This Sunday, WWE will run its annual Royal Rumble Pay Per View. 30 wrestlers will enter the match with a chance to win and challenge for a championship match at Wrestlemania! It’s like Christmas morning for us wrestling fans: thrills, chills and surprise entrants keep us on our toes for an hour. We decided here at CXF that just talking about the rumble is old hat so! We’ve booked one for you! Except… wait… OH YEAH WERE A COMICS WEBSITE. Wrestlers are real life superheroes in the ring, but we’ve got fictional superheroes to book so welcome to the first annual ROYAL MUMBLE!
Mikey Zee: We have a frankly amazing cast of participants Forrest, and I selected for you today and I’m so glad we figured out a way to do this. Thirty contestants will enter the squared circle today, but only one can come out a winner and claim a shot at the first inaugural CXF Championship.
Forrest Hollingsworth: Let’s get ready to MMUUUUUUUUUUMMMMBLE — that’s Marvel Rumble for those wondering, and it is legally distinct from the phrase owned by Bruce Buffer.
Mikey, I have consulted the texts (read some comics) and crunched the numbers (watched more hours of Royal Rumbles than I’d be comfortable saying aloud) and I am ready to get into the Gorilla position of sorts and talk all of the top rope page turning topics. But first, our illustrious GM and editor Charlie has to hit the in-ring ear microphone in with some rules.
(Ed. note: AHEM. And now it’s time for the 2021 Royal Mumble Match!)
Rules:
- Only “grown-up” heroes can compete
- No flyers
- Two Superheroes start in the ring
- Every 90 seconds another superhero enters
- Superheroes are eliminated by going over the top rope of the ring
- Both feet must touch the ground to be eliminated
- Weapons are allowed, no killing.
- Winner receives NOTHING, this was a waste of time when everyone has real problems to deal with, c’mon guys there’s like….evil Silly Putty trying to take over the Marvel universe right now or something.
The Entrants:
Mikey and Forrest act as your bookers for this event. Each nominated 15 wrestlers for a total of 30 that we thought had interesting angles to explore, exceptional physical abilities, or for y’know, the meme potential. We made a good faith effort to book them as well as could be expected, and mutually agreed on a final four following input on every contestant. What I’m saying is we did the science and this is the objectively correct outcome, no take-backsies.
| Entrant Name | Entrant Number/Performance Description |
| Rogue | Rogue, one of the strongest entrants in the Mumble, enters first. Seemingly the only hurdle in her way is her own stamina as she deftly weaves and bobs her way to the final four taking and using power indiscriminately. |
| Galactus | Too big to get into the building. After a failed hail mary to get his herald in instead he hung around in the parking lot for a few and left. |
| Venom (Eddie Brock) | This mock-up of Venom winning leaked early in the planning stage. However, so did this one of a surprise competitor Knull, shaking Eddie’s confidence. Will he be able to get his own demons over the top rope and bring home the win? Also, hey wait does he count as two entrants with the Symbiote? Somebody get the ref in here but he moves on in the meantime. |
| Nightcrawler | Dozens of fans wearing B: Bad A: Ass M: Mother F: Fuzzy Guy T-shirts are disappointed when Nightcrawler teleports out of the ring to hand out mutant religion pamphlets to the front row, forgetting the two feet rule. He remains a fan favorite. |
| Black Widow | Widow makes a stunning debut, and a combination of Lita meets Strong Style maneuvers carry her through a MCU sponsored commercial segment with Taskmaster. Unfortunately ‘Badass Mother Fuzzy Guy’ is also a Red Room activation phrase and she dives over the top rope mid-match. |
| Loki | Loki is eliminated when it’s revealed that after entering he retreated to under the ring and used a projection to make it seem like he was still competing. Carnies gonna carny. |
| Bullseye | After clarifying the rule about killing people a concerning number of times he eliminates both Daredevil and himself in a fit of rage. A single Joker card floats down to the apron. Baby, that’s joker’s tri…are we allowed to say that? |
| Taskmaster | Can you say cross promotion? Taskmaster and Black Widow have a couple of hot sequences, but the whole thing comes across like a commercial for their movie. As he’s taking a bow (kayfabe is weird) another entrant takes note. |
| Black Cat | She enters at #9 because she has nine lives, obviously. She attempts to make deals with other entrants to fight for her, until she’s knocked out of the ring–but wait! She does a handstand and flips back into the ring a la Kofi Kingston, only to be slammed out by Sera late in the game. |
| Doop | Doop rolls up to the ring American Doop Ass to a Doopspeak cover of Limp Bizkit’s Rollin that everyone inexplicably understands. Initially a joke entrant, he does let’s say surprisingly well for now. |
| Ant-Man | Hitched a ride on a Hit-Monkey headed annnnyyyyywhhhheeerrreeeee. |
| Strong Guy | Strong Guy double booked himself for a #XMenVote appearance at the same time and no-showed. |
| Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes) | Enters at #13 because he’s not afraid of bad luck, crashing into the Rumble with his car like Stone Cold Steve Austin. FLAME CHAIN WRASSLIN, BAYBEE |
| Daredevil | Charismatic lawyer Matt Murdock will be examining the legality of fellow contestants self-eliminating in spite. |
