username

As I said around here somewhere, either Roman or Punk had to drop the belt before the champ vs champ match at Crown Jewel in early November, it's just how WWE always handles that. As much as it baffles me to say this I'd have probably done the shock switch to Penta as raw champ instead, but this'll work too.

Listen if Keith Lee has to join a cult and find a guru simply to have someone to counteract Prince Nana as we finally get his match against Swerve then I'm all for it >_> (seriously though I would appreciate one bit of good Keith Lee news sometime this decade).

See it being gimmicks and not just storylines makes this tricky as if the latter then Kane is a shoe-in. It also prevents me from nominating Abyss as that started great, and then they just booked him in increasingly damaging ways for a decade or so.

Given Savage's size and how he wrestled (he did that double axe from the top to the floor all the time for years, wrestlers nowadays are half the size and basically don't) it's a miracle he held up physically as long as it did.

May I suggest starting with The Wand of Gamelon... >_>

I do think Thekla is very close to sliding into the "well we didn't intend to turn you but you left us with no choice" situation that pops up from time to time.

I am both excited at the return of Professor Layton, and dreading it given how absurdly gung ho the president of the company is about AI and how one can see how the game's story could potentially be all about that.

Here is so much more comfortable as a heel it is impossible to ignore. Really though I'm just tickled to see Powerhouse Hobbs finally getting an actual push that he's the focus of. I've quite literally waited years to see it.

Without the mass you can really tell how short Reed is.

Both their contracts are apparently up next months and... well based on history it doesn't look like Max is coming back.

I do feel slightly bad for Max Caster the wrestler as he was given the usual kiss of death "this guy loses in 30 seconds because he's an overconfident loser" gimmick and actually got the crowd on board for it and him, that's a rare skill. You can do that you should probably sew up a long term "low carder who mostly fills other purposes" spot but AEW has never really figured that part of wrestling out (see also how they are the only people in wrestling to not figure out how to make money with Danhausen). Now Max Caster the person... meh.

I saw some people shocked by Wendy Choo being released and... if you aren't a coach you shouldn't be in developmental for several years. The fact that she seemed to be going backwards (had been moved from NXT to Evolve) suggests they lost faith in her but to be perfectly blunt after that long there she likely got all she was gonna get out of it and it becomes a true "we either gotta move her up or out of here" deal and out seems like the more reasonable choice. Hopefully a fresh start helps her take a step forward.

I legit wonder if Bowens has whatever Brad Armstrong had where people claim he was compelling in real life but he never found a way to channel it in the ring.

Bayley is sort of in an odd spot due to her age. It makes a run outside of WWE (likely in AEW with detours through japan and various indies) a bit of a now or never deal, but she's also shown an eye to the next step of her career as a mentor/teacher/possibly trainer with her Lodestone seminars and if that is something she wants to focus on a bit more moving forward WWE is probably the best partner for that. If she was a bit younger and never wanted to have kids she could probably do both, but as-is it feels like realistically she's gotta choose one and that comes down to which is more important to her. I thought before she was more likely to take the AEW route but I don't think this is a choice with a simple right/wrong answer for her specificaly.

I remember being sent a video for that games years back and basically replying "this is nothing but stolen AKI animations, game ain't never legally coming out". Don't get me wrong, before AI entered the picture I'd have gladly given it a shot if it somehow existed but it's been mostly red flags since the jump.

FWIW Raquel Rodriguez uses that as one of her trademark non-finisher moves; it looks like it has more impact than a regular vertical suplex but probably not enough for a match ender.

I think WWE owns UpUpDownDown so that entity is probably simply dead as of this point. I do not know if AEW really cares much about this space but I cannot see them wanting to deter Creed from doing this on his own, and I can't see Creed not wanting to do something in this sphere even if it is just simply twitch streaming sometimes. Cole is still injured but does still Twitch stream fairly regularly, haven't watched any of his stuff in a while has he has a habit of picking games to play I just don't really care to watch. I hope GM mode still exists in the WWE 2k games moving forward.

They have a habit of doing a quick title change before these champ vs champ matchups if they don't like/want to run said match-up so... well while it should probably be Roman I assume Punk will no longer have the belt by then.

I'm not gonna look up if this was the first episode of WWE tv where every single match was won by someone of latino descent (ok Evans technically beat Dom by DQ before it got restarted)... but it almost has to be, right? Royce and OTM starting the show with a true "on sight" beatdown of the Usos did a good job of shaking up the somewhat stale formatting of the show for at least one week. I assume this happened because the show was taped as opposed to live but I only had five commercial breaks during the entire show, the longest of which was 60 seconds long. Shocker, the show was markedly better paced and watchable this way!

Yeah but it followed a tiger driver directly on top of his head, and then ospreay hit his two finishers after the OWA 1 count for another 1 count. We are living in the era of "overkill = the best" and that is what it is, but if someone says that it struck them as a bit much and it took them out of things I think that's more than fair. I have gotten to the point where I'm generally fine with the body of Ospreay and Omega matches, but they almost without fail lose me at the ending (you can go and check if you want, I probably said the same thing after Ospreay/Swerve a couple months back). If you love it then cool, you're probably gonna get them in most ppv main events going forward. Anyways good to see New Day show up and I'm glad Britt gets to resume her career after a couple of years in the wilderness.

Yesterday was spotty for me as well.

Raw actually had more fun stuff than usual tonight. That cannonball from Dragon Lee was nutso (there is an alternate angle replay from the one before that shows how fast and far he flew), I thought Evans brought some nice extra intensity against Big Cass, and the ending with Keyes coming back with backup to wage war on everyone worked very well and he seemed dramatically more comfortable in this role.

My gut feeling is that between this and Blake in interviews saying she liked the divas era and wants to bring back the butterfly belt is some odd almost meta heat gathering exercise/experiment. I do not think it's likely to be any more successful than just letting her do stuff.

This is as good an opportunity as any to post my "clever until you really think about it" ironman match idea. Have the heel give it a good shot for the first quarter or so of the match, maybe have them lose a fall or just lose interest and get DQ'd. Then get DQ'd again. Just repeatedly do low blows, attack the good guy with weapons, punch the ref for the hell of it. Get it to some ridiculous score like 20-0, drag it out for ages with the face just getting assaulted viciously with no one really being able to do anything about it. Eventually after a half hour of this have the heel grab the mic and say something along the lines of "so I checked before the match, if he's unable to finish he forfeits the match no matter the score" and have them just start bashing like a limb or neck with a chair with them trying to cripple the good guy in the time remaining while the face desperately tries to hold on. Neat idea on paper, I assume the live crowd will not deal well with the match being an endless heel beatdown with probably no comeback/payoff, would possibly work in an e-fed though.

Yeah but Dustin has come to the defense of Nyla (which hell, puts him ahead of AEW at this point), has tweeted several times telling "trans fobes" (he's a bad speller) to more or less go to hell, released an AEW t-shirt in trans pride colors with all proceeds going to a trans charity, etc. He's got some problematic views for sure but this has never been one of them going back several years now.