WrestleMania 2025 (from the perspective of a guy who doesn't watch wrestling)

The biggest wrestling event of the year, as seen by a total wrestling normie.

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A quick disclaimer:
I did watch the 2025 Royal Rumble, and that event a couple of months ago was the true first time I’ve ever sat down and watched a wrestling broadcast in its entirety. But I took too long to write about it in this format you’re about to see, so I decided to skip ahead to the main event of WrestleMania.

Before this, the most I’d ever known about the world of wrestling came from the pop culture osmosis of my childhood in the late-1990’s/early-2000’s¹; the Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling video I watched a decade ago, made by renowned asshole nepo baby, Max Landis; the various videos made by Super Eyepatch Wolf about storytelling in the WWE² (an invaluable guide to being aware of at least a fraction of the backstories behind a handful of present-day wrestlers and their storylines); and from James and Chelsea at Dead Meat doing their annual Horror Royal Rumble series of videos, the 2025 edition of which is what prompted me to watch the real thing this year for myself, in concordance with me having a Netflix subscription to be able to watch it. (Thank god they’re not still pay-per-view in the UK… for now.)

Without further ado, here are my thoughts from across both nights of WrestleMania 41, as I try to understand what the heck is going on, who the heck certain people are, and why the heck Logan Paul wasn’t banished to the shadow realm forever after the Suicide Forest incident, that by all rights should’ve permanently ground his fame and fortune to a halt seven years ago, were it not for him being like any pernicious cockroach because of how he just won’t go away…

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Day 1:
WrestleMania Saturday (April 19th 2025)
Running Commentary:

• Roman Reigns - okay, I know him. The “ACKNOWLEDGE ME” guy that nobody liked, then people did like, then people don’t like again? I don’t know, I’m lost on what the audience thinks of him anymore.

• Seth “Freakin” Rollins - I forget everything I ever knew about him, which was barely anything to begin with.

• CM Punk - if I remember correctly, he’s considered a legend who’s highly esteemed among wrestling fans, right?

• Charlotte Flair - judging by the resounding boos from the crowds, I guess she’s either an intended heel, or the audience genuinely doesn’t like her because of my guesstimations about her being a nepo baby (daughter of Rick Flair, who I know best from his portrayal in The Iron Claw), and the blatantly rigged unfairness of her winning the Royal Rumble months ago, given she had an injured knee she was still recovering from, she only arrived near the very end of the Rumble, and it looked as though she barely put in any effort against the other women she competed against.

• Tiffany Stratton - the crowd likes her here, and went crazy for her at the Royal Rumble, so I guess she’s a fan favourite?

• Gunther - I know nothing about this dude; he looks like a pre-set template on one of the WWE video game character creator screens, before you customise him into a more unique form.

• Jey Uso - I know him from when he “defeated” John Cena at the Royal Rumble, which was one of those moments when you could most clearly tell these things are pre-ordained, rather than something borne of wrestlers’ genuine effort. At the time, I thought it made sense that Cena would cede the win to Uso as a kind of torch-passing moment, given Cena’s imminent retirement; but since Cena turned heel weeks after that, I guess that was a mistaken presumption.

• Triple H - the highfalutin head honcho of the WWE (which I presume happened after Vince McMahon resigned, because of… everything).

• For someone who’s supposedly “world-renowned”, I have no earthly idea who the hell Salvatore Ganacci is.

• Tom Brady owns this stadium? The “deflate-gate” guy? Huh.

• The British guy (Wade Barrett) among the commentators always sounds to me like Twitch streamer/YouTuber, ConnorDawgVA. I just can’t un-hear it.

• “Yeeting to the max” is certainly a phrase.

• Oh, I know this one! “SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM!” Those are words I can only ever hear in Randy Savage’s voice.

• Turki Al-Sheikh, chairman of the General Entertainment Authority for Saudi Arabia, must’ve paid an ungodly sum to have the cameras and commentators shout him out as if he were one of the top-tier celebs in the audience. Must be a contractual obligation that the WWE has to follow if they want to maintain their notoriously dodgy and heavily criticised deals with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It’s all about the money, same as it ever was.

