Professional Wrestling writers get it wrong sometimes, too. Here are some happenings in professional wrestling history some fans would just love to write out of their minds:
WWE
- Some fans disregard the existence of WWE entirely, claiming that the company died when the name changed from WWF to WWE. Other fans claim the company truly died when Vince McMahon bought WCW and ECW, thus leaving no competition for the WWF at the time, causing the quality of the promotion's product to degrade significantly. And others say the existence of WWF stopped after WrestleMania 17 (long considered the legitimate end of the Attitude Era), which saw "Stone Cold" Steve Austin shaking hands with Vince McMahon, his arch-rival and the Big Bad of the entire companynote .
- Some people refuse to acknowledge the career of Chris Benoit following the double-murder/suicide of the Benoit family in 2007. This slips into Canon Discontinuity at times, because WWE doesn't like to acknowledge him either.
- In the 1980's, when a wrestler went to the WWF, fans of other wrestling promotions would often deny that those wrestlers ever worked for Vince McMahon, especially if they adopted an embarrassing new gimmick (e.g. Terry Taylor never became the Red Rooster) or they became Lighter and Softer (The Sheepherders did not become The Bushwhackers).
- Prior to the Attitude Era and the advent of the Internet, the WWF routinely revised its own history to suit their storylines or praise its biggest star, Hulk Hogan. If you were a typical wrestling fan of the Rock-N-Wrestling era, Hogan joined the promotion in 1984 (shortly before defeating The Iron Sheik for the title) as the ultra-virtuous superhero ... and never had a previous run as a bad guy. Additionally, his fiercest nemesis of the late 1980s – André the Giant – had NEVER been bodyslammed, much less met Hogan in the ring. (Hogan had met Andre in 1980, when Hogan was a heel and Andre was the face, and "The Hulkster" slammed Andre at least twice.) And, Andre never lost to anyone by pinfall in more than 15 years ... until suffering his famous defeat at WrestleMania III.
- WWE, along with Pro Wrestling Illustrated and The Other Wiki consider the WCW and ECW title lineages to have extended past those companies actually existing, giving us stuff like The Dudley Boys being former WCW World Tag Team Champions despite never stepping foot in a WCW ring. Most fans consider these titles to have ended when their respective companies folded and their WWE versions being prop belts, i.e. the ECW title held by Terry Funk and Shane Douglas is not the same one as the one held by CM Punk and Bobby Lashley (the ECW revival is covered in more detail below).
- Hardcore John Cena fans and the WWE itself would like to forget about his heel run from 2003-2004, which featured him bullying handicapped wrestler Zach Gowen and submitting to Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit. The reason for the former is Cena's anti-bullying image, and the latter is due to his "Never Give Up" mantra.
- On that note, several fans like to forget any match that results in The Undertaker or Kane submitting, as it contradicts their entire characters.
- The Divas Championship belt is something a lot of WWE fans wish never existed. Not the idea of a Smackdown women's division, just the bright pink butterfly belt itself, especially after it replaced the black and gold version of WWE's original Women's Championship belt, whose lineage was moved to the "retired" section of the title histories on the website. You'd have to all the way down the indies below even CZW to L.O.U.I.S. just to find worse looking title belts, and even they, who had legitimate budget excuses, had many more quality championship matches than the mighty WWE, which was in the process of flip flopping between a serious women's division and PG-rated cat fights. Thus fans had a really hard time accepting the tramp stamp belt as prestigious. Eventually WWE itself agreed, keeping the old lineage in "retired" but putting the divas belt in there too and giving Raw and Smackdown two new belts.
- The Laptop GM concept on Raw was found by fans to be annoying at times and perceived as going on for too long, but fans wanted to see an definitive end to it since it still had lots of promise. When Hornswoggle was revealed to be the secret GM
, fans weren't pleased. WWE eventually made it Canon Discontinuity by bringing back the Laptop itself for a one-off skit. - In what might be one of the fastest cases of this occurring in recent memory, fans who aren't furious at the end of Undertaker's streak are generally ignoring it. Time will tell if this can be salvaged.note Fortunately, it seems to have worked, as Brock Lesnar capitalized on this, and after the Undertaker lost to Roman Reigns three years later, there is a “Better Brock than Roman” mentality with fans.
