx.

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