• Just as she was in the Royal Rumble when I first saw her, Alicia Taylor is a damn good ring announcer. (Question: does the “let’s get ready to rumble” guy - Michael Buffer - still do ring announcements, or has he retired?)

• So, since I’m under no illusions that winners in wrestling win purely by effort or chance, and the competitors are here to sell pre-written narratives with their performances through physicality, the question then is: Who have the Powers That Be at the WWE chosen to win these matches, and how do these choices feed into future storyline plans? And also: Who does the audience want to win?

• Jey Uso vs. Gunther - a whatever match I don’t have too much investment in either way, but since I’m more familiar with Uso than I am with Gunther, I’m glad that Uso won the day, and the world heavyweight champion title. Good for him!

• Something I learned from watching the Royal Rumble, and is confirmed as I watch WrestleMania - the sounds of slapping skin on skin really sells the impacts of the hits everyone lands on one another. I’m sure the hits still hurt somewhat, but the outsized slapping sounds probably make the hits come across disproportionately worse than they actually are. Add to that the sounds of bodies, limbs, skulls, and faces hitting the canvas, which again sound more painful than they perhaps physically are, and you get those “Uso Splashes” being sold as wince-inducingly painful for whoever bears the brunt of Uso’s attacks.

• One of the few parts of these events that I’m sure aren’t faked is the pride that the winners, their friends, their families, and their fans feel whenever they get the win, and the esteem that comes with it. Case in point with Jimmy Uso greeting his brother in the ring, who hands him the winner’s belt, before the brothers hug and cry in celebration.

• Spotlighted among the audience: wizard-bearded music producer Rick Rubin, and… CRISS ANGEL?! Now there’s a man I haven’t seen hide nor hair from in many, many years. With those sunglasses on, he looks like Gene Simmons.

• The New Day - I think these guys were guests on a Smosh Try Not To Laugh video years and years ago. Like, pre-pandemic years and years ago. And now, having won the Clash of Clans commercial disguised as a wrestling match against The War Raiders, they’re first-time WrestleMania winners. Neat!

• Audience spotlights: O’Shea Jackson Jr. from Straight Outta Compton, Michael Che from SNL, and that dude known as Jelly Roll, whom Todd In The Shadows’ videos have informed me is a guy who’s appeared on a bajillion country songs as of late. Which is why I’ve otherwise never heard of Mr. Roll, given that I live in Britain, country music isn’t as big here as it is in the US, and I am deathly allergic to present-day popular American country music, which all sounds like parodies of parodies of parodies³ of country music - i.e. garbage - to my ears.

• Jade Cargill vs. Naomi - these storyline recap intros before each match are lifesavers for an ignorant plebeian like myself. So let’s see… Naomi knocked Jade out and threw her onto a car last November… suspicion was cast on Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez as the culprits… then last month at the Elimination Chamber (“the seventh women’s Elimination Chamber in history”, apparently), Jade surprise attacked Naomi because she found out the latter was the true attacker, thus breaking apart the three-person tag team between Jade, Naomi, and Bianca Belair. That about sum it up?

• Jade Cargill’s abs. Holy moly.

• Both these women are excellent at selling the leg-drops, face-kicks, and body-slams⁴ as viscerally painful. They perform these moves as vicious attacks motivated by emotions of betrayal and retribution, and the impacts feel real enough to cause involuntary wincing on my part.

• Anyway, Jade wins, and I guess that’ll teach Naomi for trying to remove Jade from the equation last year. Though I’m sure this isn’t the end of the story by a long shot.

• Audience spotlight: Lilly Singh?! Now there’s another face and name I’ve not seen in a hot minute. Remember when she had her own network TV talk show, and everyone on YouTube hated it, for reasons of varying levels of validity? And also, there’s rapper Lil Yachty, whom I have no opinion on whatsoever.

