Rey Mysterio and the IWC: A Hate Story

July 26th, 2011 ~ Permalink ~ 5 notes

• WWE
• Rey Mysterio

Rey Mysterio has had a career that anyone in the wrestling industry would give a body part to have. He has been a popular performer in any promotion he has worked in, part of numerous high-profile matches, and a multiple-time world champion (even if two of those reigns were shorter than a day). So why does the Internet Wrestling Community have so much hate for the Man of Mystery as of late?

Mysterio has been one of WWE’s highest-profile performers since his entry into the company in 2002 (a year after the sale of WCW and well after the InVasion storyline). When Rey entered WWE, he was still a hot property based on his work in WCW; although he was not the same Rey Mysterio that fans had grown used to seeing in WCW, he was still an exciting performer. Rey’s high-flying style was a danger to his body—as evidenced by his numerous surgeries—but the risk came with great rewards: he soon became a legitimate main eventer in WWE and (along with Eddie Guerrero) helped to bring in a larger Latino demographic of viewers to WWE. Amongst casual wrestling fans and industry pundits, Mysterio remains a beloved and respected performer to this day.

In recent years, however, the spite-filled “vocal minority” that is the Internet Wrestling Community has aimed their version of the “Internet Hate Machine” at Mysterio. Accusations of Rey being a “backstage primadonna” who is only concerned about his position in the company have been passed around from dirtsheet to dirtsheet like an STD. The IWC has also accused Rey of capitalizing on the death of Eddie Guerrero and getting a “sympathy push” into the main event scene in 2006 (when Mysterio won the Royal Rumble, then went on to win the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania 22). While those accusations can be brushed aside with the kind of dismissal that is reserved for swatting at flies, the accusations of Rey’s performances in the ring being less than stellar do hold weight—if just because there is actual evidence that can be presented to back them up.

Rey’s high-risk wrestling style has resulted in injuries (specifically, to his legs) that have required him to stop using many of the moves that brought him into the limelight to begin with. The “sanitization” of his in-ring repertoire has helped to alleviate his injuries and keep him from retiring beyond even critics’ expectations, but that “sanitization” is a double-edged sword. Since Rey’s moveset is limited by the extent of his injuries, the sight of him using moves that he once pulled off with regularity has become rare, and saving those moves for important matches has given them a heightened importance as well — but that limited moveset leads to many of Mysterio’s matches being boring and predictable.

Mysterio’s in-ring performances being lackluster is just a symptom of a much larger disease, though, and that is the lack of quality writing in WWE. When fans accuse WWE of being lazy when it comes to character development and producing a compelling product, the first person they will point to as an example of this laziness is John Cena—but Mysterio is a victim of lazy writing as well. Rey’s character has remained the same since he first entered WWE: he is “the ultimate underdog” good guy. (That label is also something of a misnomer, since Mysterio’s win/loss ratio in WWE is weighted in favor of his victories instead of his losses.) When a wrestler’s character does not change and evolve over the years, the act becomes stale—and the audience will start to grow weary of that act, as the IWC has with Mysterio’s.

The quality of Mysterio’s world championship reigns are also part of the complaints, but they really play no part in how Mysterio performs in the ring. Mysterio’s 2006 run as the World Heavyweight Championship is one of the worst-written World Heavyweight Championship reigns in WWE history due to the excessive “ultimate underdog” writing (he was destroyed by much larger opponents for weeks before going on to defeat them on pay-per-view); his most recent world title reign lasted less than two hours. Rey has persistently cranked out quality performances to the best of his ability despite this shoddy writing, though, so the blame for those reigns being horrible has to be laid at the feet of the “Creative” team.

While the most vocal members of the IWC may consider Rey Mysterio “boring” or “predictable” (and that can likely be blamed on the WWE writers instead of Mysterio himself), he remains a solid worker that WWE can count on to produce a performance that ranges from “watchable” to “stellar” with anyone else on the roster. Rey may not be the same man he was a decade ago, but he is still a great performer when it counts. When his career is over, I think that the IWC will miss him far more than they expect to.

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