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AEW - DEC 2019


Brian Fowler

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Well I mean they have learned from their mistakes. The women's division being a mess was a talking point from early on in AEW when it was basically Britt, Nyla, Riho, and Emi. It's more fleshed out now and they've made some good signings as of late.

As for production issues, the sound problems last week were due to TNT's satellites and the only issue I can think of this week was for a couple seconds during MJF's inset promo.

Almost all wrestling commentary isn't good and JR, even with his grumpy tendencies, is better than most and he still receives a ton of praise from many people in the business. I'll take their word over grumpy people on a wrestling message board. Otherwise, the commentary is probably some of the best in US wrestling. Excalibur is great, Tony is great in his role of being in complete wonderment, and aside from Shawn Spears helping out on Dark, the Dark commentary teams have been pretty good.

No wrestling promotion is perfect and there's this expectation among some on here that AEW should be perfect in everything they do and no other promotions commit the same errors they make. Hell, these complaints and expectations ignore that MLB, NFL, NHL, and NBA all commit these errors or have these issues. It's live sports. Shit happens and nothing is perfect. That doesn't excuse AEW for some of these mistakes, but it's pretty unfair to levy these complaints at AEW, expect perfection, ignore improvements they have made, disregard that they're a growing company, make complaints without watching the show, and ignore what happens in every other major sports broadcast. The commentary on Raw and SD is fucking awful. It's some of the worst commentary around. 95% of all sports commentary is shit. NXT is better, but then you'll have people on here acting like Mauro being excited kills the product for them, which is pretty ridiculous. Impact, WWE, AEW, and again, all major sports suffer from production gaffes.

But whatever. Koolaid drinkers or something. So dumb

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Let me rephrase that, Matt and Goodeae are right it’s ok to critique a product that you are watching or have watched. 

If you (and I mean that generally the universal you) are going to bash AEW and those who watch AEW cuz you don’t like the product I don’t think is ok.

The missed ref cues have been obvious, Britt Baker is getting shoved down ours throats, there has been audio and other technical issues all true. I do not think that AEW is complete trash because of this. They are growing it’s been what 12 weeks of television? They are miles ahead of where TNA the only other company that was kind of sort of a number two (TNA has been number two but in a different sense) was in there first weeks of television. And TNA was two years in by the time they got TV.

The Bucks, Kenny and Cody get a ton of shit some is warranted and some is not. There’s some cool shit going on in AEW. Cody is the folk hero we didn’t know we needed, Kenny continues his decent into madness and The Young Bucks vs Proud n Powerful feud has been one of the better angles. Plus MJF continues to be absolute fire on the mic, Jericho and the Inner Circle are such a great heel faction.

Dislike AEW ok fine but it feels like some are posting on here just to call those of us who like AEW foolish I don’t think that is ok.

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I see things are going well in here.

One general point

If folks only commented on things they liked, it would be quieter here

If it was quieter here, people wouldn't visit as much

If people didn't visit as much, then I could convince Dean to finally shut the site down.

Wait a second....

(Alright - I better say this not sarcastically. People can post where they please. People also need to do a better job of engaging in a civil manner. Not everyone will agree with you or be as passionate about something you care about. That doesn't mean they don't want to understand.

People also ALSO need to remember that not everything needs to be responded to. You can let some pitches go by. You don't have to have the last word.

People also also ALSO need to remember that just because you say something, that doesn't make it fact.)

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Now to what I originally came here to post

Someone asked Conrad if they will be a Starrcast attached to the next PPV and he said no.

So if you were planning on attending the PPV in person - adjust your plans accordingly

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People continue to compare AEW to WWE like someone is holding WWE up as this paragon of wrestling. Who is making that argument? I don't care about WWE at all anymore.  I watch the Top Ten posts on Youtube and that is about it. 

There's still big problems with the women's division. Riho hasn't appeared in ring since 11/13 on Dark in a meaningless tag match. The booking focus has been on Awesome Kong and Brandy but they aren't particularly active in ring either. So we get a lot of matches that don't have any purpose with absolutely random tag teams and no feuds. Baker doesn't bother me as much as she seems to bother everyone else but she wasn't ready for that push. There's much bigger issues than Britt Baker but even then she isn't the problem, her presentation was.

 

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On 12/11/2019 at 1:21 PM, MORELOCK said:

Creative has nothing for them, eh?

At least we're getting all the librarian segments we could ever want.

