AEW TV - 10/10 - 10/17/2023 - Tuesday Night Wars

[Craig H]

Rest of the show was quite good. They looked like they booked themselves into a corner with Swerve and Hangman and got out of that to setup the rematch between those two. Love OC winning the belt and looking like he's at full strength again. That rematch between him and Moxley should main event a PPV or something with OC bringing up how Mox beat him when he was broken and tired. LOVED LOVED LOVED Hobbs squashing the shit out Jericho. That ruled. Of course, sadly, Miro is nowhere to be seen again. Wardlow isn't doing much for me and just seems like a better version of Ryback at this point. Happy Shida won. She's awesome. The main event though...eh....Old Man Adam barely escaping Luchasaurus isn't the best look. Speaking of things that aren't good looks, Copeland really has the stink of someone who only knows WWE on him. I almost think it would be better if he worked an old school style like Punk was doing to get over the little things, but instead it was just the same thing Edge has been doing since he returned. I like the guy a ton, I'm just not a fan of the style and was hoping to see something a bit different. The other thing that worries me is that he and Christian never seemed to be able to have a great match against each other. It's possible my memory is poor and it's Edge and Matt Hardy who couldn't have great singles matches against each other, but I swear it was he and Christian. Then again, their last match against each other was forever ago.

[Craig H]

Just now, Raziel said:

The theory behind it is that it makes your hand heavier, and a heavier hand deals more damage/more likely to KO.  

I mean, yeah, I get that. It's just that if anyone has held a roll of quarters, it's not that heavy and they already hype up Juice having one of the hardest left hand punches in wrestling. It's a nitpick.

[odessasteps]

It’s also a good visual when you punch the guy and the roll explodes and the quarters/dimes go everywhere. I think Tully won a belt in JCP using them. 

[Cobra Commander]

At least a roll of coins is somewhat legit since it’s what fucked up the Dynamite Kid’s mouth when Jacques Rougeau had enough of Kid. So it has that going on all the other cases of pro wrestling physics.

[Go2Sleep]

The inability to be subtle made the quarters thing worse than it should have been. Everyone knows Juice uses the roll of quarters as his weapon of choice, and everyone knows about Max's antisemitic bullying story centering around quarters. Anyone who needed to get the angle would've gotten it.  Writing FRIEDMAN on the roll of quarters and zooming in on it makes things look a lot worse to a casual viewer. I don't think there was any ill intent, but much like the misogynistic lines that Caster slips in his raps, sometimes creative freedom still needs some oversight. Hopefully there won't be much more to this than Juice trying to grab the quarters in the match, then immediately getting blasted by the diamond ring and otherwise beaten handily. Keep the focus on the main event with Jay which is the big program here.

[Cobra Commander]

Don’t worry, the quarters thing has made TMZ

[Godfrey]

Also Samoa Joe's vignette that he's gunning for the world title as if he didn't just earn and then lose a world title match is confusing

[Greggulator]

It sorta feels like AEW is run by children. That’s shocking. We haven’t heard any stories about poor management leading to something completely preventable creating chaos in the company before. 

Obviously this is not on the same scale as an angle touching on anti-Semitism a few days after what happened in Israel occurred.  

But a babyface Stat once told Layla Hersch something like “no wonder your parents gave you up” since Hersch is adopted.

My son is adopted. Like… there is no worse shit you can say to an adopted child than that. It’s such a friggin’ cruel thing to say and it’s guaranteed that at some point in my little dude’s life it’s something we will have to confront. 

I would be pissed off at it if it came up at all. But it is especially misguided when it comes from a face. My son also is starting to really love wrestling. If he was just a few years older and saw that unfold it would be really messed up. 

It’s nutty because AEW has done some really good things with Anthony Bowens and LGBT issues. But they haven’t used his sexuality as an angle (at least from what I remember.) 

