The Idiot King

Pretty okay Night One. It doesn't bode well that the best matches of the night were the nothing tag team match (which, genuinely was very good!) and Fenix/Gable. I enjoyed myself, for sure, and was surprised by the quality of Jade/Naomi (which I think solidified Jade as able to hold her own in a long-ish singles match, even if she still has the bad habit of waiting VERY PATIENTLY for spots to happen) and then sort of underwhelmed by the Charlotte/Tiffy match. Glad to see Jacob Fatu look like a killer and belted up. I thought the main event was FINE, but was very by the numbers. It had all the worst tropes of a triple threat match, but everyone had their working boots on. Too much acting for me (You are not good actors! If you were, you would be actors!) but a fun result. I think what does bode well is that nothing was BAD, and that the expectations are set so high these days (in part because of the heights of nearly every AEW PPV) that anything less than the best of the year is seen as a let down. And I am not as down on Jey Uso as everyone else. He is firmly in the LA Knight camp of "Not for me, but the kids seem to love him." I saw Smackdown live with my girlfriend and her kid the other day and lemme tell you, that 8 year old could not get up out of their seat fast enough to do the arm-bounce thing. But also like LA, I'm not sure he has THE juice or in-ring ability to maintain the momentum when the catchphrase wears off. It happened to "The Road Dogg" Jesse James, and it could happen to you too!

A brief, live PPV review from my girlfriend who had never seen wrestling at all, nevermind in person until last night: * Important questions I had not thought to clarify before the show: "Is there a scoring system? What happens when someone wins? Does he get something?" * Re: Isiah Kassidy -- "The guy in the mesh shirt looks like he might have been a dancer earlier in his life. I think his flips were better than the other team's flips, so I'm actually kind of sad that he lost." * Re: Mark Briscoe -- "Who is that? He has an amazing face. I've never seen a face like that before. He's my new favorite." * And re: The Main Event. I liked it a lot, personally, including the ending. Couldn't help think about various suggestions on here that we are in the midst of a Stop The Moxsunaga arc. We were going to have to leave early, so I kept telling her we should start heading out before the match was over, but she was so engrossed in it, she insisted we stay until the end. "I love the bad guy in this. He's a beast. He's my new favorite. I love the beast. I love how the beast suffers. I love how anticlimactic the ending was. I didn't know you could do that in wrestling. Sometimes that's how life is."

Because she's a NO GOOD JEZEBEL!

Didn't mind Ospreay and MJF at all, though it ran a bit long, as someone who really enjoys MJF's schtick. It's obnoxious, it's too worked-shooty, it's repetitive and it always seems to hit. I appreciate Ospreay's earnest himbo routine, and I think he is really stepping into his role. The Saraya-Toni match was bad. The fun stuff they tried to do got muddled by poor execution, and they never gelled at any point, and somehow cooled down the hottest feud going into All In. Glad we at least had the messiness at the end to wash the taste out. Mercedes-Britt and Jericho match were on the lower-end of fine, but wow, that Okada-Claudio match. I agree that the "Oh damn, we just ran out of time, guess we'll have to run it back at the PPV" is getting a little tired, but I appreciate it as a way to heat the crowd up for something without any build. Like, "Hey, that was a really great match, right? Wanna see an even BETTER one?" Loved that match and think Claudio is fighting for third-best Sharpshooter with Sting (after Bret and Owen). Cash Wheeler's looking a little juicy, so I hope it doesn't slow down his execution on things. I don't want Darby or Jack Perry to die in London, but I am open to being made seriously concerned about the possibility.

I'd rate it as a high-mid AEW PPV. Not a lot of meat on the bones, but hard to hate on the overall level of matches. Loved Toni/Mina -- a well built story with a good payoff match that all made sense. Impressive how much they sold Mina over just the past month or so. Mercedes/Vaquer was sloppy and a little all over the place and that finisher is still SO BAD, but I had never seen a Stephanie Vaquer match before, and I was hugely impressed. Not a ton to complain about, really, and glad to see Britt back just for star power reasons. Danielson/Shingo was about as good as you'd expect, and I like Bryan pretending to die all the time (Dante Martin stole a bit of this in the TNT Ladder Match -- and that Briscoe Sabu flip was fucking dirty and dumb and fun). The main event really delivered -- even as someone who is not traditionally a huge fan of EPICNESS in matches -- and solidified both guys as real stars. That stomp onto the table was NASTY. I like all the little story beats (even the bad acting) and think they have built something nice with the MJF/Ospreay/Swerve/Garcia quadrangle that is actually elevating everyone. Everything else was fine. I have trouble enjoying ZSJ matches, while appreciating that he is very talented. Feels like some momentum and buzz is building with Ospreay and Swerve starting to take over the top spots. The fact that this whole PPV was more or less sold on that match, which was very suddenly a dream match, says a lot.