Well, they turned him heel and gave him a valet. That's not nothing.

But you can't push everybody. Clearly they're hoping to sustain him with 'boy done good but still jobbed' booking. That can work and that can not work, but there are few other options right now.

I think they do need to do something with the midcarders - running that 'tournament' and giving that ring to MJF was bad booking. If only because he already had a scarf. DDP used to wear too many gimmicks; it was Randy Savage who told him to dial it back. And yet it was DDP who gave that MJF that ring. Weird.

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1 hour ago, Goodear said:

This comparative mentality makes no sense.  Being better than a terrible show doesn't make you good.  Clearing the mighty hurdle of RAW is nothing to be proud of for a wrestling show.

I don't see evidence of the shows getting better so being a start up is no longer an excuse to me.  Make the same mistakes over and over, it's not a sign of growing pains.  It's a sign you are a slipshod organization too busy smelling your own farts to improve.

 

 

No, I think it makes perfect sense. If a show has issues, but it represents something preferable to you than the other show that you think is bad, and if you think that it has a chance of getting better, of course you'll give it more leeway.

Though honestly, I think we just disagree that Dynamite is not a good show in general, so we're talking from two different places. I do, however, think that we need more than seven weeks before we have a sense of whether or not this show will round into something that's really consistently good. But hey, if seven weeks is enough for you, that's your preference and I respect that. I give books around one hundred pages to get me at least somewhat interested before I dump them; I give video games only a couple of hours. I understand the idea of "This show gets two months," though I don't subscribe to it. 

12 hours ago, odessasteps said:

There seemed to a lot of kool aid drinking in the AEW threads. Whether that’s people enjoying their product or wanting them to succeed just to be an alternative to Vince’s company or being in the demo that wants a new company to call their own, I think that probably covers most of the posts I read in the threads. 

admittedly, I am not watching the show and have no desire to start, but it is good there are more available places for guys to work. 

Well, if people enjoy the product, of course they'll defend it. I don't know if that's "drinking the Kool-Aid" as much as it is, you know, enjoying the product.

The old "attack the argument, not the person" rule applies here. If people defend the company, calling them Kool-Aid drinkers isn't fair. Though this isn't a lecture because God knows I've made the same mistake many times...on this board...etc.

Though of course, any critique of the company should also get the same respect. Lord knows there's quite a bit to critique, and I say this as someone who enjoys the company. 

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19 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Now to what I originally came here to post

Someone asked Conrad if they will be a Starrcast attached to the next PPV and he said no.

So if you were planning on attending the PPV in person - adjust your plans accordingly

Something that stood out when doing Starrcast IV was how small everything was compared to the past ones.  It could be due to it being in Baltimore *insert every criticism of it here*  But having it at Rams Head Live when it would have made more sense at a hotel or convention center was quite a bit puzzling.  So I can see them limiting the Starrcast shows to the bigger PPVs so they feel more special.  But with C2E2 going on I'm not ruling out that that's the main reason and the next PPV will business as usual.

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Yeah, there's no way they're going to be able to do a Starrcast with C2E2 going on and Conrad would have had to book rooms and booths a long time ago if he wanted something at McCormick Place. And running something outside of C2E2 would probably result in Conrad taking a bath because attendance would be so low.

I think Starrcast has run it's course anyway. It should have been a once a year deal to begin with, but it's expensive as hell to go to anyway and when you run it that many times in that short span of time then you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for talent appearances and fan attendance. It also doesn't help that WWE is probably squeezing him out as well by preventing people from appearing.

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25 minutes ago, Goodear said:

People continue to compare AEW to WWE like someone is holding WWE up as this paragon of wrestling. Who is making that argument? I don't care about WWE at all anymore.  I watch the Top Ten posts on Youtube and that is about it. 

There's still big problems with the women's division. Riho hasn't appeared in ring since 11/13 on Dark in a meaningless tag match. The booking focus has been on Awesome Kong and Brandy but they aren't particularly active in ring either. So we get a lot of matches that don't have any purpose with absolutely random tag teams and no feuds. Baker doesn't bother me as much as she seems to bother everyone else but she wasn't ready for that push. There's much bigger issues than Britt Baker but even then she isn't the problem, her presentation was.

