EVA

His meme is more culturally relevant than Seth Rollins.

Even better: Not only did Seth get chumped, but people were more disappointed that Moxley didn’t show up.

I am currently hating him!

This is a fair point: Seth sucks so bad that if he wasn’t really injured, he probably wouldn’t have bothered selling leg work from night 1 that the announcers were trying to put over for the whole match.

Seth sucks so bad. I thought the match with Drew was actively bad, mostly because of him having to sell the knee from night 1 but not being willing to fully commit to it, so he could get all his shit in.

The first 5 matches were just kinda there, but Bayley/Iyo was great and Cody/Roman was a fun dog-and-pony show, as expected and appropriate.

I imagine her style of shouting is tough to keep up over multiple nights in a row, especially out in the elements.

They never really figured out how to book Bianca outside of Mania. That they spent the last 3 years feeding her Sasha, Becky, and Asuka and now she’s in an undercard 6-man that was more about putting someone else over really says it all.

I thought Becky/Rhea was a good, strong match. A nice, Bret-esque subtle shift to being a bit of a dick by Becky when she realized the crowd was with Rhea. The electric chair spot was really neat and could’ve been the finish.

The main event was about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be. First half was super plodding—the crowd wasn’t wild enough to justify all the stalling and teasing at the beginning, the crowd brawling was mid, and the heat on Rollins was perfunctory.

I thought it was interesting that Cody seemed to be getting some boos during the main event. If this keeps up, he’ll bring in the flaming tables again.

But anyway Gunther/Sami was IMMENSE, and there was never a doubt about that one. Never thought I’d see the corner brainbuster in WWE. The perfect move at the perfect time to credibly end Gunther’s run. Very excited to see Gunther move up the card over the next year. Also very excited for Sami to make Chad Gable as a heel in the coming months.

I absolutely expected it to be bad. I don’t know if they’re getting bad advice or what, but it’s wild to me that neither of them have attempted to diversify their in-ring style as singles. They both just do their tag stuff but alone. Maybe they see Roman getting by with just spamming spears and Superman punches and think they can do it with superkicks and flying splashes, but they are clearly mistaken and somebody should tell them.

Jimmy and Jey are all-time tag guys but, man, they stink as singles. Which is a shame for Jey, because he has all the outside the ring stuff you would want, but once the bell rings, he loses all the juice.

How was it on the company first? The Tate’s were not entitled to fly out of their home airport just because that’s what they’ve always done before and that’s more convenient for them. That’s where the problem started—the entitlement. The second problem was that they spent most of their time whining to someone who’s job ISN’T booking travel. The third problem was that they apparently spent *two to three days* not communicating with anybody about the travel, seemingly expecting the travel person to seek them out about making changes to flights that were already booked. Again, it’s the entitlement. If anybody would like to lose their job in the future, I would encourage you to follow the Tate’s blueprint here—just whine about your problem, don’t offer potential solutions (beyond “give us what we want”), and then break off communication and blame it on someone else when you miss a shift. That doesn’t work at any job in the world.

Not directed at you, just using this as an opportunity to ask people to go back and read that text exchange and really take note of the entitlement oozing out of what the Tate’s are saying/doing. Also keep in mind that the person they’re whining to ISN’T EVEN IN TRAVEL and it’s not their problem to even be able to fix. You can even kinda hear that person’s frustration creeping in through the second batch of texts. “When you didn’t hear back from someone in THREE DAYS, did you follow up?” No. No, they did not. It may have been the first time they missed a booking, but I would bet money it wasn’t the first time they were a headache to deal with. Final straw, etc.

Tony Khan doesn’t give a fuck about $1600. But the person running AEW’s travel, who wants to be seen as running a financially efficient department, probably does!

He mained the Tokyo Dome and MSG before he was 30!

I wasn’t a great fan of Edge’s promo, but hearing some people acting like this is some sort of unheard of thing was weird to me. Sending someone out to the ring to directly or indirectly address some offscreen beef or audience perception issue has been a thing in wrestling for a long time. Just off the top of my head, I recall WWE trotting out the Rock to cut the infamous “Get the F out” promo after Stone Cold walked out, the equally notorious Authority mea culpa, Joe shooting on Scott Hall no-showing TNA, Heyman doing it like all the time in ECW…It’s a thing!

I have mixed feelings on the Best Friends situation. Like most people, I have, like, -1000% desire to see them break up. But I also don’t have any desire to see them run a break-up-to-make-up angle in a promotion where the Elite do that story, like, once a year. So I guess I just hope they fully commit to it and that it works out for everybody. I thought Trent and Chuck were a lot of fun doing their “Dicks in Real Life” bit on BTE pre-AEW, so maybe they can recapture that magic.

Based on the way that match was laid out, I’d think Jay was the one with heat. And based on some cursory research, it seems like that might be the case, due to him expressing unhappiness with the MJF feud?

JAY WHITE getting dominated by Billy Gunn—and not even getting to win off the low blow—is legitimately insane booking. A potential Mania main event-tier prospect getting his ass handed to him by a mascot. What are we even doing here?

Yeah this BCG/Acclaimed feud just gets worse and worse. Everybody involved is less over than they were before. Need to move on. Quickly.

Swerve organically growing into being a main event guy and maybe the top babyface has been a lot of fun to watch, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he does as champ. The Bucks new gimmick has been surprisingly great. The kind of refresh that Jericho used to be able to pull off. It’s been a perfect integration point for Okada, and I can’t wait to see where he’s at 6 months from now. Ospreay unexpectedly becoming a money promo guy really raises the ceiling on what I thought they could get out of his signing.

This Mania build has been quite the roller coaster. YAY CODY/ROMAN 2! BOO ITS ROCK/ROMAN INSTEAD YAY THEY FIXED IT! CODY/ROMAN IS BACK ON AND ROCK IN A TAG MATCH! Now, we’ve crossed over into the bittersweet realization…yeah, but Cody/Rock would be better than either of the matches we’re actually gonna get.