Pretty lousy RAW overall (with one of the deadest crowds in ages not helping anything), but Ricochet took a memorably nasty bump and that Dragunov/Bron match was really good and worth seeking out.

I think pro wrestling discourse on the internet has always been pretty dumb, but I think what you're seeing a lot of right now (going wholly on vibes here), is a couple of things: 1. You, me, probably most people on this board are old now. We have seen a lot of wrestling. We have lived through a lot of wrestling. More than new international markets, I think there is a whole generation of young fans coming online now who grew up in a post-WCW era where there was nothing but WWE, and who are YOU to tell them that your love of Steamboat-Flair is an iron-clad truth while their love of the General Manager era of RAW is dumb nostalgic revisionism. They don't want to be told that the things they loved when they were younger fucking sucked any more than any one else, so there's a real "Get out of my way old man" attitude -- which is good, honestly! -- but instead of it being applied in defense of more obscure, unheralded wrestling that you might have otherwise overlooked, it's about some real historic low points of American Wrestling. 2. As an extension of that, I would guess that maybe that same cohort are at about the age where you really push back against the idea of being seen as pretentious, and you learn the really fun judo move of being like, "Actually, I love dumb shit! Dumb shit is GOOD, and all that arty-farty crap that critics say is good is BAD." Which, again, is a totally fine way to approach things, but I think mellows out with age as you realize that there's more to appreciating the world than being contrary. Because the internet wrestling world has had to slog through, god, two decades(?) of there being an American Wrestling monopoly, not much kind has been said about WWE for a very long time on here, which results in there being sort of a clear consensus that can be bucked. 3. This has resulted in a lot of dumb culture war stuff bleeding into wrestling. Not in terms of political parties or anything, but in the sense that people are really defining who they are or are not as consumers. Like Marvel fans screeching about Martin Scorcese, there is this sense of identity that people are tacking onto their fandom. An AEW fan is THIS kind of person (fill in your own blanks here) and a WWE fan is THIS kind of person, and all arguments originate based around these fixed ideas of defining yourself in opposition to something else (nevermind the stupid binary that this creates). This results in really boring back and forths that never seem to be in good faith at all and are mostly defensive posturing. 4. Which also results in the very cool, very interesting people whose entire worldview seems to be, "In my opinion, everything is good and nothing is bad and nobody should ever say anything bad about anybody or anything." The most interesting people who talk about wrestling, I think, are people who have very specific, idiosyncratic viewpoints. Like, if you can write (or speak) compellingly about how JBL's Cabinet was the greatest faction of all time, I'm all ears, I would love to be convinced of this, but I need to actually believe that you believe that and not feel like you're just saying it because you're worried that liking Kenny Omega would make you look like a huge dork (it would, incidentally). 5. The internet is just worse than it's ever been. A total ramshackle, decaying version of itself that is breaking everyone's brain more every day.

Can Naito still go? I haven't kept up on NJPW stuff in ages, but in my mind, that would be a really fun match.

Almost forgot, but yeah, Orange-Roddy was great and the Roddy/Wardlow wins made a ton of sense and maybe -- MAYBE -- could save the dumb Devil shit. Orange has not had a bad match in the last year and a half? Two years? Amazing work. The most I have ever cared about anything related to the Undisputed Era. Skeptical about Kyle O'Reilly stuff and was definitely handled in a very AEW way of "Oh, okay? Sure. Huh."

5/5 PPV. AEW rules the world, etc. The worst match was probably the scramble, and the women's match had a tough spot with a totally OK performance. Ospreay/Soup was amazing (as someone who has been slowly warming to Will over the last year or two), the tag match and Eddie/Brian were all-timers and what a beautiful, dumb, silly, genuine send-off for Sting. I don't understand how you could hate this promotion. Swerve/Ospreay at Wembley! Takeshita should be belted up! The crowd is finally booing Hangman! I am now 100% okay with Darby dying on live television because it seems like what he wants, and I should respect that! Daniel Garcia SHINED!

