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BomberPat

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Everything posted by BomberPat

  1. that's generally more of a CMLL trope than it is a AAA one. It's born of Lucha trios matches historically being two out of three falls, or "captain's fall", where you win by either beating the team captain once, or beating both other members of a team, and quite often rather than actually bothering to go to all three falls, they'll just get a visual win over everyone all at once, which doesn't make much sense, but it's a trope that's been around for decades - you see it happen in the old El Santo and Blue Demon movies, even.
  2. it's atrocious. The only appeal Nic Nemeth has at this stage is to see him outside of a WWE environment with fresh opponents, not rehashing a match we were already sick of in WWE ten years ago, and with Alberto thoroughly checked out and the worst he's ever been. Even aside from everything he's alleged to have done out of the ring, he's shit. When Konnan brought him back, he said in an interview that he was basically giving him one shot at redeeming himself. If that were the case, he should have been gone after AAA's Lucha World Cup in 2022, because he utterly shat the bed in that one. Carlito was wrestling on the other team, never removed his shirt or took a bump, and Alberto looked ten times more washed up and disengaged than he did. He managed to have a bad trios match despite teaming with El Hijo del Vikingo and Psycho Clown, a wrestler who that same year managed to have a passable match with El Canek, a man so old that he has a tag team match with Ivan Koloff on his record, once bodyslammed Andre The Giant, and holds a World Title victory over Lou Thesz. The whole card is an uninspired, in places outright deranged, mess. AAA's big shows tend to be a clusterfuck, but there's always at least one match that's guaranteed to be an exciting mess of high spots, and I don't see that here. There's no Vikingo, no Komander, no Lucha Bros, and the only others that could step up to that level are Octagon Jr and Laredo Kid, and they're not exactly booked in a match that's likely to be a frantic spotfest. I love knackered old luchadores, so I should be all in for the 90s nostalgia, but looking at that card just makes me feel tired.
  3. I tried to find the old thread, and looks like it was maybe closed, or otherwise just long dead. AAA have announced the first of three Triplemania cards for this year - for the uninitiated, Triplemania is their big Wrestlemania-like show, at least in theory. Since 2022, they've split it across three events over the course of the year - one in Tijuana, one in Monterrey, and one in Mexico City - with an overarching theme or tournament; in 2022 it was a "Reverse Mask Tournament", where the losers advanced to the next round, culminating in a Mask vs. Mask match at the Mexico City show (if you saw photos of Pentagon Jr. soaked in blood holding Villano IV's mask, that's where that comes from), and last year's was a similar gimmick of tag teams of rivals where losers progressed into a mask/hair match in the final (though that was one fucked around by Rush playing politics, so the final ended up as a four-way). This year's theme is "Origenes" - effectively a '90s nostalgia gimmick, bringing in a bunch of old names from that era. Given how often AAA brings old-timers in for major spots, it's not that clear how much different this is than anything else they do. There's no tournament or through-thread beyond that, so it's likely to be even more of a mess than the last couple of years. El Hijo del Vikingo is currently out injured long-term, so has had to vacate the Mega Championship, after a record-setting 833 day reign. During that time, he had no meaningful feuds, very few memorable matches beyond the kind of moves that would have been GIFed and gone viral even if he were in an opening match, and now had to vacate without losing the belt. So the title is now vacant, and will be on the line in the main event of Triplemania between Nic Nemeth and Alberto del Patron. Alberto is semi-regular with AAA now, but is not good. Nemeth is a guest, and likely won't show up again - if he wins, he might pop back in to drop it at a future show. The match was overdone and stale ten years ago, and I doubt it will attract much more attention from an international audience (which is usually the point of bringing in big US names to these shows, rather than appealing to the live crowd), to whom Alberto is more or