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AEW R-Evolution II - 3/7/2021


Dolfan in NYC

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I always think back to the last Dynamite of 2019, with a really, really, really shitty Dark Order attacking all of the babyfaces. The awful reaction that received led to them pivoting away from that and re-realizing what the Dark Order is or should be. By pivoting away from that last Dynamite of 2019, we wound up with more than a few wonderful feuds and matches, the Stadium Stampede being one of them, but the Dark Order is now one of the most over acts.

That's why I'm not sweating this. Let's not pretend any of us are unfamiliar with disappointment when it comes to big wrestling angles. It happens all the time. What matters most is, did they learn from it.

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I watched most of the show yesterday. I have THOUGHTS.

The issue with the run in on the main event is that it makes Moxley look crazy in that he's trying to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Honestly if he didn't come up with a plan to combat The Good Brothers in a no DQ match when they just did that in the last no DQ match, he deserves his fate. I'm at a point with several angles where they need to end and this one needs to move away to something else. Not to fantasy book (but I'm totally doing it), but imagine if you will Archer and The Death Triangle run off the Good Brothers and they have Wight and Christian do the unannounced run in instead on the behalf of Callis. You move forward the Invisible Hand reaching into other promotions angle "opening another forbidden door", you unleash two big surprises when they aren't really expected, and you move Moxley out to a feud with Christian. You also keep Moxley from looking like a dope. None of the wrestlers can do anything about the pyro but they obviously got put in a really poor spot. 

The Street Fight and particularly Sting and Brian Cage (boy is going to be fun typing out first and last names all the time) exceeded my expectations. Cage came off like a BEAST in this production, projecting Big Physical Threat in a way he has problems doing in regular matches. He loomed. There's been lots of talk about the stair walk suplex, but throwing a tire at an extra and carrying Darby around like groceries was also pretty great. Hobbs and Hook's cameo was pretty great if you think of the ski mask as an affectation rather than a disguise. The bat flying around the building worked too. Well done!

Ladder match and tag team battle royal both suffered from too many people in there that people don't care about or wouldn't know. It's no way to debut someone to put them in a multiman, it almost always fails. They could have cut people out of both matches and it would have helped. The tag royal was probably 5 teams too deep with people with no shot of winning and it caused it to wear out its welcome. I feel like a broken record, but Marko Stunt is the worst babyface. For having such a deep tag team roster, they sure love putting over teams that aren't true units going all the way back to Page and Omega. I can't imagine anyone being invested Scorpio at this point, he's been MIA for months. 

Women's title match suffered from tonal shifts from doing headdrops on the ramp, to doing rope pull dances, to cocky heel kicks from the face champion, to whatever that corner chop exchange dance thing was. Using your PPV to this to set up a trios match is backwards and wrong.

Hardy and Page did well. Kept it under control and relatively simple until the now mandatory run ins.

I hope the Best Friends-Miro angle is over. It's been on way too long and the interest is gone.

Tag match highlighted a lot of Young Buck issues. Their heet and shine segments are terrible. No fire and no emotion in an angle where their dad got attacked. Miro worked with more rage and he was upset at his butler not giving notice. We also work in the indeBUCKtible cliche where they take a baseball shot and the rope piledriver and still kick out. The first Metzler driver attempt when Nick flipped himself into position for the Liontamer was ugly. I didn't like it.

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18 minutes ago, Zakk_Sabbath said:

AEW will be fine. I've touched on it before, but I think it's a little bit of PTSD from WWE being the only game in town for 20 years. Any misfire like this for a young company, you wonder if it's going to be the first of 1000 cuts 

I think this works both ways where people are very charitable to AEW because its not WWE. Honestly, AEW's booking can really suck and it gets disguised by a lot of signings and the wrestlers getting to work long matches. 

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Christian's on Renee's podcast today. He discussed being nervous coming out for this, and specifically mentioned the surprise being built up and taking on a life of its own as a contributing factor. The man gets it. 

From the way he was talking, it seems like a mortal lock he's working with Moxley at some point. Other names he specifically mentioned were Kenny, Darby, and MJF.