Yeah, it seems like they are astro-turfing to save some face, and who knows where it'll go from here -- WWE is capable of rolling with the punches for a Wrestlemania moment and having things revert to the norm after a month or two when they feel like it -- but I cannot take anyone seriously who is like, "Ah yes, this was the brilliant plan all along. The audience is playing directly into their hands." Some people still say that about the Bryan Danielson run! As though he wasn't weirdly waffling around with the Wyatts for two months before Wrestlemania. They've put themselves in a dumb position through bad storytelling that they are gonna have to wriggle their way out of one way or another and who knows, maybe it'll be compelling, but I refuse to attribute to genius puppeteering what is more than likely panicked flailing.

I hope this recent WWE boom means that a whole new generation of fans will get to experience the excitement of getting to do the "Okay, but the THING IS, it's good that this sucks, in my opinion" two-step. Just spending hours a week talking themselves into believing anything other than the dumbest possible answer is true. It's a right of passage. I hope they will learn to let the stupidity of it just wash over them like a gentle bath and find pleasure in whatever the 2024 equivalent of Stevie Night Heat is. That being said, if Cody comes out and wins the title off Roman after Rock softens him up -- not bad! But still, a ridiculous way of getting there that asks poor Cody to do an awful lot of conceptual heavy-lifting and only makes sense in the internal Stock Must Go Up logic of the WWE Branded Content Machine That Cannot Be Killed. Excited for the women's title matches, tho!

This all rings 100% correct, but does not make any of it less thrown-together stupid and makes Cody look like a double geek, second place title or no. I would be very curious if Cody feels as though this is a win-win-win situation. "This title and its legacy is my whole life, and I struggled back to the top of the mountain by beating out 29 other WWE Superstars in front of the whole WWE Universe and actually, uh, now that I think about it, The Rock really would be better at this whole thing than me because it'll destroy your family! Nobody's ever done this before, but I am. Because it's SMART, actually. Brave when you think about it. But I'll be here! You just wait! I'll just be over here. When you least expect it - BAM! Just over here, working on my story. Just storying away. Lots of story left to tell. Many chapters." Me, I do not care. It is just very, very funny. Real "that's okay, I'll still keep drinking that garbage" expectations of the fans.

Lol

Don't reveal the secrets! Those stunt grannies have families to feed!

Not a great one! Women's match was fun, if a little sloppy, and Jade looked great. Men's match was almost entirely whatever, up to and including the trudging across the finish line. Cody losing again at WM would be very, very funny.

I don't love the Bucks, but also am realizing I 100% don't really care who Sting's final opponent(s) is/are, as long as it's not some kind of embarrassing Undertaker/Kane vs. HHH/Shawn Michaels fiasco. So, asking this in absolute good faith: Who would people, realistically, rather see him face?

Two very very very good matches tonight. Swerve losing is fine. His shine is fine. Honestly, I tend to think he would only be hampered by anything less than the World Title, so I am not even sure he needs to get to the finals of this thing. As far as I'm concerned, the only question AEW should be asking itself at all at the moment is how do we get the belt onto Swerve. I'll be sad when Andrade leaves because he is very much one of my favorite in-ring guys in the world today, and I do not understand why he has had such trouble breaking through time and time again. I doubt he'll fair much better in WWE for a second go round, but that seems INSANE to me because he's so charismatic and hits like a truck. Very excited for RUSH/Swerve and Danielson/Brody coming up, too. The Devil (who very suspiciously seems to enjoy REAL GLASS) sucks. That whole thing sucks. Who cares. Go away. I hope Heel Hangman Page is fun whenever we get to it. I didn't hate the Omega/Jericho Starks/Bill stuff half as much as everyone else. It felt loose and messy and was bad, but at least it felt natural and off-the-cuff and maybe got Ricky actually mad? I'll take that over a script any day.

Hard disagree. Love adderrall-postin Tony. Picking petty feuds, talking shit, being weirdly defensive, making personal attacks on his perceived enemies. One of us! One of us! Something I have been thinking about as it relates to AEW attendance cooling off and just using the old scientific anecdotal eyeball test: AEW is wrestling for like 30+ year old dorks. There is inherently a limit to how many of those there are (many of them, myself included are right here on this forum!). Whereas WWE, whether I (a definitely 30+ year old dork) like it or not, makes wrestling for kids which is, at least in my lifetime, who wrestling is for. I don’t get LA Knight, but he’s not FOR me. The kids love him. He says wacky stuff, he looks kinda like George Michael (the kids still dig him, right?) and he has perfectly serviceable punch and kick matches. It’s brand new stuff if you’re 10! And the only way to grow your base is making new fans out of little kids or the elusive (non-existant) casual. The most casual exposure AEW has gotten (assuming nobody gets too mad about the quarters thing) is through the very WWE-ish Jade and through the very kid friendly Orange Cassidy. It may just be that you need kids to drive attendance because if you are 8, you gotta go with your parents. That’s at least double the tickets. I went to Wrestledream and had a blast but anyone under 15 looked like they would rather be in a library. It’a a tough needle to thread. I tend to think that the more different the alternative to WWE is, the better, but financially I may be wrong. I tend to love beautiful failures and not taking a dump truck of cash from the Saudis, so nobody should come to me looking to fix their business decisions, but it’s definitely been a strange feeling to go to live events and be missing that vibe of young true believers.