The wrestling industry should really stay away from working angles that touch on current events or social issues. The people in the industry don’t understand things like context. The performers aren’t strong enough with acting chops to pull things like “nuance” off. Just do what you can do and keep it with that.

It’s the same stuff whenever the WWE was trying to do the evil Middle Easterner with what’s his name in the 00s. And as much as as I like Mustafa Ali, he was trying to do some edgy political stuff and man I am so glad they told him “nah” about that because it would not go well at all, even with the best intentions.

And I say all of this as someone who was a comedian for a really long time. I don’t fly the PC flag. But I have common sense and live in the real world. 

Just don’t do this stuff.

[Cobra Commander]

Cornette trying to figure out how to balance the involvement of AEW people he dislikes with the involvement of AEW people he likes with the whole personal issues mantra of southern wrestling (Brian Last hates it though for some reasons that are probably obvious or easy to figure out)

[Log]

Yeah, there's a fine line you have to walk when you give your performers more freedom to do their own stuff.

I feel like there's a good middle-ground between how Vince ran things and how Tony's running things. I'm not a fan of overly-scripted stuff, but there needs to be an editor there to weed out stuff like the quarter thing that's just better off not to do.

[Curt McGirt]

3 hours ago, The Natural said:

Cue him and HOOK signing a match, him laying down and Hook taking the belt off him for free

2 hours ago, Craig H said:

wrestlers are fucking stupid

From the Discord, Re: Juice: "I'd bet you $10000 he couldn't point out Israel on a map if you gave him 10000 chances."

Asking for wrestling to be anything less than utterly crass is the easiest request to lose on the planet and arguing against it is utterly fruitless. Everything considered, this is the best we're gonna get.

[Cobra Commander]

“This heel is too stupid to realize he’s being antisemitic” might be true for Juice. But I can understand why that isn’t a good defense.

[HarryArchieGus]

Glad to see the pushback on this pathetic anti Semitic try for heat. During Dynamite, my partner and her sister were on the phone with relatives in Israel who were rushing around earlier to get their children out of the area of attack. Fuck you Max, Juice, Tony and all involved.

[Greggulator]

Wrestling is the only fictional television program that lets its performers go by without a script and does so live. Man, what could go wrong?

Maybe wrestlers should learn to develop scripted lines better. 

[Shartnado]

3 hours ago, The Natural said:

Only fourth singles match from what I've searched:

AEW Collison, 14th October 2024.

I'm interested to hear what kind of magic you used to search this one?!?

[Matt D]

I've thought a lot about what actually gets heat in 2023, and especially in AEW. I agree that they should avoid current events for the most part. The promotion is based around the idea of "friendship." The entire MJF/Cole thing is friendship-based. The Elite storylines tend to all be based around that, certainly all of the Hangman stuff. They beat the BCC in Blood and Guts because they were friends and the BCC had brought in "enemies of an enemy" to team with.  Christian Cage is even a bigger heel that he was a few weeks ago because he's outright turning his back on it. A lot of Eddie Kingston's stuff is based around it. You get respect. You get family, to a degree. Most of it is based around friendship and what gets heat, even more than the idea of disparaging pro wrestling is to attack the idea of friendship. 

[Cobra Commander]

Some of the “personal issues make money” thing might tell you that personal issues don’t totally overlap with current events

[JLowe]

MJF using the anti-Semitism he experience growing up as part of his angles in the past is something I mentioned not being a fan of. Sometimes he used it as part of his villain origin story. Sometimes, he used it to garner sympathy as part of a build to cheat/betray the fans. I called it out then as something that could go bad.

When Juice kept emphatically referring to him as "Friedman", I thought something was weird. And then it went there. I wouldn't like it regardless of the situation. I especially don't like it given what just happened.

I also don't think the feud/angle needed it.

[Cobra Commander]

Now if this was a real world dispute, Juice’s next step would probably involve finding all the Jewish people who he’s friendly with to vouch for him. Obviously this wouldn’t make anything better but no shortage of actual bad people find the nearest human shields to hide behind.