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I'm curious to see what they do with Christian.  I'm not crazy about signing him because it feels a little TNA of them to be snapping up all these ex WWE guys while they have this huge roster already.  I also think, at 47, he's definitely on the downside of his career.  But maybe being on the shelf so long, so his mileage is less than his age, will work out in his favor.  I'm giving it the benefit of a doubt, I guess.  But damn, please stop signing older ex WWE guys.

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9 minutes ago, Goodear said:

I think this works both ways where people are very charitable to AEW because its not WWE. Honestly, AEW's booking can really suck and it gets disguised by a lot of signings and the wrestlers getting to work long matches. 

It's definitely fine if you don't like the booking, cause that's a totally subjective matter of taste and I would never begrudge you that, but I'm talking about the technical snafu with the explosives. No amount of kick ass ring work can overcome something like that, it just needs to be learned from. 

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10 minutes ago, Goodear said:

I watched most of the show yesterday. I have THOUGHTS.

The issue with the run in on the main event is that it makes Moxley look crazy in that he's trying to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Honestly if he didn't come up with a plan to combat The Good Brothers in a no DQ match when they just did that in the last no DQ match, he deserves his fate. I'm at a point with several angles where they need to end and this one needs to move away to something else. Not to fantasy book (but I'm totally doing it), but imagine if you will Archer and The Death Triangle run off the Good Brothers and they have Wight and Christian do the unannounced run in instead on the behalf of Callis. You move forward the Invisible Hand reaching into other promotions angle "opening another forbidden door", you unleash two big surprises when they aren't really expected, and you move Moxley out to a feud with Christian. You also keep Moxley from looking like a dope. None of the wrestlers can do anything about the pyro but they obviously got put in a really poor spot. 

The Street Fight and particularly Sting and Brian Cage (boy is going to be fun typing out first and last names all the time) exceeded my expectations. Cage came off like a BEAST in this production, projecting Big Physical Threat in a way he has problems doing in regular matches. He loomed. There's been lots of talk about the stair walk suplex, but throwing a tire at an extra and carrying Darby around like groceries was also pretty great. Hobbs and Hook's cameo was pretty great if you think of the ski mask as an affectation rather than a disguise. The bat flying around the building worked too. Well done!

Ladder match and tag team battle royal both suffered from too many people in there that people don't care about or wouldn't know. It's no way to debut someone to put them in a multiman, it almost always fails. They could have cut people out of both matches and it would have helped. The tag royal was probably 5 teams too deep with people with no shot of winning and it caused it to wear out its welcome. I feel like a broken record, but Marko Stunt is the worst babyface. For having such a deep tag team roster, they sure love putting over teams that aren't true units going all the way back to Page and Omega. I can't imagine anyone being invested Scorpio at this point, he's been MIA for months. 

Women's title match suffered from tonal shifts from doing headdrops on the ramp, to doing rope pull dances, to cocky heel kicks from the face champion, to whatever that corner chop exchange dance thing was. Using your PPV to this to set up a trios match is backwards and wrong.

Hardy and Page did well. Kept it under control and relatively simple until the now mandatory run ins.

I hope the Best Friends-Miro angle is over. It's been on way too long and the interest is gone.

Tag match highlighted a lot of Young Buck issues. Their heet and shine segments are terrible. No fire and no emotion in an angle where their dad got attacked. Miro worked with more rage and he was upset at his butler not giving notice. We also work in the indeBUCKtible cliche where they take a baseball shot and the rope piledriver and still kick out. The first Metzler driver attempt when Nick flipped himself into position for the Liontamer was ugly. I didn't like it.

I don’t think the issue is Moxley not having an answer for the Good Brothers. His character is a lone wolf that basically threatened to jeopardize the career of anyone crazy to step in the ring with him because of how violent he is. 

And his only friend in the promotion, Eddie Kingston turned on him for a chance to win the title. That’s why if AEW had a more competent production team the ending would have been more impactful.

But for the match, he’s a lone wolf character that has no more friends left. 

The issue is that they had so much interference and fuckery in the other matches instead of protecting their main event. Which is a common problem in AEW.