less a non-entity now, and Nemeth can be seen in more potentially interesting matches in TNA, NJPW, and on the indies. The only positive here for AAA is that circa 2011 is when WWE TV was arguably at its hottest in Mexico with Del Rio on top, and Ziggler as a recurring opponent, so they might be hoping they can do something with that. Here's the whole card: Vampiro was in the worst match I saw last year at a Triplemania, and one of the most illogically booked matches at another Triplemania. He has since quit and returned to AAA, and is now on a "retirement tour", with the largest possible air quotes. Latin Lover is in his corner - they set up a match pitting Lover and Vamp against Jeff Jarrett and someone in 2022, it never happened. He's teaming with Pagano, who has been his on-again off-again partner, rival, protegé for the last couple of years, and none of it makes sense. Psycho Clown is one of AAA's biggest stars, but they have utterly run out of ideas for what to do with him. He and Sam Adonis blew off their long-lasting feud in the hair vs. mask final of last year's Triplemania, and to thank them - and Sam especially - for going through with that, for Sam losing his hair, and putting up with the Lucha politicking of Rush and L.A. Park that led in and out of that match, they're just in a meaningless "US vs. Mexico" match. Negro Casas was a huge signing when he jumped ship from CMLL to AAA; he was seen as a CMLL lifer. The tide has turned completely the other way since then, and AAA is losing talent constantly. He allegedly jumped ship because he wanted to team with his family (including Psycho Clown), and do intergender matches alongside his wife Dalys, which wasn't an option in CMLL. He's not really been treated as a major star in AAA, and has largely been an odd fit for their style of Lucha. For the most part he was feuding with Nicho el Millionaro, the original Psicosis, and while he has tagged with Psycho Clown, it's been on lesser shows, never Triplemania. The surprise partners here are unlikely to be anyone of note - it was implied that they might be relatives of Casas and Wagner, which gives quite a few options, but it will likely be whoever happens to be available. The last time Dr Wagner Jr showed up at Triplemania, it was him and Andrade El Idolo assaulting Psycho Clown in 2022, and that got no follow-up and he just randomly showed up again last month. I expect this is aiming for a Wagner/Casas family feud leading through the three shows, but I'll be amazed if Dr Wagner Jr makes all of his bookings.
  4. I assume that there’s some governing body setting that limit, as most betting sites have a £10 minimum withdrawal. Just means when you win smaller amounts you end up gambling them in the hope to turn them into something bigger, rather than letting them accumulate over time, because it turns out gamblers don't have great long-term planning ability or impulse control.
  5. Not the easiest thing in the world to follow, but Luchablog uploads clipped matches from most of AAA and CMLL's TV content around a week after it airs, as well as a lot of indie stuff: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1ebraR2AUOoo6hqmjXyrVEVs-oOFHJ_1P AAA upload some, but not all, shows on their YouTube channel, and their bigger shows (Triplemania, Rey de Reyes, Lucha World Cup) are on Fite/TrillerTV. If CMLL live stream, it's generally behind a paywall on their YouTube. It's worth following Luchablog on Twitter, as he tends to post about when and where and how to catch the bigger shows. I'd like to watch more CMLL, they're on a hot streak (especially compared to AAA), and have some incredible talent. I just don't have the time, and even as a bit of a Lucha nerd, I find some parts of their shows pretty difficult to get into/
  6. This is Roger. Not a single thought in his head. Complete idiot of an animal.
  7. 10 points - Final Fantasy VII 9 - The Secret Of Monkey Island 8 - Metal Gear Solid 7 - Red Dead Redemption 2 6 - Starcraft 5 - Dungeon Keeper 4 - Super Mario Galaxy 2 3 - Chrono Trigger 2 - Age of Empires 2 1 - Streets Of Rage 2
  8. On a regular basis, not counting stuff I go to live, mostly just AEW. I watch Dynamite every week, and dip in and out of Rampage and Collision when they look worth watching. I keep tabs on other things - will watch the bigger AAA shows, and GCW when they book something interesting, though I struggle to keep on top of anything else. Sometimes dip into NJPW or the bigger WWE PPVs, but I rarely come out of a WWE show feeling like I got my money's worth.
