Like everything else, pro wrestling fans are susceptible to fashion and trend bias.
In fact, wrestling is probably more affected by this because it never stops, and because it never stops, there’s always something to be heralded as the televised match of the year or the best promo you’ve heard from MJF. The edited picture was considered a career high, but was it really better than his manipulative supervillain origin story?
Or did it just happen recently?
This also swings the other way; since the fight never stops, it’s pretty easy to get bored even with outstanding stuff. Remember when Blackpool Combat Club, a total triumph of blood-soaked star vehicle, was running on too many trios matches and everything was threatening to get a little worse?
Are fans fickle? Or does the lack of an offseason accelerate the shelf life of the fight itself?
That’s an interesting idea. How does fervent support – so fierce that these fans devote so much of their time rooting for their favorites online in the hope that management will somehow listen – fade away and simply die? Does this process happen over time, so much so that you barely notice it until it happens?
Sometimes – but there are defining moments…
“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.”
It is
A) What actually happened to Johnny Gargano in the middle of his program with Tommaso Ciampa from 2016-2020.
and
B) The plagiarized purpose behind his twist; NXT tried to turn an excellent feud into a growing comic book movie reach saga and the results were hilarious.
The ambition was more than pretentious.
Wrestling fans just wanted to watch a babyface wrestler triumph over a heel wrestler in a storyline that justified its length. It all went to hell with the masturbation parody of an “epic” match that was One Final Beat in April 2020. It was an unintentionally hilarious story of two former friends agonizing for an hour about what they’ve become , but what they would really become were bad actors. By then it was over for Gargano.
It effectively ended on the November 7, 2018 NXT when Gargano cut a torturous tweener promo with the delusion that he was The Winter Soldier when he was actually Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3. The story was so far removed from what it was that Adam Cole became the favorite role of fans. Gargano’s incredible performance at TakeOver: New York was a moment; he was never a top babyface again.
To his credit, Gargano sensed this, too, and reinvented himself as a comedic goof — only on purpose, this time — as the leader of the Road faction toward the end of his WWE run.
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