AEW trying to remove the clip of the dud from the internet is kind of a bummer. Excalibur awkwardly reacting like a major explosion just happened instead of Cody’s pyro at half strength cracks me up.

Anyway, I don’t like death matches but feel really bad for Omega and Moxley for having to go through that only to have a post match screw up completely over shadow the match. 

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5 minutes ago, Bryan said:

AEW trying to remove the clip of the dud from the internet is kind of a bummer. 

A bummer for you, sure. From my perspective, it's straight up the funniest bit of this. They're so embarrassed they went from pretty much encouraging people to gif and clip whatever they like to aggressively enforcing copyright. Tasty stuff, that. 

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It’s not like this is the first time AEW/Warner/whoever has went after people on Twitter that were clipping and making gifs. It happened last year to a pretty prominent Twitter guy over something on Dynamite (maybe it was 2019 and the Dark Order thing? Can’t remember).

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17 minutes ago, Zakk_Sabbath said:

It's definitely fine if you don't like the booking, cause that's a totally subjective matter of taste and I would never begrudge you that, but I'm talking about the technical snafu with the explosives. No amount of kick ass ring work can overcome something like that, it just needs to be learned from. 

AEW has had numerous production issues though. They constantly had audio issues, I’ve lost count of the amount of times the camera has cut away from the in ring action when something big was clearly about to happen for a crowd shot or close up of a manager.

Instead of hiring former WWE wrestlers, I think Tony Khan should hire some of the WWE production people (anyone except Kevin Dunn). There product is obviously garbage but their presentations have always been good.

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7 minutes ago, Bryan said:

AEW has had numerous production issues though. They constantly had audio issues, I’ve lost count of the amount of times the camera has cut away from the in ring action when something big was clearly about to happen for a crowd shot or close up of a manager.

Instead of hiring former WWE wrestlers, I think Tony Khan should hire some of the WWE production people (anyone except Kevin Dunn). There product is obviously garbage but their presentations have always been good.

I'm pretty sure WWE has as much, if not more production snafus/missed camera shots as AEW. Plus AEW doesn't do that shakey camera bs.

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WWE plans every match down to the move to make sure they know exactly what's going to happen in the ring and exactly when so they know how to shoot it.  There are no surprises for production staff.  Shit, that's not even wrestling.  Unless AEW changes to that style, which would be the dirt worst, I don't think hiring WWE production people would help them.  Maybe hiring NJPW people would help, since they're trained to shoot wrestling exactly like you shoot a sport, reacting as best they can to the action unfolding in front of them.

Edited by Technico Support
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On 3/8/2021 at 12:00 AM, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Do I now regret buying that shirt Kenny was wearing before the match was over? Maybe

It's good to remember that things could always be worse.

 

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To be honest they should have just had Omega/Bullet Club come out & point and laugh hysterically when the timid explosion went up. The true thoroughbred athlete Omega infantilising Moxley's hardcore fetish by constructing a gun that shoots a paper flag out of it. A sort of "final joke" as it were. Pretend it was intentional & that there was no kick for Moxley at the end of the rainbow even had he won.

Edited by A_K
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1 hour ago, Goodear said:

Tag match highlighted a lot of Young Buck issues. Their heet and shine segments are terrible. No fire and no emotion in an angle where their dad got attacked. Miro worked with more rage and he was upset at his butler not giving notice.

The match started with the Bucks showing fire, running at Jericho and MJF and pummeling them.  It moved to the outside, where Jericho and MJF took the advantage.  Bucks realized it's not a good idea in the long run to just try and run at opponents like that, especially when they don't have a size advantage, so they got back in the ring and went back to their usual offense.  Made complete sense to me.

(You can infer by me removing the rest of your post that I agreed with everything else)

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4 hours ago, Zakk_Sabbath said:

I wonder if they originally planned to have the deathmatch in TIAA and the NFL said "Uh, no?" Maybe the fire marshal limited what they could do in there? FWIW, Dailys Place has a fabric ceiling. Maybe the concern was anything larger could have gotten really bad, really quick... Just trying to make sense of this thing for the last three days

The stadium was setup for a monster truck rally on Sunday afternoon, which I'm sure was scheduled well before AEW decided on the date.

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