  9. That he followed it up with a "....BUT I DIDN'T" in the style of Athletico Mince's Lenny Biscuits made it even better.
  10. AJ vs. LA just feels a bit cobbled together, a real "and who have we got left?" affair in the style of Kurt Angle vs. Kane at 'Mania 18. Before that, I assumed the direction was going to be a US Title clusterfuck with everyone Logan Paul had cheated or screwed over getting a shot at him - LA Knight, Kevin Owens, Randy Orton, probably throw AJ in there too, just a more blatant "get everyone on the card" affair, but one that at least feels like a 'Mania match.
  11. There's usually decent stuff on there, but the whole card drags. Suzuki vs. Barnett was my favourite match all year, whatever year it was they did that - Barnett has carved out a niche for himself, where he's much better and has more of an aura than he ever did when he was more of a regular wrestler. In terms of AEW talent making the show, I don't know if Moxley will be on there this year as AEW seem to have cut back on the number of indie dates he's permitted to work, but Barnett will be wrestling Johnny TV.
  12. there are people in WWE who I know for a fact were offered more money by AEW. That doesn't mean I think the figure getting floated around for Mercedes is correct - that puts her on Brock Lesnar money, and more than Cena's reported salary, which would be bonkers. Thing is, WWE sells wrestlers on opportunity - yes, you might get less base pay than WCW, but with all the royalties and other perks on there, and the possibility that one day you might break through to genuine mega-star status, is usually enough to get people to sign on the dotted line, especially if they've always grown up dreaming of working for WWE. What we're seeing with the big signings that AEW have made is Mercedes Moné, who has been there and done that in terms of WWE, Okada who seems far more concerned about how he's presented and how respectfully he's treated than about whether WWE can offer him a Wrestlemania main event and an action figure, and Ospreay who never really had that "always wanting to be a WWE superstar" childhood dream; his inspirations were in TNA, or in Japan, and while I can see him ending up in WWE one day, he was never going to sign a mark deal because a little kid inside him always imagined himself wrestling on Monday Night RAW. Obviously it doesn't hurt that they've all got seemingly great agents - Barry Bloom for Ospreay and Okada, and UTA for Mercedes.
  13. True, but I think it's also an accepted part of the job that Witchell or whoever the Royal Correspondent may be is a given, whether you like it or not. I get the impression Charles finds a lot of the actual business of being King quite tedious, but it's what he's been prepared for his entire life and he has to do it. Whereas there's a sea-change with Harry choosing to opt out of "Royal" life, and the relationship between William and the press isn't one of utilising soft power, but the fairly heavy-handed application of super-injunctions - as @Keith Houchen said, I think there's something to the timing of suddenly getting all these press profiles of the Marchioness of Chomondeley, but rather than seeing it as a "soft launch" as a potential new partner, I think it's more the press warning William & Kate of what's waiting for them if they don't play ball. Aside from all that, I wouldn't be surprised if William, Kate, or any of the younger Royals have burner accounts and sock puppets on social media through which they are able to navigate the world relatively free from the trappings and conventions of their role. That takes a lot of control and power away from the press. All of this is me just having a reckon, I neither know nor particularly care about any of this!
  14. it looks to me like Sami getting slotted in here is similar to Daniel Bryan being added to Edge vs. Roman Reigns when that story wasn't going well - WWE thought "well, people love this guy" and saw crowbarring him into the story as a quick fix, but a decent sized chunk of the audience almost turned on him over it because they saw "getting added to Triple Threat matches" as becoming Daniel Bryan's schtick, at the expense of the person they felt "earned it". You can't be the babyface underdog if you're getting handed opportunities. From WWE's perspective, I'm guessing they saw Chad Gable as a dependable sympathetic babyface to get heat on, for Sami to step up in time for the actual match. It's a shame, because while I think Sami and Gunther will have a phenomenal match, I think the great Wrestlemania visual in that match would have been Chad Gable hitting the Chaos Theory on Gunther.