• Jacob Fatu vs. LA Knight - the Samoan werewolf, versus the guy pulling up in a chauffeur-driven, gleaming white sports car. I have no character investment in either man, so I’m afraid I’m a little ambivalent over Fatu being the victor herein. However, props to the two men for selling this fight to feel like it really could’ve gone either way, and not as though they were having to bend to the whims of a script.

• These establishing shots of the Las Vegas strip remind me of watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation back in the day.

• The most I’ve previously been privy to knowledge of Luchadores and lucho libre culture is through the kid’s cartoon, ¡Mucha Lucha!, and that would’ve been over 20 years ago (Jesus Christ, man), so I’m not going to pretend to know enough of anything about this category of wrestling, when I’m already a novice ignoramus about the world of wrestling in general.

• Audience spotlight: Dana White, UFC CEO, ardent Trump supporter, and— [*checks notes*] —member of the board of directors at Meta?? I’d ask what his qualifications are, but given this is Trump Administration 2.0, we know nobody gives a fuck about qualifications in anything anymore, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

• El Grande Americano vs Rey Fenix - from what I can glean, El Grande Americano isn’t a real luchadore, his very presence is an affront to the sport, and he’s a damn dirty cheat who sticks a steel plate under his mask, which can injure his opponent if they go to kick him in the face? That’s a heel if ever I’ve seen one. So, of course, the cheater wins (or, as I have to remind myself, the cheater is written to win).

• Lucha Libre AAA president, Marisela Peña, looks like an 80’s soap opera villainess with those oversized sunglasses, and that hairdo that looks like it slots onto her skull like one big LEGO hair-piece.

• Shawn Michaels - the name rings a bell, but I don’t know how I know of him.

• Audience spotlight: Stephen Amell from Arrow! Chris Bauer from True Blood!⁵ Israel Adesanya from… sports, I guess (I have no clue)! And a second shoutout to Dana White, where you can absolutely hear the boos overwhelming any possible cheers, and it is glorious.

• Tiffany Stratton entering from a custom-made giant Barbie playhouse, courtesy of Mattel? The two sides of my brain - the disgusted-at-capitalist-excess side balking at the cynical corporate synergy this entire event reeks of, and the Greta-Gerwig-Barbie-loving side appreciating the glam - are at furious war right now.

• I still can’t tell if Charlotte Flair is intended to be disliked by the audience, and is thus fulfilling the role of a heel perfectly, or if this is another Roman-Reigns-circa-2015 situation where the WWE wants the audience to like her, but nobody’s buying it.

• Charlotte Flair vs. Tiffany Stratton - at long last, I now have a preference for who I’d like to see win! And even if I’m playing right into the WWE overlords’ hands, I cannot help but not want Flair to be victorious. And as it turned out, Flair wasn’t! Credit where it’s due, though: unlike Flair’s unconvincing win at the Royal Rumble, this match against Stratton actually looked hard-fought for, and for a minute there, it looked like it could’ve been either woman’s game. But I guess it was ultimately deigned that Flair wasn’t to be the winner this time. Maybe those in charge of whipping these storylines up figured that the audience would riot and tear the stadium apart if Flair won this match, too? Hell if I know.

• In the look ahead to Sunday, I’m glad to see that Rhea Ripley, Iyo Sky, and Liv Morgan (three current wrestlers I actually know about!) are on the ticket… but oh for fuck’s sake, Logan goddamn Paul is one of the headliners? UGH. Doesn’t that vile twat have a new crypto scam to shill and get sued over to busy himself with instead of plaguing another corner of the entertainment industry? (I mean, sure, the WWE is hardly what one could call a bastion of moral righteousness with a straight face, so the Paul Brothers unfortunately both fit right in… but still, I hate those insipid little shits with every fibre of my being.)

• Seth “Freakin” Rollins’ entrance really does tickle that primordial lizard brain side of my mind that’s easily pleased by cool music, and hot flamethrower pyrotechnics. I’m a simple man of simple pleasures sometimes.

