Franchise Original Sin / Professional Wrestling

• WWE has the breakup of The Rockers. The immense success Shawn Michaels found after the breakup was good for the business no question, even taking the diva persona Shawn acquired as a result of it into account, but Marty Jannetty's fade into obscurity was unfortunate. The plan was for both members of the team to become big singles stars but it came to be that, in trying to duplicate the success of Shawn Michaels, WWE broke up a lot of popular tag teams and instead of getting one good singles star out of it usually ended up with two wrestlers fading into obscurity and eventually this behavior all but destroyed the tag team division. Right before WWE's tag team division could be considered dead there was an unexpected revival in The '90s... only for the sin of the Rockers to be committed once again in what would become a recurrence.
• In the early '90s, All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling decided to market itself towards adult men rather than its traditional audience of schoolgirls. The wrestling of this era was highly regarded and they sold a lot of tickets, but fewer young girls among the audience meant fewer girls who were interested in becoming wrestlers, leading to a dearth of talent as the current crop aged and retired. Though women's wrestling in Japan never hit the nadir that it did in the US, it never again reached the heights it did from The '70s through The '90s, and AJW itself closed its doors in 2005.
• The success of ECW lead to an influx of garbage wrestlers who could not wrestle well but could bump, swing stuff around, or were willing to jump off high places, and also popularized valets mainly there to do "cat fights". These did not originate in ECW, but this is where they caught on. Abdullah the Butcher, The Sheik, Dick the Bruiser, those guys could still work traditional matches well... Sandman not so much. Also, the ECW women typically had more to their roles during their early to mid years, but as ECW wound down... rolling around and bronco busters were about all women did. Prior garbage feds like FMW tended to produce some of the most fearsome women divisions on the planet^note Probably because women's wrestling in general is far more popular in Japan to begin with (see the entry above), whereas stateside it was largely treated as a joke until 2015 or so. Following in ECW's wake, XPW, IWA Mid-South, and CZW would magnify these flaws to new heights (though in fairness, the latter two would learn from their mistakes and outlast ECW).
• "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's refusal to tap out to Bret Hart in their iconic Submission Match created a trend for future wrestlers. It was the career-defining match that set the tone for Austin's gimmick for years. His refusal to tap out would actually become a reoccurring topic when he turned Heel. Although there were wrestlers (namely Hulk Hogan) who also never tapped out, Austin was the first person they ever brought attention to. In later years, wrestlers like John Cena have been criticized for never tapping out and tapping out in general being treated like a coward's action, making it hard to have technical, submission-based wrestling offense without making the loser look weak.
• Similarly, Austin's return after his 1997 neck injury meant that, for the next two years, the main event scene in WWE was built around a man who couldn't do much in the ring. Making matters even worse, the few top opponents he had to start with (The Undertaker, Kane, Mick Foley) really couldn't carry him the way Bret Hart or Shawn Michaels could. To compensate, marquee matches coalesced into a "Main Event" style; a lot of brawling with very little traditional wrestling, a few big, but safe bumps (particularly into the announcer's tables), an inevitable ref bump and a hot sequence at the end often involving wrestlers kicking out of each other's finishers. When new wrestlers came in from other companies with fresher, more physical styles, they were often kept out of main events for "not knowing how to work," and the "main event" style would often be castigated by critics and fans alike.
• WWE giving the women's title to Sable, a model who had not gone through developmental nor wrestled on the independent, territorial or foreign circuits. Sable went beyond needing to be carried; she flat out refused to take bumps. Still, the popularity she had gained as a valet revived interest in the division and led to talented wrestlers putting on good matches — not to mention that Sable was quite muscular for a model, so, Kayfabe aside, the idea of her powerbombing someone was at least plausible. The sin was actually having Sable win the title from Jacqueline, which necessitated she be exposed in extended matches and set up Trish Stratus, another inexperienced model, getting the title when it was vacated. While Trish, to her credit, became a respectable talent despite her beginnings, WWE continued to push models with little to no wrestling experience, to the point it had to take the title off television altogether when the roster overflowed with inadequately trained people who were not learning as quickly as Trish, did not appeal to audiences as Sable had, and didn't have enough carriers to offset the low level of performance.
