Busting out of Hell Part 2

Below is a reply to the International Object Podcast from last week.  We got one of listeners to write us a long email.  That makes me very happy for someone to react that way.  The other thing I really liked was that I was not think of any of these reasons. 

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This is Butch Rosser, somehow known as Pestilence on the iTunes store.  Someday I should get around to fixing that. 

Anyhow, wanted to compliment and complement the latest show about the Punk/Ryback undercurrents.  Rich's ending is brilliant and unique on several levels which is why I'm writing this as a full-fledged e-mail and not just a series of hysterical raving Twitter platitudes.  When I heard the idea, it struck me as something everybody was talking about as a way to get the desired ending in the Internet fandom world; he just gave it a name.  It was like the first time somebody explained to me Calvin and Hobbes was the same as Fight Club.  In addition to the initial brilliance, it can also set up several things going forward.

1. You can make the argument that the Elimination Chamber is just a better Hell in the Cell, and a year or two without HITC is just fine.  Can anybody in the current WWE environment sustain a 1-on-1 feud as a main event heated enough that it justifies HIAC on its own?  Will most of the audience even care if EC replaces it for this mythical Feud To End All Feuds and you just take out the pods?
2. It provides a strong second point for the Royal Rumble: it's Ryback's first, and he is going to end some motherfuckers.  Hell, he beat up three jobbers so badly they turned into a Jethro Tull cover band! Also, we will have the Rock at this event, which may be relevant to your interests and desires.  For a tidy sum, you can watch this!  It can be like golf was in the mid-oughts, when it was Tiger v. the Field: even when somebody from the Field won, it was well-known by everybody - not just people who gave a rat's ass about golf - that Tiger Woods was the...well, BEST IN THE WORLD~!  Also in the past few years, the Rumble winners have been mostly surprise participants or one of the favorites going in.  I can't remember the last time going into a Rumble that one guy specifically was the favorite.
3. Most importantly buttressing the main point of the show: why does a force want a title?  People want titles as avatars of who they are.  C.M. Punk is the WWE Champion, but he's a bad guy who wants respect.  Most important word in the prior sentence isn't Champion, or Punk, or even respect, but guy.  It's why Punk is so effective as a heel, he takes an emotion common to most people and just blows it up out of proportion (well, in the eyes of the WWEU; as an Internet guy who met Punk years and years ago at a Con and he was just a sarcastic nerd [aka one of my own people] he could shoot my mother in the face and I'd shrug).  This whole thing isn't a heel turn from Punk, the same way Austin's heel turn wasn't a heel turn.  That came from Steve's fear of losing the top spot and not being as good as was during the injury, the loss to Triple H at NWO '01 proving it.  If it meant selling his soul, well, what soul?  The fans made him a good guy.  Charles Barkley 3:16 said I'm not a role model.   Austin was a babyface because he didn't want his boss telling him what to do.  Punk became a babyface because he called out his bosses for being idiots that didn't even listen to the customers who supported them.  His heel turn was pointing out those same things and then getting increasingly physical because he'd spent 8 months waiting to be the guy with the belt he'd seen as a kid that said THIS GUY IS THE GUY but there was always a Rock or a Cena or Triple H or something or other that was more important than him.  As adulthood teaches us, when your childhood gets shit on, people don't take to it very well, and I damn sure wouldn't' have had his 300+ days of restraint before I started kneeing people in the face as a result. At the rate he's going, Ryback has a long career ahead where he can always be a guy with a belt.  He has right now to be a force.

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I like the idea of people making up their own reasons.  You don't need to tell people why something is happening.  You just have to do things well and let people figure out the reasons/