  15. I think this isn't far from the truth - the media don't have the access to the Royals that they want/expect, and they're banging the drum about Kate here while it's a non-story to give them a taste of how hard they could go if there's something worth reporting, all in the hope that it forces them to play ball. It's a younger generation of Royals who don't solely interact with the outside world through press releases and Nicholas Witchell. I doubt there's any real story behind the Kate photo, and some of the ways it has been "Photoshopped" could easily have been an automatic compositing and tidying up of multiple shots, rather than any active manipulation, but making the photo the centrepiece of all of this fuss is a good way for the media to fire a warning shot about not trying to sneak anything past them. What's funny is that the Twitter detectives and conspiracy sleuths aren't satisfied that the photo has been edited weirdly around one of the kids' wrists, or the obvious little things like that, and are trying to argue that Kate's face has been shopped in from a Vogue cover, and making it a much bigger deal. The longer it goes on, the more deranged the explanations will become, when if they had just released the original, unedited photo when asked, at least some of that would be nipped in the bud.
  16. He sounds like he’s been smoking twenty a day since I last spoke to him then, it's the weird gruffness he puts on when he's trying to be serious that stands out as forced.
  17. I think Wardlow vs. Joe was a perfectly fine TV match for the spot it had on the card, and equally that there's a reason why it was booked in that slot and on this show, and that's because Wardlow just isn't good enough to perform at a main event level yet, when you compare that match to pretty much every other AEW World Title match. I was surprised they had him lose clean, though, because the Undisputed Kingdom's momentum is just absolutely in the toilet now with MJF out, Cole injured, the Bang Bang Scissor Gang feud getting abandoned, no follow-up on Roderick Strong as International Champion, Taven and Bennett being Taven and Bennett, and now going to the all-too familiar well of inter-faction intrigue with Kyle O'Reilly. I'm still not completely sold on Ospreay as a promo, because I can't help notice the extent to which he's putting on a voice and playing up the bruvs and Essex-isms (claiming that the Tiger Driver '91 dropped Kenny Omega "on his knockers" being a particularly egregious bit of bollocks), but that was the most I've genuinely believed what he's saying in a promo so far.
  18. BomberPat

    Pride

    Very much so. You can have legitimate discussions or debates on trans athletes in sport, but I'm not inclined to take it very seriously when you never express any other interest in women's sports that isn't an excuse to further attack trans people, particularly when every other Tweet on your timeline is about attacking trans women too. Similar to how JK Rowling as a supposed champion of "women's rights" never finds the time to publicly express a statement on, for example, abortion rights being under threat in America, but Tweets multiple times a week on transphobia, which makes you think that her priorities are probably more about attacking trans people than they are about defending women in general. If you are setting yourself up as someone who cares about the sanctity of women's sports but have nothing to say about, for example, Gymnasts for Change, the abuse of young women in Indian wrestling by men at the highest levels of government, and never showing any interest in any individual games or matches, but losing your shit every time a trans women comes 138th in a marathon, I'm going to come to the quite reasonable conclusion that it's not about women's sports. On top of that, there was a Canadian meta-study last year looking at data from between 2011 and 2021 that showed that either trans athletes on average have no biomedical advantage over cisgender athletes, or that the data isn't conclusive enough to show that they do, that many of the justifications for excluding trans athletes are unscientific and inconsistent, and that trans athletes are sufficiently under-represented in the higher echelons of sport that the idea that people are "pretending" to transition just in order to win at women's sports is a complete fallacy. One of the big talking points from people opposed to trans women in sport was Laurel Hubbard, the weightlifter who competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics - she finished last in her category, with 13 (presumably) cisgender women outscoring her, but she's still held up as a scare story robbing a spot from other women. She's not used as an example because she's winning, but because as a weightlifter she has a physique and look that can be easily shared on social media as "mannish" and "unfeminine" and get people riled up about "men in women's sports" - the victims of that aren't just trans women, but any woman who doesn't fit a narrow category of what a woman "should" look like, and long predates the present moral panic about trans women in