- Speaking of Roman defeating The Undertaker and apparently retiring him at WrestleMania 33, it was a borderline catastrophe for WWE. While the Deadman's dignified departure into the darkness after his defeat was highly praised, rather than Roman's defeat of 'Taker helping get him over, he attracted atomic levels of X-Pac Heat because of it, facing almost 15 minutes of solid booing and screamed abuse the next night on RAW. Sadly, the match itself simply wasn't very good either, showing 'Taker to be well past it with a bad hip who should have already retired. Roman brought his defeat of Undertaker up during a promo-off against John Cena by boasting he'd done something even Cena had never accomplished, and not only did the crowd turn on him again when reminded of it, Cena tore a strip off him for bragging about beating a "tired, broken-down old man". It was apparent that the whole thing had gone so badly that WWE promptly decided to undo the whole affair, with the Deadman returning again at WrestleMania 34 to face (ironically) John Cena and defeat him (the hip replacement surgery had helped) before resuming part-time competition, with no further references to his "retirement". (He retired for good, at least in theory, at Survivor Series 2020. In front of no fans thanks to COVID-19.)
- Which in itself turned into an inversion to many fans, who prefer to see the at least somewhat dignified retirement of the Undertaker as his endpoint and want to forget about especially his matches in Saudi Arabia in the years after.
- Many fans are choosing to just forget everything that happened in WWE during the COVID-19 Pandemic, which featured the absolute worst of Vince's creative instincts and several "cinematic matches" that completely threw Kayfabe out the window, along with a generally terrible atmosphere without any fans in the buildings. The shows filmed in the "Thunderdome" in particular are something fans don't ever want to see again or be reminded of because the setnote was so distracting and visually off-putting. This actually became a brief Audience-Alienating Era for WWE, as TV ratings plummeted during this period, though some of that decline can obviously be blamed on the pandemic itself. At any rate Triple H took over creative when Vince was ousted in a sex scandal in 2022, which turned things around just in time for a sale to the parent company of UFC, as of January 2024 Triple H is still the booker.
- Related to this is another thing fans choose to disregard: NXT 2.0, where in 2021 Vince gutted NXT while Triple H was sidelined with a heart problem because he felt WWE NXT wasn't producing enough main roster talent.note This brought us a new bright color scheme that many fans felt belonged on Nickelodeon and the return of Wrestling Doesn't Pay, along with most of Triple H's guys getting let go and heading to AEW. Triple H would Retool NXT again when he took over creative for the whole company, as of this writing Triple H's BFF Shawn Michaels is booking NXT.
- Some even go so far as to declare that the WWE died after the Montreal Screwjob and the league's subsequent makeover.
- Many people never even watched WCW, and the WWF didn't mention them by name on the air until WCW started doing it first. On the flip side, many fans refuse to acknowledge WCW's existence at all, citing such examples as RoboCop showing up at NWA Capital Combat, May 19, 1990note , David Arquette becoming champion, Vince Russo becoming champion, and the Fingerpoke Of Doom. A smaller fraction of fans believe that wrestling peaked when Goldberg won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship from "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan on Nitro, that wrestling exploded due to the awesome climax, and that fans simply moved on to watch other things from that point on.
- Most fans would like to forget WCW having unmasked Rey Mysterio Jr. in 1999. WWE seems to agree, since they do everything they can to avoid acknowledging that part of Rey's career. None of the matches from his unmasked period have been released on home video and can only be found on Peacock/the WWE Network.
- Many fans saw WWE's 2000s incarnation of ECW as being a complete bastardization of what Paul Heyman's original vision of extreme or hardcore wrestling was. In fact, many have gone so far as to label it 'Entertainment Championship Wrestling'. Seeing champions like Bobby Lashley and Vince McMahon, the eventual departure of Paul Heyman, and then the introduction of the new "Platinum Phoenix" ECW Championship, it's not hard to see why some fans disregarded the entire show's existence.
- A good portion of the fans that do regard the show's existence believe it was a fairly entertaining show that helped to build up new personalities. They just wish it wasn't called ECW.
