Business Decisions

The WWE may have finally found a way to make Randy Orton face: making him a hate monster intent on proving he’s the best by any means necessary.  So, you know, John Cena but in shorter trunks and pastel colors.

This was, for the record, the second consecutive week that Randy Orton has cut a very solid promo that bordered on a “face” sentiment and while there was a little jokey joke right above this, it’s clear that fans want to root for Randy Orton more than perhaps any other performer in the company. There are any number of reasons for this — he’s perhaps the finest all-round performer of his generation, people love the shit out of the RKO, he’s not John Cena — but last night it may have reached a critical mass in his career. While there’s never been a particularly great Randy Orton run as a face, it feels as though he — like Chris Jericho before him — may have finally found his “voice” as a performer in the past year or so and he (at the very young age of 34) could be looking at another five-ten years at or near the top of his profession. Which must be why he and Seth Rollins don’t get along.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, and speaking of his father-in-law, HHH did a “Donald Trump selling TRUMP-brand sperm”[ref] Easily the most luxurious, most virile sperm on the market. Very refined.[/ref] job of selling this free PPV. For all the wonderful meta-ness in tonight’s episode,  the bit about Stephanie and HHH having to face real adversity definitely hit home the hardest. The WWE isn’t in anything nearing dire straits, but it’s clear that in the Network era, the WWE has been forced to step out of their comfort zone of selling monthly PPVs to a braindead group of losers like your correspondent. They are now being forced to “bring it” week after week in hopes of drawing eyeballs not just to their sponsors but all of the other entertainment ventures they’ve become involved in. After shifting from house show gates to PPV numbers to TV ratings, the WWE has moved on to the next way to measure their success: relevancy.

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