• The dramatic revelation that the "higher power" in control of the Ministry of Darkness was none other than Vince McMahon himself, as part of a grand strategy to get the WWF World Heavyweight Title off "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. It was dramatic, memorable, and cemented McMahon as the iconic "evil owner" he was famous as, as well as Austin's true Arch-Enemy. It was also completely rock stupid and made no sense at all; the Ministry had been feuding with McMahon's Corporation stable to try to seize control of the WWF for the better part of a year. Its relative success would lead to an obsession with trying to shock and "swerve" the audience rather than engage in good storytelling would lead to long-term decline in WWF/E's product quality for decades, on top of metastasizing into other companies like WCW where it combined with backstage politics to quickly turn terminal.
• The First WWE Diva Search added nothing to the program in the long run but did not do any damage either, as everyone soon forgot about it. What everyone remembers is the 2004 quarter-million-dollar Diva Search, which lead to a football player from the Lingerie Bowl with no wrestling experience coming straight to television with a bigger paycheck than half the roster. That in itself would not have been so bad if not for the aforementioned sin of Sable, which lead to three wrestlers being released in favor of runners-up from the 2004 Diva Search, who stayed on longer than the fan-voted winner. This decision was the direct cause of the women's title being removed from television, and there were three more Diva Searches before the fans made it clear enough was enough. At least the last two actually kept the winners over the runners-up.
• TNA's is the signing of Kurt Angle. Make no mistake, Kurt is undoubtedly the greatest signing the company has ever made — he legitimized them as a major wrestling promotion. The real issue was his booking. For his first couple of years, Angle remained the focal point of TNA and was constantly booked over the younger, homegrown talent. His Spotlight-Stealing Squad status was so bad that TNA was nicknamed "Total Nonstop Angle" at one point. While all this would be bad enough, the real danger of Angle's booking was the precedent it set. After Angle, the company started signing more and more older stars primarily from the Monday Night Wars and putting them over the younger talent. This trend peaked during the start of the Hogan/Bischoff era, where basically anyone who wasn't a major player in the Monday Night Wars was pushed down the card and/or released to make room for Hogan and Bischoff's friends. As a result, TNA went from a promotion that had some vague similarities to WCW to WCW-lite. In short, Angle was the beginning of the end for TNA, and the damage in the fallout of his signing is something that the company still hasn't recovered from, both in regards to their reputation and finances, to this day.
• The Rock's return to the WWE between WrestleMania 28 and WrestleMania 29 had a very similar effect. When it happened, almost everybody was happy: the fans were happy to see The Rock return, WWE got some mainstream press (which they're always desperate for), and in general, despite the flaws in the execution, all was good. However, when WWE saw the surge they got from a returning legend, they've tried desperately to make that same lightning strike twice, bringing multiple former Superstars back, including Chris Jericho^note Though Jericho never really left (until the most recent time he left, he's now in AEW), he periodically took time off to tour with his band, or just to rest, Rob Van Dam, Brock Lesnar, The New Age Outlaws, Batista, Sting, and Goldberg. Some have worked, some haven't, but as a whole, the sheer number of them are seen as damaging. It creates difficulty in working angles and building momentum due to their spotty appearances, which can damage the push of younger wrestlers who are working with them. The sheer number of them who are clogging up the roster, and the short-term rise in popularity, could potentially hurt WWE long-term by not giving their rising stars the time to become the main-event performers they need to be when the current generation starts to step down. While most of the returning Superstars themselves are very popular, the term "part-timers" has become a dirty word among WWE fans.
