Hello and how are ya? Time to blog!
I’ve mentioned things have been crazy at work. We’ve been doing a lot of overtime to try to get things where we need to be before a big system change throws a potential monkey wrench into our activities. Saturday was the last scheduled day of overtime and I was there. I therefore had a shortened weekend. I’m still feeling a little tired. Fortunately, things should only get better from here on out.
I found out there’s a board game club in my own home town! A retired colleague texted me on Facebook to tell me all about it. They meet on Tuesdays at 6:30. There’s also a board game day scheduled this Thursday. Looks like a fun deal for a board game enthusiast such as myself. They’ll be supplying a lot of games themselves which is good because most of mine are English copies and I expect a large number of participants will be unilingual French-speakers (that’s the community I live in). This week’s theme is co-op play.
EDIT: My bad, the board game day was on DECEMBER 28th, not January. Oh well, there’s still Tuesdays!
I got back onto DDO over the weekend after a two-week hiatus. My wrists are feeling better and I played in bursts rather than for an extended period so it went well. I’m about halfway to Level 20. With shorter play times, I expect that my progress will be a little slower now. That’s all good. The goal is still to get to the cap some day.
So that’s the news as it were. Now for the Royal Rumble.
The Rumble is my favorite wrestling pay-per-view event (or whatever they’re now called on the WWE Network). I love battle royals and the added mystery of who’ll come out when is just a lot of fun. In past Rumbles, WWE has thrown in surprise appearances from past wrestlers which is also pretty nifty.
The downside to the Rumble is that the outcome is highly predictable. Because the winner of the Rumble is given a main event match at Wrestlemania, it guarantees that most of the participants have no chance of winning. Wrestlemania is the most important show of the year and ticket sales, PPV buys and Network subscriptions are built on the main event. That means WWE will only allow one of their biggest stars to win (which is why while having past superstars show up is fun as a surprise, it’s also a letdown because everybody knows they have little chance of winning unless they were main eventers to begin with).
This year, they decided that they wanted to have Roman Reigns defend the world title in the Rumble match. Given that they’ve spent the better part of the year building Roman Reigns as their big main event player and Triple H as his principal adversary, this meant that the most likely finishes for the Rumble were: Reigns wins while eliminating Triple H in the process, Triple H wins while eliminating Reigns in the process, neither wins but one or both of them are responsible for the other’s elimination since their feud is big enough that it doesn’t NEED to be for the title. Triple H hadn’t been seen on main roster television (he was at the NXT PPV) in over a month, and he’s mostly retired from in-ring competition so his participation in the Rumble should have been a surprise, but if you have even an inkling of how WWE sets up their angles, it was pretty much a given he was going to be involved in some capacity.
But just because the outcome is predictable, it doesn’t mean the match itself can’t be entertaining. The key is HOW they get to the outcome. And this is where I felt they sort of dropped the ball. In order to maximize the drama, they had Reigns enter the Rumble first meaning he’d have to be there for the entire match. The problem with that is that the fans as a whole are burnt out on superhero booking where the chosen one defies all odds to win all the time. The fans turned on Roman Reigns last year for that very reason and it took WWE all year to get them back on his side. Now, this setup was almost guaranteed to make them turn on him again. So what did they do? They had a run-in from the League of Nations take out Roman Reigns in the middle of the match (without eliminating him which was ridiculous) so he’d look vulnerable and then had him make a “miraculous” return near the end of the match so that it would look like he might just pull it off and then had Triple H, the final entrant, eliminate him. Despite all the effort to generate sympathy for him, the fans STILL turned on him, because really he got to sit out most of the Rumble and still be there at the end which just looked like a cheat. It was in part a case of darned if you and darned if you don’t. By being married to the idea that Reigns had to be there at the beginning to show the odds were stacked against him AND be there at the end so that it would be a more devastating loss, they put themselves in a no-win position. The best thing to do would have been to simply have Reigns get eliminated by Triple H (interfering as a non-participant) in the middle of the Rumble at the point where the League took him out and then have Triple H officially enter the match at the end and win.
But other than the Roman Reigns conundrum, the rest of the show was solid. Dean Ambrose and Kevin Owens had an incredibly brutal last-man standing match. The New Day were highly entertaining as always in putting away the Usos. Kallisto won back the US Title that he never should have lost in the first place. Despite the garbage finish, Charlotte and Becky Lynch put on a great match. Sasha Banks returned after a short absence to finally insert herself into the title picture. On top of all that, AJ Styles made his WWE debut in the Rumble match. That was the big planned surprise of the night although those who follow backstage news online were aware that he was about to get signed. There was still some doubt of whether he’d show up on the main roster or go to NXT first so it still was pretty phenomenal (see what I did there) to see him.
So that’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on the Rumble, please share them in the comments or hit me up on Facebook. I’d love to hear what others thought of the show. Carja V.