• So is Tribal Chief-era Roman Reigns definitely liked by the audience now? Are they happy to “ACKNOWLEDGE” him, as he so wishes? The crowd sounds appropriately enthusiastic for his preposterously melodramatic entrance, and they’re all doing his upward-pointing signature move in his honour, so I’m going to assume Reigns is seen as cool now.

• CM Punk gets a whole-ass rock band (whom I don’t know if I’m meant to recognise) to introduce him onto the stage? That’s pretty baller.

• Someone’s surely going to make a GIF out of that shot of Rick Rubin nodding along to the music, right?

• Roman Reigns vs. Seth Rollins vs. CM Punk - a big match with a big array of things to make mention of, so here goes:

• Those sure are some conveniently placed garbage cans, huh?

• Aggressive non-stop violence is a-okay, but a smidge of profanity during a pay-per-view/Netflix live broadcast? Won’t someone please think of the children, and abruptly mute the audio at the slightest hint of an itty-bitty swear?!

• What a convenient giant prop bottle of Prime Energy (conveniently the co-creation of WrestleMania competitor, Logan Paul). Everything is a commercial at all times! There is no escape from the advertisers! Obey! Consume! This is your god!

  

• I want to see a video or a GIF that infinitely loops the image of Seth Rollins going back and forth between kicking CM Punk and Roman Reigns in their faces over and over and over and over and over again. There’s something so strangely funny about that image in a slapstick kinda way.

• Those sure are a blindingly white pair of gnashers on Roman Reigns there, eh? It’s giving Evil Doppelgänger Inspector Gadget in the Matthew Broderick Inspector Gadget.

  

• Not to sound like Bill Hader’s Stefon character from SNL, but… [*Stefon-from-SNL voice*] This match had everything! Garbage cans… table destruction… steel chairs… betrayals… double-betrayals… triple-betrayals… Dan Cortez… well, maybe not that last one, but everything else, yes!

• So I take it there’s quite a bit of significance to Paul Heyman aligning himself with Rollins over Reigns, Rollins defeating Reigns and Punk, and Rollins becoming the WrestleMania Triple Threat world champion? I can’t appreciate the gravity of it like a dyed-in-the-wool wrestling fanatic can, but judging from the audience’s responses, and the typically ebullient and excitable reactions from the commentators, it would appear this is kind of a big deal.

Anyway, that was Day 1.

What lies in wait for Day 2…?

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Day 2:
WrestleMania Sunday (April 20th 2025)
Running Commentary:

• Cody Rhodes - a guy whose platinum blonde hair makes him look like a Malfoy, a bully in an 80’s children’s movie, or Homelander from The Boys, but who Super Eyepatch Wolf’s videos informed me is part of a long and legendary line of previous WWE icons, and despite his “American Nightmare” nickname, isn’t currently a bad guy in-universe. I think. As far as I’m aware. If I’m wrong, forgive me.

• The Judgment Day - I don’t know all of the members of this group, but I did see Liv Morgan and Dominik Mysterio during the Royal Rumble. I also just saw them both on an episode of Hot Ones Versus, where I learned that Mysterio is part of a long family line of previous WWE wrestlers. At this point, I’m guessing I should assume that half or more of all wrestlers I see at the WWE are part of decades-spanning wrestling lineages that go back farther than I’m aware of.

• Penta - no idea, sorry.

• Bon Breakker - is the crowd booing against him, or growling in appreciation for him, like whenever Jason Mantzoukas is greeted with a chorus of “ZOOOOOOKS” at the start of every How Did This Get Made? live show?

• Randy Orton - I know the name, but can’t recall any accompanying stats or context about his history or notoriety.

• Rhea Ripley - now there’s someone I knew of before I started watching wrestling for myself; one of those wrestling stars whose names broke through and crossed over into my bubble of general celebrity awareness. Do I know any of her storylines, in-universe character traits, whether she’s a heel or not, or anything beyond her being a hot goth musclebound tattooed Australian woman? Nope! But that’s enough for the time being.

• Iyo Sky - a familiar face from the Royal Rumble, which is where I first saw her.