Half-assed live report, here: Swerve-Hangman was easily the most fun live, hitting right in the sweet spot of a 4 hour (not including the Zero Hour) show. Crowd was way hotter for Swerve than anyone else all night. Easily my MOTN. FTR-Aussie was fun and well put together, with Aussie Open having a more sizeable following than I would have guessed for a very talented in-ring but otherwise sort of generic team. Danielson/ZSJ was conceptually very impressive (and compelling!) for a style that isn’t really my cup of tea. I feel very lucky to have gotten to see Danielson live post-comeback. Last time I saw him was the Ryback/Team Hell No v. Shield TLC(?) match whenever that was. Poor Ricky Starks was working to crickets after everyone spent their energy on Swerve/Page but he and Yuta put together a tight, hard-hitting match. Julia Hart and Stat did an amazing job. Wanna echo what other people are saying about her growth and how much people were buying into her character. Always impressed with how over the usual crew are: Bucks, Kenny, Jericho and the Lucha Bros. Every time I’ve been in person, the energy hasn’t waned a bit, but I am now firmly on the side of Orange Cassidy’s momentum having been wasted. The main event was fun, classic, big time wrestling. That third bump on the stairs was gross. Christian’s the best and it was exciting to see Edge literally anywhere besides WWE. Am I looking forward to an Edge-Adam Cole classic? No. Do I think it would be neat to see Edge and Christian team up one last time? Sure, why not. Keeps things feeling lively even if it’s just a quick hit of nostalgia. I don’t imagine they are gonna put the world title on him or anything.

Jade (potentially? definitely?) leaving is a huge loss to AEW but makes perfect sense for Jade, so I hope it suits her well and I can't imagine her being anything less than a huge star wherever she is. There are lots of fresh and exciting match-ups for her in WWE and I cannot imagine they could somehow fuck this up, but you never know. AEW is big and established enough now that I don't think losing any one wrestler to WWE is going to tank the company, but I do worry that over time if enough people start to see AEW as simply a stepping stone to WWE fame, it will take its toll. It would suck to lose MJF (who would do great in WWE) or Starks (who would 100% end up in sub-midcard-hell), but the roster is so stacked that you have a lot of great pieces to play with even if there were a fairly large exodus. WWE is just starting to really get back on track with making stars again (Rhea and Bianca are the only two who immediately come to mind) and having AEW suddenly function as a star-making feeder system would be a huge boon to them. It's fun to be in a period of shake-ups and people jumping ship back and forth again, with all the attendant drama, so long as we don't end up in another decades-long period of monopoly.

Man. What a bummer. Marty was up there with Warrior and Hawk as a kid where I was hoping that whenever they came back it would be for real this time. I think also, importantly (if only superficially) the more-than-friends relationship between Shawn and Marty was explored some. Maybe it's a little taboo or still seen as a slight in some way, but to hear them both tell it, there's a complicated romance there. More than anything else, this episode made me want to see a deep dive on Pat Tanaka.

Just watched Forbidden Door and wanna drop in here and say that MJF is a better Flair/Race than HHH ever was. Not sure if that's even controversial, but it really hinges on his ability to look like a goof while also being indisputably one of the best technical wrestlers working today.

Am I crazy for thinking this is all pretty benign? Alvarez is like, "Who knows what's going on with Punk! Could be anything, really!" and then Punk was like, "Shut the fuck up" and then...that's it? Seems like pretty thin gruel to extrapolate into the backstage disaster some people are spinning it into. I'll believe Punk isn't coming back when he's released from his contract.

Dub is dead. Real end days of WCW numbers. Punk and Kenny no-show locked in for sure. Can't even sell out a 90k seater. On a more grave and serious note: I'm hearing that Dark is done? Is that true? That breaks my heart! They at least deserve a send-off. I am game for the new Saturday show (if a little wary of the Friends of Punk/Friends of Elite divide), but Dark is really something special and unique that will leave a big hole in terms of national exposure for independent workers. I hope once the dust has settled a little with all the new changes, they find the money/time/space for a new Youtube show.