The Wrestling Thread

[Raging Justice]

It's amazing how AEW can feel so stale at times and my main major criticism of them is how they lack something that gets me invested in characters, often lacking emotional hooks that really gets me glued to the screen,wanting something to happen badly, and then BAM it just kinda all falls into place in one evening.

Maybe I am still caught up in the moment, maybe it's partly because the crowd was so hot, and because I actually got to watch live and at a sociable hour, and it was in my country, it might even be recency bias, but Bryan Danielson overcoming the odds at All In was almost perfect. You explain so well why it was too, Raging Justice, since so many moments were linked to Bryan.

And for all my criticisms of Bryan's booking, how he came into the company basically saying he didn't want the belt and just came to help put people over and ended up losing left right and centre, if he hadn't been booked like that, that moment wouldn't have been so special. I said a few months back he should have won the belt off Hangman and had a short reign when he first came in and then lost it back to Hangman. I was wrong. This was better.

Of course, AEW still has a ton of issues and I expect I will be complaining about something within a few weeks. I also doubt I'll watch All Out unless they put on a spectacular card and they continue telling some kind of compelling story now with Bryan (we'll see), but right now All In is my favourite show of the year, possibly tied with Revolution at a push. I know I would get laughed off the internet for daring name anything other than Wrestlemania, but it's just my opinion.

Speaking of that, wrestling discussions online are so toxic and juvenile. It's just full of edgelords and shitposting pages posting childish cringey takes and people mocking everyone and everything. It doesn't feel like there are many places for wrestling fans to just have decent, rational and open minded discussions about wrestling.

I had another cool realization. Bryan made Swerve tap out for maybe the first time in his AEW career. Bryan won the world title at Wrestlemania XXX by tapping out Batista

[Raging Justice]

This was fucking awesome. Bronson Reed is on a streak of terror maiming people in WWE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pAXiopPRD4

[Reprise]

Haven't watched Dynamite yet, but seen some clips on social media and read people's thoughts. Jack Perry will be Bryan Danielson's first title defence at All Out, which I expect to be VERY divisive. Isn't All Out in Chicago? Lol I know what they are doing.

Bryan also said he will not retire as champion, but will retire when he is beaten for the belt, so it's going to be an interesting couple of months, I feel. We now know that Jack Perry, Darby Allin and Christian all have title shots.

Moxley is back, gave a fairly confusing promo where he called out Darby Allin for some reason and said he needs to talk to him. He then a moment later got back in the ring and addressed the audience and Schiavone and said "this isn't your company anymore". No idea what that is referring to.

Anyways here's the card for All Out so far. Swerve and Hangman in a steel cage is going to be absolute fire.

1. Will Ospreay (c) vs. Pac (AEW International Championship)
2. Willow Nightingale (c) vs. Kris Statlander (Chicago Street Fight, CMLL World Women's Championship)
3. Swerve Strickland vs. "Hangman" Adam Page (Steel Cage match)
4. MJF vs. Daniel Garcia
5. Bryan Danielson (c) vs. Jack Perry (AEW World Championship)

[Raging Justice]

Dynamite was fun. Great match between Hangman and Ishi, a GREAT in ring segment with Hangman and Swerve, and a really great segment between Garcia and MJF too. We also had a forgettable, lame segment with Mariah May. God, everything surrounding the TBS title is trash. We also got a really fucking lame segment involving Mercedes and Okada. I absolutely DO NOT like this pairing. Get Okada the fuck away from Mercedes. AEW's women's division is starting to feel like shit again. After a big pay per view, it's like they had nothing interesting for either women's champion. They mentioned a title defense between Mercedes and Momo Watanabe from Stardom, but who fucking cares? These non-AEW title defenses always amount to nothing. In a more interesting universe we'd have AEW stars getting involved in Stardom storylines and vice versa, but that's never gonna happen.

Willow Nightingale needs to get pushed more, along with maybe The Virtuosa, Thunder Rosa, and Shida. To my complete and utter shock Mercedes and Mariah May have both flopped in AEW and I'm thoroughly bored of both of them. They come out, do pointless promos and silly antics, and we're supposed to get excited about seeing them again next week

Deonna Purrazzo and Thunder Rosa have had a feud in recent months that has genuinely been more fun and interesting than anything Mariah May and Mercedes have done. What aren't we getting awesome stuff with Mercedes like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qA9E1CHe_M

I'm honestly more interested in Kamile right now than Mercedes.

I like Perry vs Bryan, I am very happy with how Perry is developing. He's also a title holder, so he has some credibility. I find anyone complaining about this kind of odd. Whatever happened to people wanting young talent to get elevated? After Perry being Jungle Boy for ages, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to elevate him and AEW is doing that. I actually think this could be really interesting if the Elite try and get involved in Bryan's title match, particularly Okada. Bryan's not gonna drop the belt for at least a few months, Perry is a perfectly fine first defense. We should be seeing him try and move up the card. Why wouldn't he? He's the one with the most to prove in The Elite.

Honestly, I'm just enjoying basking in the glow of Bryan Danielson as world champion. It's one of those things many of us thought we'd never get to see. As a Vegeta fanboy, if he took out the main villain of a Dragon Ball Super arc I'd be so happy I wouldn't even care what they have lined up for his character afterwards. I honestly wouldn't care who they picked for Bryan's first title defense, you know he'll have a killer match no matter who it is.