• Bianca Belair - another RR returnee, and as I learned from last night’s theatrics, a key player in the drama between Jade and Naomi.

• Stephanie McMahon - do people like her despite being Vince McMahon’s daughter, or does she have her own controversies I’m unaware of?

• The repetition of that Travis Scott song, ‘FE!N’, is getting really annoying now. That squeaky “fein!” refrain sounds like Forrest Gump’s imitation of sex noises, run through several layers of autotune.

• I know nothing about Iyo Sky, but I like her rambunctious energy and colourful style.

• Bianca Belair - the commentators allude to a storyline between her and Sky that makes their match-up have some significance, but all I can do is shrug. (Not shrugworthy, however? Bianca’s arm and back muscles. Woah.)

• Rhea Ripley’s intro, and the crowd’s reaction to her entrance, genuinely gave me goosebumps. Even I can recognise that that’s a bonafide star right there.

• Iyo Sky vs. Bianca Belair vs. Rhea Ripley - retaining her world champion title, Sky wins the match at the eleventh hour, taking out both Belair and Ripley during the latter two’s head-to-head distracting them from Sky’s presence. A fun match overall, filled with impressive acrobatics, cool wrestling moves, and charmingly giddy showboating from Sky during moments of victory. As always, there’s moments where you can assume that if you heard the audio from the hot mics around the ring, you’d hear the opponents telling each other what their next moves will be, what they’re going to do to sell the moves, and generally slipping out of character to give each other praise for their performances.

• Audience spotlight: Flavor Flav (or as he’s spelled in the UK, “Flavour Flav”; signature clock around his neck as always), Merab Ovalishvili (a UFC person I’ve never heard of), and Rich The Kid (a rapper I’m unfamiliar with).

• Damian Priest vs. Drew McIntyre - never heard of the former guy, and I’m unclear as to whether I’ve heard of the latter guy before, but McIntyre’s got a cool theme song, I’ll give him that. Even if his entrance did go on for far, far too long. Priest’s theme (featuring Slayer guitarist Kerry King) was okay, but I didn’t really vibe with King’s guitar histrionics that occasionally sounded like the squeals of a deflating balloon. (My apologies for not appreciating the details that were probably super cool for a lot of people who are fans of all these guys.)
  Anyway, despite me having no preference for a winner in this so-called “Sin City Street Fight”, Priest and McIntyre sold the punishing brutality of the match. I’m certain that no matter how much wrestlers pre-plan, choreograph, and constantly tell each other their next moves during the matches themselves, they’re still going to experience a ton of pain, and some measure of injury no matter what, so props to everyone for putting their bodies on the line for our modern-day gladiatorial entertainment. (Also, that selfie gag from McIntyre was fun.)

• “If your back hurts, your whole body hurts.”
  You said it, commentator man. Story of my freakin’ life. (Minus the steel chair smacks, of course.)

• Oh, there’s another Doom game (The Dark Ages) coming out already? It feels like only yesterday that Doom Eternal came out. I’m assuming Mick Gordon won’t be returning for scoring duties, given how he was allegedly fucked over by id Software? It’s a shame - ‘The Only Thing They Fear Is You’ is one of the bestest, most face-meltingly metal pieces of music ever composed in the history of mankind. But I digress.

• Audience spotlight: Jahmyr Gibbs (I dunno), Daniel Cormier (I dunno), and Tony Hinchcliffe (I wish I didn’t know).

• Penta vs. Dominik Mysterio vs. Finn Balór vs. Bron Breakker (sponsored by Dude Wipes, I guess) - Mysterio wins to become the intercontinental champion, via a little betrayal of his Judgment Day teammate Balór. (The only note I have to offer is that Mysterio’s nickname “Dirty Dom” reminds me of “Dirty Den” from EastEnders, which will only mean anything to fellow Brits of certain generations in and around my own.)

• The commentator tables budget for WWE matches must be astronomical, given how much they’re never safe from breakage by errant wrestlers breaching the confines of the ring, and are in Sisyphean need of perpetual replacement.