• Brock Lesnar
  • His "Suplex City" gimmick, wherein he endlessly spams German suplexes in his matches, only stopping for an occasional spot of him driving his opponent into the corner, standard punches/kicks, or his Finishing Move. When it started, it was first used against John Cena, then later Roman Reigns — where it worked well because of the Catharsis Factor. Fans were tired of Super-Cena booking, and Roman was obviously being groomed to be Cena 2.0 when the character was an ill fit for him, so the fans enjoyed watching those two get punished. However, come 2016 and used against wrestlers who didn't have the power of booking protecting them, its flaws were exposed. At first there was his street fight at WrestleMania 32 against Dean Ambrose, who most saw as a rising star and possibly the man to get the vaunted win over Brock. However, fans instead got a glorified squash match where Brock no-sold every weapon Ambrose used on him, stopped him from using others (including a chainsaw and Barbie, making those two legends gifting them to him pointless) in a clear bid to avoid getting injured before his upcoming UFC match that summer. But the straw that broke the camel's back was his match with Randy Orton, one of the few men who could believably have a competitive match with Brock, at SummerSlam. Instead, Brock threw him around like a rag doll, and while Orton got some offense in, he ended up losing by technical knockout as Brock busted his forehead open with elbow shots. Orton lost so much blood and had such a wound that he needed ten staples to close it, and suffered a concussion. As a result, fans turned on Brock en masse to the point where Goldberg squashing Brock at Survivor Series provided Catharsis Factor in the other direction for many.
  • He seems to have set the precedent that a part time wrestler can win a title and still only work part time, as he has a habit of winning one of the world titles and then not showing up for weeks on end and just letting Paul Heyman cut a promo on his behalf. While he's not the first guy to do this (see Hulk Hogan in WCW), the fact that Lesnar has done this multiple times over the last decade seems to indicate the 30 day rule is no longer in effect^note Generally speaking in wrestling a champion must defend his title every 30 days or be stripped of it. Roman Reigns must have taken notes, he's held both world titles since WrestleMania 38 in 2022 (and has been Universal Champion since Payback 2020^note Those belts would later be unified and Roman would finally lose his title to Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania XL) and while he usually makes it to TV he rarely actually wrestles. WWE ended up creating a third world title in May of 2023 to address this, with Seth Rollins winning a tournament to win the first World Heavyweight Championship, no relation to any previous titles called "World Heavyweight Championship".
  • Many have began to decry his frequent burials of promising talent such as Kofi Kingston and overexposure of him in events such as 2019's Money in the Bank, alongside both the 2022 Royal Rumble and Elimination Chamber, forgetting about the omen of things to come: Lesnar's high-profile defeats of The Undertaker at WrestleMania XXX and John Cena at SummerSlam in 2014. What made fans willing to look past them was the sheer shock factor of 'Taker's highly touted then 21-0 win streak finally being broken of the former, and the brutal 16-minute display of Cena getting utterly demolished when a less one-sided match was expected that was the latter. Once Lesnar was then repeatedly booked into what amounted to squash matches (the most egregious being the defeat of Kingston on October 4, 2019's edition of SmackDown in only 9 seconds, and appearing in and winning the 2019 Men's Money in the Bank match at the last minute despite not having been announced to be taking part in the match), the novelty was gone and fans began to tune out.
• WWE's failed attempts to universally get over the likes of John Cena and now, Roman Reigns can likely be traced to one person — Hulk Hogan. When Hogan first debuted in WWE, he was like no wrestler fans had ever seen, and his All-American Face character and Large Ham personality made him one of the most popular people in wrestling. However, as the business evolved, Kayfabe was less enforced, and society grew more cynical over the years, an All-Loving Hero no longer had the same impact as before, causing fans to reject such a character. (Even Hogan himself famously turned heel in The '90s in response to the changing times.) The cracks were already there with Lex Luger & Diesel in the mid-'90s as that character archetype was already starting to wane^note Not helping there was both of those guys not at all being a good fit for that role. Luger has an arrogant demeanor that made him a natural heel, while Nash was totally out of his element trying to be a white meat babyface instead of his usual witty snarky self, not to mention a guy his size isn't going to elicit much sympathy heat (which led to problem #2: Vince McMahon would book him against even bigger guys and the matches would be terrible). Both guys were trying to be something they weren't, and fans picked up on that pretty quickly. However, because Hogan, personal problems and backstage antics aside, is still beloved by WWE fans even today, the company seems to always make their top face a clone of Hogan, then wonder why the fans don't cheer him.
• Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, WWE did several "matches" that were essentially lengthy cinematic sequences featuring brawls. The initial two, the "Boneyard match" & "Firefly Fun House match" at WrestleMania were heavily praised because, despite not being actual matches per se, they were unique spectacles, and in the case of the latter, represented a fascinating deconstruction of John Cena's character. However, later such "matches" such as the "Wyatt Swamp Fight" and the "match" between the Street Profits & Viking Raiders at Backlash didn't garner equal praise, since they were less wrestling matches and more "look at all the cool cinematic stuff we can do" and tended to focus more on effects or being weird for the sake of weird, without any deeper or more interesting content. ^note  For example, the latter featured several biker ninjas and a tentacle monster for literally no reason, and the former not only brought back a character who'd been retired but did so in a confusing series of disjointed attempts at Mythology Gags.
• The much-maligned trend of Japanese women's pro wrestling featuring former idols who have little to no athletic experience as top-card draws dates all the way back to 2013 with Yuzuki Aikawa's rise to prominence in World Wonder Ring ST★RDOM. The difference is that Aikawa was not exactly a typical idol—she had been a high-level taekwondo practitioner in high school and spent the first year of her career taking hellacious beatings from other talent and still pressing on. It was easier for fans to buy Aikawa as a serious wrestler due to both her background and her in-ring performances showing she had "paid her dues" and was credible enough as an athlete, so nobody minded her getting pushed into a World of Stardom Championship run as a classic underdog babyface. However, later promotions would see Aikawa's success, not realize her background that made it possible, and immediately push former idols even if nobody could ever buy them as wrestlers in the first place.
  • In a meta sense, this issue goes back further to Stardom's founding—unlike their predecessor in All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, which made large powerhouses (Bull Nakano, Aja Kong, Madusa, etc.) the focus of their promotion to appeal to young girls, Stardom focused on smaller, more conventionally attractive women in order to provide Fanservice for a male audience. Even in the early 2000s, there were fan complaints that the promotion was treating its wrestlers more like idols than athletes. However, wrestlers like KANA, Act Yasukawa, Mayu Iwatani, and others coming up around the same time had spent years training to get into the business just like every other Japanese wrestling hopeful and were devoted to wrestling above anything else—but when Stardom actually started booking idols instead of just treating their wrestlers like them, it became impossible to ignore.
• WWE gets a lot of stick from Smarks for hiring TV writers from outside wrestling rather than traditional bookers. "Bookers, not writers" is basically a slogan among the online crowd. However, the first "TV guy" that WWE hired to helm their product, Chris Kreski, actually produced some of their most critically acclaimed and fondly remembered content during their peak commercial success years. Kreski was a veteran screewriter and showrunner who, like the writers who came after him, had no real background in wrestling. However, unlike his successors he treated Raw and Smackdown like serialised action-dramas; with strict adherence to continuity, plotlines planned months in advance and clear ideas of how "characters" should develop over time and how their individual stories would intersect and affect each other. Basically everything the IWC claims to want. The difference is that the current crop of writers are generally rookies working their first major gig, have little respect for wrestling as a medium and don't bother with Kreski's rigorous approach because it's "just wrestling".
• Many have criticized WWE for having Japanese and other Asian wrestlers use Asian mist as part of their movesets, viewing it as an outdated, racist trope with exoticizing Yellow Peril connotations. When the Great Kabuki first used the mist in the 70s, and his kayfabe son the Great Muta did it in The '80s, their gimmicks were definitely offensive by modern standards, playing up the "mysterious Asian martial arts master" to the hilt, but both of them were portrayed as Noble Demons being led astray by evil managers, and Mutoh nearly was booked to win the NWA world championship in 1989 due to being incredibly over with the American crowd. Mutoh himself took the gimmick back to Japan, changing it from an Inscrutable Oriental gimmick to a quasi-supernatural one. The Great Muta was portrayed as an incredibly creepy, ghost-like character that could have been a Split Personality or even a demon possessing Mutoh (it was never made clear), so it made perfect sense for him to do something as over-the-top as spitting blinding mist in his enemies' faces. Notably, Mutoh never used the mist when he was wrestling as himself instead of Muta. However, in The New '20s when wrestlers such as Asuka and Shinsuke Nakamura who don't have supernatural gimmicks and who never used the mist in Japan start suddenly spitting it in WWE, the racial undertones become hard to ignore.

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