Maybe I’ve written this before, I don’t know and I’m not going back to check. But we have got to do something about these triple threat, fatal 4-way, 6 pack challenge, whatever they want to call the multi-person matches in wrestling. The rules are dumb and it makes me hate them even when the match is good.
The main thing that’s always bothered me about these damn things is why they aren’t elimination matches. The first triangle match I can remember seeing worked that way, or at least it did in my head. I can’t recall who was in it, so maybe I can’t be trusted. But my point is that that’s a good concept. You have an issue between multiple people. They all want it settled. What better way to do that than put them all in the ring at the same time and let them sort it out? At the end, you have one person left standing tall. He is the winner. It can’t be argued. Problem solved.
But that’s not how it works now. Everyone is guilty of it, but I’m going to pick on WWE here because they abuse it so much. You put a bunch of dudes in a match, its a complete mess and then the first one to get a pin wins. It solves nothing because everyone else in the match gets to bitch and chew about not losing, thus ensuring that the feud must continue even if there’s no need for it to do so. Either that or they pretend the story is over, even though to anyone who bothered paying attention it clearly is not. If you can’t answer the simple question of why this guy cared last time but this guy doesn’t now, your story is arbitrary, lazy and stupid.
And I mentioned the matches being a total mess. That’s not me advocating for tags in and out, although if you want to do that it’s probably fine. What needs to change is this thing where all multi-man matches are no disqualification. That’s some bullshit. It’s another booking crutch often beaten to death by WWE in order to make endless rematches that nobody wants or to avoid beating someone they want to protect. I have two basic thoughts on this.
- If you don’t want to beat a guy, don’t. Either he wins or you don’t make the match.
- maybe just don’t make these matches if this is how you’re going to do them. If you’ve trained me that most of the time it’s going to come down to someone cheating or a bunch of assholes interfering, why would I keep caring? I’ll just wait for the important match especially if I have to pay extra to watch it.
And since the Royal Rumble is tonight, I’m going to repeat something I’m positive I’ve written before.
This shit where someone not in a battle royal can eliminate someone who is, knock it off.
- If you are outside the ring after having been eliminated and pull someone out, it doesn’t count.
- Ditto if you come back in and throw someone out.
- If you were never in the match to begin with but storm down and start tossing dudes, that definitely doesn’t count.
The Rumble has been one of my favourite WWE things forever, and I like battle royals in general more than I think a lot of people do. They thankfully don’t do these bad eliminations all the time, but it ruins it for me whenever they do. Doing them at all is doing them too often.