sports; Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand most recently for how intersex athletes have been caught up in all this, but there were female sprinters in the 1936 Olympics accused of being secretly men, and jokes about young female Soviet gymnasts actually being older men were everywhere in the '80s and '90s, to a far greater degree than anyone expressing concerns over those gymnasts being subjected to physical and sexual abuse. We're wrestling fans, we all saw how much Chyna was ridiculed as a "man" when she debuted in the WWF, or how Joey Styles called a low blow on Nicole Bass as being hit "in the balls". If a female athlete reaches any prominence at all, while not looking like a narrow, stereotypical ideal of what a female athlete should look like, or if they achieve at a higher level than their male counterparts are comfortable with, they're attacked as men, and there's a long and horrible history of them being subject to invasive and insulting tests to "prove" that they're women, and being abused and insulted in the press too. Outside of sports, it's the bathroom policing thing - I know of at least two cis women who have mentioned to me that a woman in the bathroom had complimented them on how well they were "passing", because they were over six feet tall, so had been read as a trans woman. But they weren't trans, and being over six feet tall might be unusual for a woman but still falls well within normal cis female biology, so it was just a judgement based on policing what a woman is supposed to look like - and it's just a matter of luck that, having been read as trans, that interaction was a positive one and not something worse. It's the flip side of the coin to policing trans women based on unclear data, prejudice and incomplete and inconclusive ideals of what constitutes a biomedical signifier of "sex" - to use one simple example, the primary method of deciding in which gender category someone should compete at the Olympics is checking testosterone levels, but that's not a cut and dry deciding factor - there's not insignificant crossover between a woman with high testosterone and a man with low testosterone, yet high testosterone doesn't make that woman a man any more than low testosterone makes that man a woman; especially when you would expect a peak athlete to have different levels of testosterone than an average woman. And, of course, men are never tested for their testosterone levels as a matter of interrogating gender, and there's no restrictions on allowing trans men to compete as men in the Olympics, it's only trans women who are policed on those grounds. So apparently the integrity of sex-based competition only matters in one direction, and that direction just happens to be in correlation with the direction that most anti-trans policy in all other walks of life is pointing. I'm also just generally uncomfortable with the idea of policing this vague category of "biological" or "genetic" advantages in sport. If a male athlete naturally produces more testosterone than his opponents, we're not policing that, but by the logic used against trans athletes, is that not a biological advantage? If a basketball player stands over 7' tall, should they be restricted from playing the sport because their height is a "biological advantage" that might give them an advantage over shorter players? There are athletes like Michael Phelps, whose body produces less lactic acid than the average person, which is by definition a biological advantage, yet no one tried to police him out of the sport for it. Almost every peak athlete has a "biological advantage" of some kind or another, because that's how you end up being a peak athlete, yet it's a phrase we only use when wanting to restrict trans women's access to sports. The real disadvantages women face in sports are economic, social and cultural, not biological, yet I don't recall seeing JK Rowling or any of her followers express concern over the comparative lack of funding received by women's sports, lack of coverage in women's sports in the media, socio-cultural barriers to entry, nor about any of the abuse that happens to girls and young women in sports at the hands of cisgender men and women, which can't be blamed on those dastardly transes.
  19. BomberPat

    Pride

    there is definitely something uniquely rotten about transphobia, isn't there? Outside of your full-blown C18 nutters, most racists and homophobes and bigots of other stripes seem to at least have other interests, whereas TERFs just do nothing but Tweet about trans people and pretend that they care about women's sports while never expressing a single opinion about them when there isn't a trans woman involved, and just get involved in these little mutual appreciation societies where they reinforce each other's bullshit until they fall increasingly down far-right rabbit holes while still being utterly convinced that they represent the views of the majority of people, and that they're the rational, sensible ones. That's Linehan and Rowling that have both allowed transphobia to lead them into Holocaust denial. Full-on "are we the baddies?" behaviour.