I don't know what's going on with Moxley, but credit to AEW for giving him a new creative direction. He has sorely needed it. I've complained about Moxley for a while, but I'm always open to changing how I feel about anyone if the effort is put in to make them interesting. I hated LIv Morgan in WWE, and they've completely turned me around on her.

[Reprise]

Yeah, I think giving Moxley time off and then bringing him back with a new direction was a great move. He has needed it for a while.

[Reprise]

Mick Foley has revealed he was training to come out of retirement for one final match. He was planning to do a 6 week run with AEW in early 2025 and wanted his final match to be against MJF. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you're someone who didn't want to see that) he recently suffered a concussion and so plans for one final match were scrapped.

[Raging Justice]

Not everything has to be a wrestling match. I would still love to see him there in a non wrestling capacity. His presence alone is worth it.

I love Tam Nakano. She's a consummate professional, always using social media to push her story. She's the best story teller in professional wrestling and the very last vestige of a time when wrestlers cared about kayfabe instead of posting stupid, real life nonsense on social media every week.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stardomjoshi/c ... iming_the/

[Raging Justice]

Sometimes I feel like pro wrestling fans are so programmed to react a certain way to certain things that it becomes difficult to tell a good story. I was reading about Tam's title match and apparently Tam was working her opponent's knee and the writer said that it was boring to watch a face working over a heel's body part. I understand that working over a body part tends to be more of a heel thing, but isn't it justified given that Tam's downward spiral was the result of this woman brutally attacking her knee with a chair? I personally love when faces use heel tactics against them and wish it would happen more often. One thing I hate about baby faces in pro wrestling is that they are too "nice". I like when a heel draws out a face's darker side because sometimes it's warranted. Sometimes you have to use your enemy's own tactics in order to defeat them.

Anyway, I watched Bash at Berlin after uh...sailing my boat on the high seas if you catch my drift. Christ, what a boring, Vince McMahon era pay per view. Literally nothing noteworthy to speak of other than an amazing crowd, though I'm not sure how much of that was due to the show and how much was just the crowd entertaining themselves quite honestly, but either way WWE shills will hype this up as further proof that WWE's product is better than ever. Jade Cargill and Bianca Belair are the women's tag team champions again, making their recent loss of said titles feel like just a fluke. I'm sure WWE will continue to over push them again as the company loves nothing more than kissing Bianca Belair's ass. This also continues the trend of boring women's tag champions. Seriously, WWE needs to just retire that title. They never build a compelling narrative around them and often put them on boring people. The team Bianca and Jade beat never really had any interesting character work or storytelling surrounding them at all.

The only match I was really into was the one between Liv Morgan/Dominick Mysterio and Rhea Ripley/Damien Priest and that match fell into the same booking bullshit that we saw throughout Vince McMahon's WWE, which is over pushing the babyfaces to make them look like unstoppable monsters. They basically gave Rhea and Damien the super Cena treatment by having them easily fight off the entire Judgment Day and make them look like a bunch of dorks



I fucking hate shit like this in pro wrestling. Victories should be earned. Baby faces shouldn't win just because "they're the good guys". Rhea and Damien should have had a plan, or should have brought in some back up. Why didn't Rey Mysterio and his faction get involved? Why didn't Zelina Vega get involved? Nope. Rhea Ripley and Damien Priest just get to win because they are super saiyins

[Reprise]

Sometimes I feel like pro wrestling fans are so programmed to react a certain way to certain things that it becomes difficult to tell a good story. I was reading about Tam's title match and apparently Tam was working her opponent's knee and the writer said that it was boring to watch a face working over a heel's body part. I understand that working over a body part tends to be more of a heel thing, but isn't it justified given that Tam's downward spiral was the result of this woman brutally attacking her knee with a chair? I personally love when faces use heel tactics against them and wish it would happen more often. One thing I hate about baby faces in pro wrestling is that they are too "nice". I like when a heel draws out a face's darker side because sometimes it's warranted. Sometimes you have to use your enemy's own tactics in order to defeat them.

Yeah, that's true and interesting. I feel like a lot of wrestling fans are a bit too focussed on wrestling telling a good story, but only within very limited parameters that they consider wrestling must stick to. Being very rigid on what a face and heel should be is one factor of that. Another problem is that many people mistake constant swerves for the sake of swerves and stories/feuds being continuously prolonged for the sake of it as "good storytelling" without every considering if the story being told still even makes sense. But that's probably another discussion.

Most mediums of storytelling that are aimed even at children don't stick rigidly to only one dimensional stereotypically good people and stereotypically bad people. Usually characters have shades of good and bad, and if a character turns bad, it makes sense within the story. Whereas in wrestling heel and face turns are done to shock the audience, not in a manner that actually makes sense within the ongoing stories.

I have also been watching some soap operas lately (blame the wife ) and I can't help noticing how interconnected and engaging the storylines can be. The way stories interweave and almost have like a domino effect on other characters and other storylines is quite remarkable. Some people say wrestling is a soap opera. Well, they (or AEW at least) could benefit a lot from making storylines feel less compartmentalised and instead make storylines more interconnected.

I skipped through some of Bash at Berlin. It was a bit boring (I didn't pay either, fortunately) and predictable. A very typical WWE PPV.

[Raging Justice]

This thing between Swerve and Hangman has reached a point now where there is no face in the story line. Swerve tried to cripple Danielson in front of his wife and kids, and Hangman just burned Swerve's house down...literally. I like it.