Welcome to another edition of WWE Heat Index, where one of the biggest stories from the past week is examined under a microscope and picked apart for analytical purposes.
“Heat” in a wrestling sense can be both good and bad, depending on the context. If you’re a heel, you want heat with the crowd because your job is to get booed. On the other hand, if you’re having an argument backstage, “having heat” with someone is by no means a positive thing.
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This week, a bunch of fans on Twitter found themselves in hot water when voicing their opinions to Roman Reigns and Road Dogg Jesse James, who lashed out in response to them, in varying degrees of justifiability and at times, petty squabbling.
Whenever we talk about Twitter exchanges and arguments, it’s important to note a few things, just as a means to preface the discussion.
For instance, while everyone is entitled to an opinion, some “opinions” can be wrong. Also, it’s rare in life that you can change someone’s opinion if they’re stubborn, so after a little bit of time debating an issue, sometimes you have to cut your losses and accept that people will disagree with you and move on.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the internet is filled with trolls who just try to get a rise out of someone and those people are best left ignored as it isn’t worth the time to acknowledge them.
With those things kept in mind, let’s start unpacking these issues by first looking at the Roman Reigns situation, which can be essentially boiled down to a case where people criticised his in-ring talent.
An argument can be made that what Roman Reigns said was not wrong. He’s legitimately correct about a number of points, to his credit. However, how Reigns went about these exchanges was not so great on my opinion.
Yes, most people will never be in the same position he’s in with WWE. Yes, he does work hard and sacrifices a lot for his career. Yes, all employees of WWE are paid to do a job, whatever job that might be.
However, Ian Porter @HeelDegenerate’s original tweet saying some people don’t want to be in WWE invalidates Reigns’ response, if it was said in earnest. When someone says you’ll never do something that you don’t want to do, who cares?
Also, for someone who is successful at the top of their career, your success speaks volumes over everything else.
If you’re a millionaire, you don’t need to remind people of it all the time when it’s public knowledge unless you feel some form of inadequacy that you want to cut them down by reminding them you're better, which is unnecessary as the only ego you’re stroking is your own—which, by sheer virtue of being so successful and famous, everybody else is already doing for you anyway.
“A Grandmaster doesn’t say he’s a Grandmaster. Other people say it for him.” – Humans of New York
On the topic of workload, we aren’t privy to the behind the scenes knowledge of just how much each individual Superstar puts in and what their responsibilities are, but even still, that doesn’t invalid the ability to criticise Roman Reigns for not being someone you enjoy watching.
Hard work should be rewarded, but effort doesn’t translate to quality by default at a 100% rate. Plenty of people work themselves to the bone and accomplish nothing. Others breeze through life and achieve greatness with ease.
Employers want people who achieve goals for them no matter what, not people who try really hard but ultimately fail. It’s okay for Brock Lesnar to do almost nothing and get paid better than most people because he draws more money. Sin Cara doesn’t have the same pull, so he’s going to have to work the house shows. It’s just business.
The idea that Roman Reigns owes all of his success to nepotism is an exaggeration that he has every right to be upset about, but one has to acknowledge that some of that success was assuredly made easier due to his familial connections.
For some people, just getting your foot in the door in a company like WWE is nigh impossible, but for someone like Reigns, that step was handed to him, for sure, just as it was with The Usos, Natalya, Charlotte Flair, Cody Rhodes and all others who have family in the business.
It’s also foolish to not call attention to how WWE does quite literally hand people some keys to succeed, and the powers that be can at times be frugal with letting others utilise the same tools.
This is a fake sport. Wins and losses are predetermined. No matter what, you do, you owe your status as a main event talent to the writing team that wants you to be a main event talent. If they absolutely refuse to let you play that part, then no matter how over you are with the crowd, you will not be booked that way.
WWE does listen from time to time and will demote someone who isn’t as popular as they had hoped, or they'll promote someone who is much better liked than they had anticipated, but on the regular, they dictate who is at the different tiers of the hierarchy.
None of this discredits the success Reigns achieved through his own talent, but it does give him an easier path as his failures would be more accepted.
While on a personal level, I feel a lot of people in society are too quick to get upset over nothing, many people feel the opposite and would be quick to jump on phrasing like #DumbAssMark as being hurtful.
They’d also point out something which I do agree with, that any time a celebrity calls out a regular Joe, they willingly or unwillingly call out their support squad who can definitely take things too far.
But that’s not all, as Road Dogg had his share of problems this week on Twitter as well.
For being one of the heads of the current creative vision in WWE, Brian James is surprisingly active on Twitter on a regular basis, which is amazing. It offers fans a great resource to give their feedback and to interact with someone they look up to and it shows that he’s connected with the WWE Universe.
Sometimes, though, things can get a little rough.
If you follow that chain of tweets, you’ll see a dialogue that starts from criticism about Shinsuke Nakamura’s entrance having commercials during it. Others have chimed in to complain about the change in pyro and lighting, too.
Again, James has some good points that are inarguable. As a television show, SmackDown does have commercials they need to work into the program. The response that WWE cannot figure out a way around commercials being interruptions, though, is debatable.
WWE wants fans to love Nakamura’s entrance. It’s obvious. That’s been the biggest driving force of his character since coming up to the main roster. Logically, it was a bad move, then, to interrupt or change it for the worse, rather than to move the show around where you know a commercial break won’t interfere. It’s just timing and scheduling.
Mistakes like that happen. Fans can complain and as a company, your response should be to take note of how they were disappointed enough to voice their opinions, so in the future, you should try your best not to make that mistake again. That should be the end of that discussion.
Telling someone they’re “searching and focusing on the wrong things” and that unpopular business decisions cannot be poor decisions is an attempt to invalidate differing opinions on the sheer principle that they are oppositional.
Someone saying they thought the commercials were a great decision, agreeing with James and WWE, wouldn’t have been met with the same “your opinion doesn’t matter" attitude.
The best approach to this type of exchange is for fans to give their constructive criticism (emphasis on “constructive”) and for Road Dogg and WWE, in turn, to respond by saying they are trying out different options and ideas, feeling out some potential changes, and they appreciate the feedback of the fans.
Please be patient while they keep tweaking things and trying out to figure out the best alternative scenarios out there until everybody is happy.
On a regular basis, Road Dogg points out hypocrisies and has a great rapport with his followers, so this may have just been a sore subject or a bad day where he felt the need to vent a bit, tired of hearing constant negativity. We all have those days and it’s something we’re all guilty of, so it’s understandable.
What this all boils down to, with both James and Reigns, is that WWE employees sometimes forget how much power and influence they wield on social media and while they are humans who are more than deserving of the ability to just tell people to go to Hell once in a while (particularly if they’re annoying trolls), as representatives of the bigger picture, sometimes they need to tread more carefully with their words.
Do you agree or disagree with these points brought up in these tweets? Which side are you on? Drop your thoughts in the comments section below!
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