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| Shane McMahon is not a hero, no matter how high heights he jumps from Photo Credit: WWE.com |
McMahon may be the most notable promoter of all-time, but that only means he's perhaps one of the worst offenders. He's spent just about 20 years trying to recreate the Attitude Era, for example, but the worst example is that he looked at his own insertion into the narrative, not as striking while an iron was hot for the good of his roster, but to center the narrative around him and worse, his family. If making Vince a sympathetic character was bad, introducing Shane as a wrestler the caliber of full-time roster members was worse, and allowing Stephanie rein all the power of Daddy without any of the chance for comeuppance was the worst.
For all the complaints about the ever-presence of Triple H, John Cena, and now Roman Reigns, and the missteps that cost the company Brock Lesnar and CM Punk, the passion of the McMahon Family is, without a doubt, the worst development, and the worst part is that they think they're the attraction. It would be one thing if all of them came back as heels to enhance the babyface characters, even if at this point, any one of them as an antagonistic foil would have diminished returns, but Shane as this benevolent hero boss is the grossest.
Honestly, the levels of sheen on top of his "good guy" persona obscure the fact that Shane McMahon, since his return, has been just as rotten as any iteration of the evil authority figure character archetype. Factoring in the transparent real life rot, i.e. his mother willingly taking a cabinet position with the most outwardly-fascist American leader since Andrew Jackson and he himself taking photo ops with Donald Trump, I'm not sure any decent person could root for him, let alone think that he's some folksy hero. Yet last night, at the Smackdown house show in Lansing, MI, the fans not only booed Sami Zayn for helping Shane's opponent win at Hell in a Cell, they chanted "You Sold Out!" at him.
One could unpack the layers of chanting "You Sold Out!" in favor of a millionaire nepotist against underpaid labor who helped out other unpaid labor, and who also is spending his own time and money on a legitimate humanitarian effort in Syria, but the truth is while individual wrestling fans can be smart, a group of them will almost certainly tend to have a mob IQ in single digits, and it's all because they're conditioned to act in a certain way. Years of this conditioning have made people believe that Shane McMahon, whose theme song even denotes how much money he has, is a plucky underdog with no resources available to him other than his willingness to fling his dad-bod off high structures. The lie has been made corporeal, and it's all part of the only plan that Daddy Vince has ever committed to, making the McMahon family name the only thing that matters in WWE, not any one of the wrestlers.
The problem is that this problem isn't going away, especially since Paul "Triple H" Levesque has as much of a tendency to mug for the camera with the legitimacy of being an ex-wrestler. Having him marry into the family only bolstered its will to put the focus on the trials and tribulations of management, and if you think that ends with Levesque's and Stephanie's daughters or Shane's sons bowing out of the family business, well, I have an ice fishing spot in Ecuador to sell you. The futility of ragging against this is staggering, but it has to end, because it chokes WWE storytelling in a way that benefits only the McMahon family. The funny thing is, they love money, and yet the best way to make it is to divorce themselves from the proceedings and let the talent shine. But once again, who am I but a commentator with a blog?