MJF storming off instead of storming in and having to be restrained is sorta different than how some would book their “line pushing” angle

[Technico Support]

1 hour ago, odessasteps said:

It’s also a good visual when you punch the guy and the roll explodes and the quarters/dimes go everywhere. I think Tully won a belt in JCP using them. 

Yep, it was the finish to the first blood match at Starrcade 86.  Fun psychology in the match as Dusty bloodied JJ with the Bionic Elbow right at the start, teaching us that Tully had to avoid it at all costs.  The only drawback was that, since JJ played into the finish, he had to hang out and manage Tully for the rest of the match with a bloody face.

[Zakk_Sabbath]

2 minutes ago, Cobra Commander said:

MJF storming off instead of storming in and having to be restrained is sorta different than how some would book their “line pushing” angle

I thought that was maybe the lone bright spot of that otherwise ill-advised segment - the MJF of the past wouldn't have done the 'right thing' of not allowing the bullies to provoke him, and instead he goes to call his buddy Adam for positive reinforcement, politely declines Renee's interview instead of blowing up on her... I completely understand what they were going for in terms of character development with him showing self-restraint in the face of the quarters as a 'trigger' - think Marty McFly getting called 'chicken' - but this was in no way the time. Just too hot right now, and as Gregg and others have said, the nuance just got totally lost. Swing and a miss.

[odessasteps]

If it was Vince booking, we'd prob be getting the debuting Mustafa Ali as a pro-Palestine heel this week. 

[JLowe]

7 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

If it was Vince booking, we'd prob be getting the debuting Mustafa Ali as a pro-Palestine heel this week. 

I almost added "at least they didn't have it be an Arab/Muslim"

[Matt D]

I can theorize a lot of things here.

Also, look, I'm not going to say that I'm the only person on the board that has actually had change tossed at him in elementary school, but I am someone on the board who has experienced this sort of thing in fourth grade as the only Jewish kid in a very Irish town. That doesn't give me any sort of superior perspective or anything. It's actually not part of my origin story. But let me try to work through this:

1. MJF was acutely aware of criticism from last week with tofu and taint and everything else. He got clobbered by it. He posted about it.
2. The wrestlers in AEW have a lot of creative control on their own material, especially top guys.
3. MJF almost certainly wanted to go back to something primal and real and focused as a way to deal with the criticism. There are 3-4 core things about him that he goes to a lot. This is one. It's not that deep a well to draw from actually and he maybe pulls too much from real life instead of making some modern myths like someone like Dusty might. This is something real to him and he sees it as a way to overcome an oppressor like an 80s babyface would.
4. Juice having used the quarters for years gave him an "in" that he could play upon to try to go for something more primal than "tofu/taint." There's logic to it.
5. The idea was bad in the first place. The first half of his promo ending with the mirror comment stood well enough on its own. Juice going for the ring to take everything else MJF cared about away from him stands well on its own.
6. The timing was inexcusably terrible. What we don't know about the timing (especially going back to point 1, actually) is how long in advance MJF had Thursday's event in the works. 
7. Khan was probably hyperfocused on the one-day feud with WWE on his birthday and probably didn't think it all the way through as an editor.

Still a while to the PPV but they should close this out next week and move on to other story beats, such as MJF/Acclaimed vs BCG. I'd say they should be extra sensitive there but between ass boys and Caster's raps and whatever else, it's going to go places regardless.

[Cobra Commander]

I'm sure there'll be someone somewhere noting "the heels said all sorts of awful things about ethnic babyfaces in the 70s/80s"... which might be overlooking that it was the 70s/80s

MJF's "I was a real shithead but i'm trying hard" thing is one thing to bounce heel taunts off of. I suspect the path is gonna be more "MJF, hero of the people" than MJF being provoked into bringing the 'old' MJF back and using it to crush the bullies