- As it goes, those that did watch the show generally refused to acknowledge it after CM Punk got drafted to RAW. All the hardcore fans that hated WWECW would watch it for him (probably because Punk wouldn't have been out of place in the original ECW) — a fact so prevalent that when Bobby Lashley got drafted to RAW, Punk became the focus to the point of being a borderline Spotlight-Stealing Squad. The consensus was that after Punk got drafted, the quality of the programming went down a noticeable degree. They still had a strong roster to carry on, but when said roster was poached to nigh-oblivion in 2009, their relevancy was so low that they were barely above Superstars in importance. The only reason anybody watched at that point was for Shelton Benjamin, a perennial but nonetheless important midcarder and, more glaringly, Christian, a main event talent whose popularity has exceeded John Cena's at certain points, who really should not have been on the show (the fact that, like Punk, Christian wouldn't have been out of place in the original ECW either is just icing on the cake). The only reason he was at all was because his return storyline got spoiled on the Internet. In fact, Christian carried the show so much that, except for Tommy Dreamer's brief reign prior to his retirement, he was the ECW Champion for almost all the time between his return and ECW's last episode, where he lost the title to Ezekiel Jackson (something else the fans like to ignore).
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling
- Some fans like to ignore Impact's existence as TNA entirely. This is partially motivated by the fact that, at the storylines, at times, were seen by smarks as being so nonsensical that it made watching Impact! nigh-unbearable, regardless of the superior match qualitynote that usually beat WWE but could easily be matched or even surpassed by many indy shows.
- Much of Impact's dedicated fan base likes to forget almost all of Eric Bischoff's and Hulk Hogan's time in the company from 2010-2013. They cite the almost inane amount of blatant nepotism (specifically Brooke Hogan's romantic storyline with Bully Ray), constantly ripping off of the WWE, and just about all of Hogan and Bischoff's attempts to turn the company into WCW-lite. To this day, it is still considered the absolute low point of the company, and that includes the early days of TNA.
- Impact itself likes to gloss over its pre-'04-'05 years, back when it was firmly under the umbrella of the NWA. The amount of vulgarity during that time far exceeded anything spat out by the Attitude Era, to the point that you were wondering if Russo was trying to run the company down before it even started up.
- Many fans declared TNA dead the moment AJ Styles left at the end of 2013. The heart and soul of TNA, the general consensus was that if even AJ couldn't take it anymore, then the company was far beyond the point of redemption. Considering that Sting, Christopher Daniels, Frankie Kazarian, Chris Sabin and in 2015, Samoa Joe, soon followed him out the door, there was a vibe going around that this opinion was not just among fansnote .
- If fans weren't declaring TNA dead when word got out AJ was leaving, they sure as hell were considering it when Jeff Jarrett, the founder of TNA, announced he was leaving too not long afterwards.
- After TNA left Spike TVnote , they found themselves on Destination America with only half the possible viewership to take on. When they debuted, only a quarter of their regular viewership on Spike apparently followed them. It was an indication that the fans themselves felt that TNA was dying or already dead and didn't bother to move with them.
- Claire Lynch, the Katie Vick of TNA. It was indisputably the nadir of AJ Styles' career, and the only good thing to come out of it was Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian partnering up and forming Bad Influence. Unlike WWE, TNA didn't have wherewithal to move the angle into Canon Discontinuity like WWE had with Katie Vicknote and it was still brought up occasionally, up until AJ's departure from the company.
- James Storm pushing Mickie James onto some train tracks. Many people thought that Storm had murdered Mickie and freaked. The storyline was lambasted almost as much as Claire Lynch, and many fans swore off TNA for the rest of their lives. Those that do still watch like to state that it never happened.
- As of Anthem of the Fight Network's takeover, TNA doesn't exist any longer, the show was simply called "Impact" and then Jeff Jarrett was brought in and it was re branded Global Force Wrestling, after the splinter company he founded when he first left TNA. This still comes in, as fans who didn't like GFW, or perhaps were embarrassed by accusations of Jarrett using it to prop up a pyramid scheme, or just wish they never knew about Jarrett trying to sell gold by offering autographed merchandise, like to pretend this is the true start of GFW, and or that it did exist before but only as the one in a long list of invaders that apparently managed to win. And then the partnership with GFW fell apart, GFW itself was stricken from existence, and most like to pretend that the GFW rebrand never happened.