| Hit-Monkey | Hit-Monkey’s reflexively freaks out about fleas once a miniature Ant-Man makes contact, some say he’s still running away from the arena. |
| Domino | Domino’s powers are well suited to keeping her as a major player in the early phases of the event. Then Rogue takes her luck and the rest is kind of inevitable. |
| Drax | [This entry has been deleted due to a claim from WWE’s legal department regarding visual similarities between Drax and the wrestler Dave Bautista] |
| Black Panther (T’challa) | T’challa is a crowd favorite, as this is his first Rumble. (Mumble?) However, does he have what it takes to make it all the way? |
| Wolverine (Laura Kinney) | Laura is Wolverine. And Swole-verine. Move over, Brian Cage. |
| Squirrel Girl | Squirrel Girl is just here to have fun. She and Tippy-Toe do several spots where they do balancing acts on the ropes. She also has a killer moonsault. She manages to eliminate Taskmaster, who it turns out is horribly afraid of squirrels. |
| Sue Storm | Has John Cena’s music and gimmick, obviously. (You can’t see her!) |
| Daimon Hellstrom | He got teleported here by his awful sister Satana and has NO idea what he’s doing, but manages to put on an Edge-like performance. (I feel like Hellstrom has incredible spears.) |
| Misty Knight | Her martial arts background makes her a very strong contender as a technical wrestler, but will she be able to stand up to the super-strength and agility of some of the other contestants? Also, who in the hell let a symbiote in here? The ring mat is all… drippy. No way that’s sanitary. |
| White Tiger (Ava Ayala) | White Tiger is basically just Ricochet and no one can convince me different. |
| Sera | Not the most powerful fighter in this superpowered Rumble, but her fighting spirit more than makes up for it, much like THE MAN, Becky Lynch. She and Gamora end up in a dangerous one on one that she ends up winning, but she keeps chasing Gamora out of the ring area to keep brawling. |
| Shatterstar | Well, we already know what his gear and signature pose is. |
| Rictor | He enters right after Shatterstar, and they have a moment where they lock eyes while Ric is still entering, and Star is HORRIFIED by the idea of fighting Ric. He and Shatterstar are thrown out by Venom while Star is distracted by explaining the rules of the Royal Rumble to Julio. |
| Gamora | BAH GAWD, SHE’S GOT A GUN! AND A SWORD! |
| Mercury (Cessily Kincaid) | She’s super, super slippery. No one can touch her! It’s incredible! Until Sue Storm tosses her over the ring with a force-bubble. Turns out forcefield powers beat liquid powers. Oops. |
| Fred Dukes (Blob) | Fred is very confused and just wants to go home and read, but his friends paid him a lot of money to come here and he doesn’t want them to get upset. He tries his best, but the people doing all the backflips are honestly just a little much. He eventually eliminates himself, which is quite a feat honestly. |
The Final Four: Laura Kinney, Venom, Rogue…. and Doop.
FH: After extensive research on one (1) Marvel Wiki I have made the determination that Doop’s powers more or less being whatever he needs them to be makes him a surprisingly strong contender, but let’s be real – he would get bored before he could clinch the win. (Ed. note: I feel like that is objectively correct. Well maybe not even objectively.)
The way I see this playing out is Rogue takes his powers – whateverthefuck they may be – and crumbles under the eldritch-adjacent totality of their scope. Satisfied with placing third, he kind of just… wanders off to buy one of his own t-shirts and some nachos. Some say he’s still in the match today, given that he doesn’t have feet to be eliminated and all, but he’s eliminated de facto.
That leaves us with Venom and Laura as our finalists. I have a bit of a conflict of interest given that I co-write CXF’s Venom columns (was this whole thing an elaborate attempt at more engagement for those? I’ll never tell!) and Laura is my favorite heroine.
Mikey I’m tagging you in to make the final determination.
MZ: Well, as incredible as Venom’s performance here today was, I think ultimately it comes down not only to the strength of both competitors, but also to the bond between human and Symbiote. On any given Sunday, I’d say Venom has what it takes, but I think he’s just too dang rattled by the whole Knull situation to bring it out.
Plus, I mean, Wolverine. She’s just gonna keep fighting until her opponent is eliminated, one way or another. Not even Venom has that kind of determination. Brian Cage, as we established earlier, is a Wolverine and a wrestler, and not even 5 men and some very heavy ladders made of UNFORGIVING STEEL could keep him down.
FH: A more prestigious feat than anything that happened in Fallen Angels! And I’ve just received word that my mic is, in fact, still on. We’ve gotta get out of here, folks, but one more round for —
NEWWWWWWWWWWW ‘21 MUMBLE CHAMPION: Wolverine (Laura Kinney)
Not only is Laura Kinney Wolverine, she’s also your first ever, first annual, one time only, objectively correct Mumble ‘21 winner! Someone make a poster!
Forrest is an experimental AI that writes and podcasts about comic books and wrestling coming to your area soon.
Mikey is a writer, graphic artist, and tabletop roleplaying designer based out of Columbus, Ohio. In his free time, he watches wrestling and indulges in horror media. Find him on Twitter @quantumdotdot.