 

People compare AEW to WWE because WWE is the wrestling brand in the world. We can talk all we want about how much we love NJPW, but WWE is wrestling for many, they're the standard, they're the ones doing this the longest, they're the ones always doing the big arenas and big shows, they're the ones who have been on TV the longest, etc. YOU may not care about WWE, but a lot of others do and it's nearly impossible to look at AEW in a vacuum.

And point of order, I don't think it's right to tell people to not voice their complaints about AEW because lord knows I and many others complain about Raw and SD enough in those weekly threads. For me it's almost like venting about what I watched and it's almost therapeutic to do that. It's also probably why I then go back the next week to turn it on while I do other stuff in the background. I love AEW, but it's certainly not perfect and there's stuff to complain about. At the same time, they've addressed many issues from when the show started and it's still new. If the same stuff is happening a year from now and it kept happening on a weekly basis then I would be concerned that they didn't see some of that stuff as a problem. However, Tony, the Bucks, Kenny, Jericho, and others have been more transparent and more open than any other promotion I've ever seen about the stuff they need to work on and fix. It wouldn't at all shock me if Tony had a JIRA board setup for AEW with various tickets to work on and resolve.

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No, they use WWE as a cudgel to beat away detractors.  "Go watch cuck angles on RAW" was literally something someone just said.  That's not interacting with an argument, it's just deflecting to a position where I am supposed to excuse this bad promotion because its not as terrible as the other one.  

 

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1 hour ago, mattdangerously said:

I'm not going to get into calling anyone a Kool-aid drinker, but some of ya'll could definitely stand to have a little more self-awareness when you praise AEW.

I've referred to it more diplomatically as the brand having a lot of goodwill, and it does because people are willing to enthusiastically explain away a lot of mediocrity. That said, I'm not sure why the Kool-aid drinkers have their jimmies all rustled. Kool-aid is tasty and refreshing. I wish I was drinking some right now.

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I took @Web Conn's "if you don't like AEW, stay out of the thread" more to mean "if you actively dislike AEW and are only here to shit on it and rile up people who enjoy it, get out."  I mean let's be real here.  There were a handful of people here shitting on the promotion from the very start.  Go check the "AEW is official" and "AEW has a TV deal" threads and you find them gleefully falling all over themselves to talk shit on a company that hadn't even done anything yet.  I think those people do need to just not comment on these threads because we know what they're here for and their "contributions" to these threads are bullshit.

Me, I dislike WWE.  Haven't watched it since early 2016.  I think Vince is an awful human being and his treatment of his "independent contractors" is repulsive.  I only know what's happening on his shows by listening to podcasts.  So because of that, you'll never see me in a Raw/Smackdown/whatever thread.  I actively dislike that company and don't go into those threads to just pile on because...why?  I'll occasionally comment on WWE outside those threads when something comes up but I don't seek it out.

I don't think there are many 100% pro AEW people here at all, but it does make some people feel better about themselves to act like anyone positive about the company is just a blind mark.   

BTW I wonder if Kool-Aid's PR people ever tried to rightfully put the heat back on Flavor Aid for Jonestown.  ?

Edited by Technico Support
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I haven’t really seen anyone here say aew is flawless. Every episode the flaws get discussed. I think a lot of us feel a vested interest because we are rooting for an alternative to succeed. If that makes me a mark I’m ok with that but I’m totally fine with pointing out weak areas that they can improve on. 
 

I don’t watch raw or Smackdown but I lurk in the threads and once in a while I’ll like a post, and once in a very rare while I’ll make a comment. But I’m not going in there to hate on anyone who enjoys it, nor am I going to beat a dead horse. I have my opinions but I’m not just going to endlessly repeat them. 
 

Totally fine with people critiquing aew in good faith and there’s things just about every week that I don’t care for. But it’s a variety show and they can’t all be zingers. 

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4 minutes ago, mattdangerously said:

"My subjective opinion is right and your subjective opinion is wrong" 

Don't be like that. Objectively, AEW isn't bad. Nearly every week it and NXT receive critical and fan praise for being good TV while low points are also discussed. Does that make AEW as a whole or even Dynamite bad?

 

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1 hour ago, West Newbury Bad Boy said:

I've referred to it more diplomatically as the brand having a lot of goodwill, and it does because people are willing to enthusiastically explain away a lot of mediocrity. That said, I'm not sure why the Kool-aid drinkers have their jimmies all rustled. Kool-aid is tasty and refreshing. I wish I was drinking some right now.

which kind would you drink?  The newer kind (berry blue maybe) from 93 was may favorite. 

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