  20. BomberPat

    Pride

    I do at times find the extent to which some choose to paint trans people as "the first victims" of the Nazis because of the Hirschfield Institute a little problematic; not because trans people didn't suffer, but it's become a kind of shibboleth, I've seen it suggested that we would be decades ahead in understanding trans issues and trans identities if that work hadn't been destroyed, and I'm not sure I agree with that. That's not to say that trans people, and work on transgender issues, weren't targeted by the Nazis, and weren't being worked on at Hirschfield, I am just wary of anything that involves projecting modern sex, orientation, and gender categories on to people in the past who would not necessarily have used those terms themselves. A lot of the work on sexuality at the time still saw homosexuality as akin to a third sex, and in Hirschfield's case as a matter of "sexual intermediacy", where a gay man was gay because they had a "female" sex drive. While Hirschfield did pioneering work with transvestites, as he called them, which absolutely shouldn't be overlooked, to be trans was largely seen as an extension of a "female" energy in a male, and as an extension of one's homosexuality. The Nazis' focus on attacking him and his institute was largely anti-gay and anti-sexual liberation more than explicitly anti-trans, and I think focusing on the attacks and book burnings as being a predecessor for trans hate today does risk exaggerating or distorting the truth. These are matters of academic disagreement, and the argument is one of differences by degree or by motivation, though, and that's not what Rowling is doing - she is essentially engaging in a form of Holocaust revisionism. If I had to guess, it's because it's almost entirely rooted in the TERF insistence that nobody ever knew anything about trans people until about 2006.
  21. I must have told this story a million times, but I was at college with a guy who's brother is now a wrestler. The three of somehow got onto the topic of whether or not wrestling was racist, with the guy's brother being adamant that it was. I brought up that the WWF had a voodoo witchdoctor, a pimp, and a black nationalist, and they were all the same guy as a mark in the "bit racist, innit?" column. The wrestler paused for a moment, and replied, "yeah, but they made Booker T a King".
  22. There would still be the matter of explaining why, after the events described in the lawsuit, and after the initial hush money scandal, Stephanie went out on TV and led a "Thank You Vince" chant in-between his stints with the company, though. It seems a lot easier to frame the situation as Stephanie trying to get out and put some distance between herself and the company (and her father) than as a principled stance against him. I have more sympathy for Stephanie McMahon (and to a lesser extent Triple H) than I do for other executives and whoever else has been either directly involved or complicit in all of this, because God knows how you process all of this happening within your immediate family, particularly when that family is also directly connected to the only job you've ever done and the only world you've ever known, and God knows what growing up in the household of Vince McMahon looked like in terms of establishing baselines of what acceptable behaviour even looks like.
  23. I started playing Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley on the Switch last night. It's a licensed Moomins game, so could easily have been rubbish, and was always going to be incredibly twee. Luckily, it's great - very straightforward so far, but it looks gorgeous, and has had some genuine laugh out loud moments, and the soundtrack is by Sigur Ros, so those are all ticks in the positive column. The premise is that Snufkin - a kind of wandering minstrel character, if you don't know the source material - is returning to Moominvalley in the Spring, expecting to see Moomintroll and everything to be back to normal, but instead everything has gone wrong, the river has dried up, Moomin is nowhere to be found, and there are fences and signs and hedges and well kept parks everywhere. This outrages Snufkin, so you have to spend the game getting rid of the parks to allow nature to return in its place. There are policemen and park wardens you have to avoid, so it's a bit of a stealth game, and you beat each park by removing all of the signs - with no signs telling them the rules, the policemen assume there's no rules to enforce and wander off. It's simple, but lovely stuff. I also recently finished Rollerdrome's super-hard New Game+ mode, and am very happy with it, and wish there was more content. I could go back and complete some of the challenges, but I find it hard to get motivated for that when it doesn't unlock me anything, I'm not a trophy-hunter. It's been one of my favourite new games I've played in a while, so I really hope there's a sequel, but it doesn't seem likely. Also slowly working my way through Secret of Mana, but, as good as it is, finding it hard to get motivated to go back and play more. Once I've finished that, it's either on to Legend of Mana, or finally biting the bullet and buying myself a PS5 for the new Final Fantasy 7.