• Audience spotlight: Colby Covington (a UFC person I don’t know), Metro Boomin (whom I do know, via his work on the Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse soundtrack, and him being one of the names collaterally tied up in the Kendrick-vs-Drake drama last year), and Dean fucking Norris (Hank Schrader himself)!

• Randy Orton vs. Kevin Owens… were it not for Owens having to be off getting neck surgery (which I would’ve expected after the events of his bloody, no-holds-barred match against Cody Rhodes at the Royal Rumble), so instead, it’s Randy Orton vs. his surprise competitor, Joe Hendry - a cheery-looking Scottish fellow I don’t believe I know from Adam, with the demeanour of a golden retriever, and the cheesiest theme song I’ve heard from any of the competitors thus far. Given how unceremoniously quick this match was, if I had to guess, Hendry was probably offered up as the sacrificial lamb to Orton gaining an easy victory for the event of this being his 20th year at WrestleMania.

• AJ Styles vs. Logan Paul - I’ve never wanted any wrestler to lose harder than I do with Logan Paul. I hate that odious long-tongued twerp, infinitely more than I’m already supposed to hate him in his boos-baiting role as a heel, so even though I know nothing about AJ Styles, I’m all in on him - on anyone - wiping the floor with Paul’s smug little face. (He beat Kevin Owens and Randy Orton, in the same match, at last year’s WrestleMania?! That result’s the most rigged load of horseshit I’ve heard of since whenever Vladimir Putin last “won” an election.)
  But alas, despite a good match stringing along what soon became clear was the inevitable outcome, and because we live in the time of evil and stupid always winning the day, Logan Paul won the fight, just as I was afraid he would.
  (For Christ’s sake, keep your tongue furled up in your fucking mouth, you Gene Simmons wannabe douchebag.)

• Audience spotlight: Vanessa Hudgens (of Spring Breakers, and “yeah, people are gonna die, but isn’t that inevitable?” fame), Rana Daggubati (no clue), Terence Crawford (look, assume that if somebody’s got something to do with sports, I’m not going to know who that person is 90% of the time), and Quavo (whose name I’ve probably heard in Anthony Fantano videos an indeterminate number of times).

• Forgive the superficial digression, but GOOD GOD… even though I think I’m meant to surmise she’s an unlikeable brat of a character, Liv Morgan is just so hot. I’m, like, full-on howling cartoon wolf right about now (funk soul brother). 🥵

• Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez vs. Lyra Valkyria and surprise guest, Becky Lynch - the first three women I became acquainted with via the Royal Rumble, and Becky Lynch is one of those wrestlers who’s long been famous enough to pierce even my sphere of ignorance. Her reputation precedes her, as is evident by the audience full of cheering fans chanting along to her rocking theme song, the cutaway to that one girl crying with shocked happiness, and the stunned/scared reactions from Morgan and Rodriguez.
  The four of them face off in the Women’s Tag Team Championship, and after a rough-and-tumble brawl full of flying hair and kicks to faces, Lynch pins down Morgan long enough to nab the win for her and Valkyria, to the raucous applause of the jubilant crowd. I suppose that once Lynch entered the equation, it was a done deal that she was going to defeat Morgan and Rodriguez, because any other outcome would be sacrilege. At least, that’s the feeling I got from it.

• Riding in on a quad-bike comes none other than “Stone Cold” Steve Austin (whom I didn’t know best from his wrestling days, but rather from his constant appearances in DTV action movies; remember 2007’s The Condemned?).

• And now, the real Major Event of these two nights of wrestling mayhem:
  Cody Rhodes vs. John Cena - the latter’s presence rendered shocking by his dramatic heel-turn during his final year of competing in WWE matches. After two decades as the nicest nice guy of wrestling, Cena literally went the “no more mister nice guy” route to inject some interesting shades of darkness to his wrestling persona. It’s stuff like this that makes the world of wrestling storytelling so interesting to me, even if only in the abstract.

