RtWR Part One Summary

With part one of the rewrite in the books, I want to have a quick look back over the previous ten episodes, and compare the overarching storylines created with what the WWE televised. I'll also have a quick look at the storylines I left out, though you could argue that any match I changed could conceivably have been a storyline, so I'll stick to the major ones - namely, the storyline changes that affected the Fastlane card.

And to get it out of the way, we'll start with those.

The Golden Truth

Anyone else get bored of what was essentially a fruitless collection of promos building towards a potential Goldust/R-Truth tag team, something that no one was particularly interested in seeing anyway?

Just me? Yeah.

This storyline was dropped simply because I was cutting fluff and wasted material.

The New Day and League of Nations

The tag team division has been fairly stagnant for a little while. The New Day are great champions, shifting between Face and Heel depending on who they are facing, and entertaining the crowd regardless. And The League of Nations, if given a proper purpose and drive have some potential (they're the modern Four Horsemen, don't you know), but a cheap promo to prepare for a rivalry coming later? It serves no purpose when there was an opportunity to build up numerous teams and rivalries over the previous weeks, leading up to a more robust tag team event at the pay per view.

This doesn't kill off the potential rivalry. But the League needs a purpose before they can take on The New Day.

The Wyatt Family vs The Titans

Ugh. Yeah, no. I'm sorry, but the Wyatt Family have been wasted far too much in recent months (actually since their debut). Big Show and Kane have purpose in certain roles, and Ryback has shown he can hold down an upper mid-card role on his own; but pairing them all together wastes the Wyatts. Something I have no intention of doing in my rewrite.

The next couple of storylines are the ones that remained largely the same. The changes to them were fairly minimal, and mostly for story strengthening reasons.

World Heavyweight Championship

The only thing that changes in this story is the ending. The set up, interactions, and motivations, were all very good. It just lacked the ending that lived up to the story.

Intercontinental Championship

Pulling Dolph Ziggler out to give him a break from centre stage, and allow him to come back potentially reinvented and reinvigorated, was a far better option than giving Kevin Owens a couple of losses that weakened him as a champion going into Fastlane and later Wrestlemania. The only change beyond that was the addition of Ryback, which provided a substantial threat to Owens for him to overcome and solidify his position as champion without weakening either of them.

United States Championship

The changes made here were mostly cosmetic, building the larger rivalry into The League of Nations and The Lucha Dragons, as that made more sense to me. Trading victories and losing their shot at the Tag Team Tournament means now the Lucha Dragons can potentially go their separate ways, or perhaps come back for one more run, while The League showed they could win as a group better than as individuals.

Women's Championship

The only real change here was the addition of another match between Charlotte and Brie Bella, to reinforce why the match at Fastlane takes place. The shortcomings in the televised version weren't the matches themselves; moreover they were the failing of the storytellers to address the fact it was going to look like her championship match was given purely because of her impending retirement. Now, at least, there is a level of justification for both her victory, Charlotte's response, and then the title match.

Y2AJ

Nothing here needed to change, except for bringing Chris Jericho's petulance out at Fastlane, instead of much later, dragging the feud all the way to Wrestlemania. It left AJ Styles in limbo, with plenty of better choices to make for feuds leading into Wrestlemania. Which we will get to.

Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks vs Naomi and Tamina

Again, there wasn't anything wrong with this feud. It broke up the last real remaining part of the Revolution, and forced two soon to be rivals to work together, something that fans wanted to see. It was effective, and so nothing had to change.

Finally, to replace the three storylines I removed, I added three new ones in:

Stardust vs Neville

Stardust and Neville have great chemistry together in the ring. By adding Neville to the Intercontinental Championship chase, and having him cost Stardust that opportunity, it gave them a chance to have something meaningful to end a long, on again off again feud: a one on one match at a major pay per view.

The Usos vs The Dudleys

Another feud that was far too drawn out in the televised version, all of the conflict between these two teams was pulled back from Wrestlemania all the way back to Fastlane, where a couple of lead up moments built upon already existing hostility, to create a simple storyline with an end match suited to both teams.

Now they are free to move on and expand the division.

The Tag Team Tournament

The Tag Team Tournament was the easiest new story to put together, because from the very first moment I decided to do this rewrite, I knew where I wanted to take the division. A tournament gave me a chance to bring in all the major teams, build upon existing rivalries, and strengthen the division as a whole. More importantly, the storyline created a platform for the Wyatts to attack, and to drag down to their level.

So that's the end of part one. Part two will commence soon, with the return of Shane O'Mac, and a Wrestlemania challenge...

Let me know what you think so far, or tweet me @kauyin.