  24. Alan Moore's a big fan of Moorcock, and Black Dossier is, even by his own standards, a self-indulgent chance to show off all of his influences, so that's not too surprising! I like a lot of the Elric stuff - very simple and straightforward fantasy, and there's a point in his most recent book where he bemoans that it gets a bit criticised now for just being a collection of "dark fantasy" tropes, by (not entirely incorrectly) saying that they weren't tropes yet when he was writing them. There's some decent graphic novel adaptations too - the story's simple enough and visual enough that it just works for that medium without really losing anything in translation. I haven't read Nomad Of Time, but that sounds great. The problem with him having so much is that a lot of it sounds interesting, but the idea of jumping into it is a nightmare. I've mentioned before that my local second-hand bookshop ended up with hundreds if not over a thousand old pulp sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks that they don't know what to do with, so I've ended up buying one or two every time I'm in, and there's usually a Moorcock or a Philip Jose Farmer in there, and as they're both absurdly prolific authors who are adjacent to a lot of stuff I like (mostly Alan Moore again, in fairness) I feel like I should be reading more of it. One of my best mates grew up in the '70s, and became a massive Michael Moorcock fan as a teenager, but then realised by the time he was in his mid-to-late 20s that he'd basically read nothing else. And he's still nowhere near having read all of it! As for current reading, I'm just finishing up a collection of Jeffrey Bernard's "Low Life" columns from The Spectator, after having seen Robert Bathurst play him in "Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell" recently. I first read an earlier edition when I was 18 or 19 or so, and a lot more easily taken in by the idea of being a career piss artist being somehow glamorous or noble. Re-reading it, it's still funny, though often pretty objectionable politically, but what stands out is how miserable it all seems. Still, it provided the catalyst to get me writing something that I've been bouncing around inside my head for a while, so that's something.
  25. I had assumed that Ospreay would be winning the World Title at All In, but timing-wise that's going to be pretty tight now - the next confirmed PPV is Dynasty in April, then Forbidden Door probably happens in June, and All In in August. If Swerve wins in April, that gives him maybe a four month reign before dropping it to Ospreay at All In, and that doesn't feel long enough for Swerve's first reign given everything building to it - and that's assuming the win comes then, and not later. Aside from the mess of changes between Moxley and Punk in 2022, it would be putting Swerve and Joe firmly at the low end of title reign length - I think Joe is more than established enough to survive that, but they don't want to look like they've dropped the ball with Swerve. There's also the weirdness that, in London, Swerve vs. Ospreay would be a face-vs-face match. AEW aren't particularly held back by the heel/face dynamic, but Swerve is a relatively recent face, and I don't think that should be someone you put up against a hometown hero. Ospreay would be better served against a top heel. Ospreay's signed for multiple years, so I think they can get away with not doing it this year. Last year's All In was a showcase match for him, next year could be a World Title win. What he needs this year is just a big match with some story behind it - if Anarchy In The Arena becomes a Wembley tradition, I can see Ospreay leaving the Don Callis Family to team with some other babyfaces against them and some hired guns, just let him be the centrepiece of the kind of big chaotic clusterfuck match that AEW do so well. Otherwise, there's the chance to do Ospreay vs. Okada on UK soil for the first time since 2015. In the unlikely event that Omega is back by then, they can do Ospreay/Omega for the first time in the UK, or have them team together for the first time ever. There could be all kinds of "dream matches" they manage to put together between now and then for him, it doesn't need to be a title match.
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