• The match itself could go either way, depending on the whims of the storytellers, and which way they want to take this. Do they want Cena to win because it’s his final WrestleMania, and also to further cement his turn to the dark side, making Rhodes want to seek vengeance at a later match? Or do they want Rhodes to win so he gets his retribution against Cena for the latter’s low-blow betrayal spurned on by The Rock, and thus turning Cena deeper down the dark path, so that he seeks revenge at a later match before the year is over? I suspect Cena isn’t going to be redeemed just yet, because it’s only April, and it’s still too early in the timeline of the overarching plot for him to be good again. But hey, in the words of Harry Hill, there’s only one way to find out: FIGHTTTTTTTT!!

  

• Mid- or three-quarters of the way through the Cena vs. Rhodes match, all of a sudden the proceedings are interrupted by Travis Scott himself entering the fray (irritating ‘FE!N’ theme tune in tow). Why? I dunno, call it a Deus Ex Travina. For whose benefit? Scott’s record sales, probably. It feels pretty forced and stupid to have this happen out of nowhere, to be honest. (Also: hey, remember just a few years ago when Travis Scott got 10 of his fans killed in a deadly crowd crush at his Astroworld festival, the youngest victim of which was just 9 years old? And remember his pathetic black-and-white-filtered Instagram video of him attempting an unconvincing apology? Remember that? I think it should be remembered more often, since it seems people are so eager to forget.)

• The final result: in a nasty match full of taunting, cheating, referee knockouts, Travis Scott intrusions, and Cena dealing another low-blow to Rhodes’ crown jewels, John Cena wins his 17th (and last) WrestleMania, in what was probably a foregone conclusion even if I wasn’t aware these outcomes are planned ahead of time. It’s all about serving the soapy storyline, and from what I can tell, the story is shaping up to make Cena become more and more despicable, dismantling his reputation piece by piece with every match, until the fateful match shall come later in the year when something will happen to make him realise the error of his ways, reject the dark side, and find ultimate redemption before he bows out from the sport for good. Or maybe I’m thinking too simplistically, and there’s other surprises in store to subvert my expectations. Depends on how complex the story is that the WWE wants to tell, and I’m clearly no expert on the matter, so I won’t pretend to know what they have in mind behind the scenes.

• Shoutout to the person with the sign that said: “UGH. JORTS.” You are my hero.

• So, anyone else looking forward to season two of Peacemaker…?

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Final Thoughts:

This was my first WrestleMania. As such, I have not one single iota of an idea as to how it compares to past WrestleManias. I couldn’t even tell you if this ranked among the best, the worst, or the mediocre-est of all WrestleManias.

To me, it was just 8 total hours of sweatily violent theatre and bombastic spectacle. Corpulent capitalist commercialism ran rife to absurd degrees at every waking moment. Some matches had more believable outcomes than others. Every competitor looked to me as though they put in 110% effort to making things look real enough, with the exception of whenever they do punches and kicks to faces, which always look objectively fake without fail. And it’s always funny every time each wrestler reacts with overblown shock and dismay whenever their opponents kick their ways out of being pinned down for three counts by the refs, as if it’s always surprising to them that it could ever happen, and they’ve somehow never experienced it before. It’s a good bit!

That’s all. Be on your way, brother.

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1. The era when the WWE was still called the WWF, where even though I didn’t watch wrestling myself, I couldn’t help but be aware of the likes of The Rock, Hulk Hogan, or Macho Man Randy Savage. Y’know, they were inescapable presences in the world of celebrity, you couldn’t not know them. Same goes with Michael Jordan despite never watching basketball, David Beckham despite never watching football (soccer for my American friends), or Tiger Woods despite never watching golf.

2. Check out The Unreality of Pro Wrestling. It’s a great piece of work that makes me appreciate the unique storytelling possibilities these silly wrestling shows can create, far better than Landis (bleurgh) ever did.

3. PARODIES NUTS. 🤪

4. I do not know the real wrestling-move phraseology.

5. (They didn’t highlight Bauer themselves, but he was standing next to Amell, and I recognised him immediately, so I thought he was worth mentioning. That’s Andy Bellefleur, goddammit!)