BomberPat

Kenny did an Undertale entrance in NJPW too, and is apparently matey with one of the developers. I've seen a few people raving about it on Twitter, and know a few people - some wrestlers - who absolutely loved it and are obsessed with the game. All people younger than me, so probably more in line with AEW's key demographic.

Personally, I know Undertale is a video game. That's literally the extent of my knowledge. So I wouldn't have known that's what he was doing, what the costume was, maybe would have guessed that the intro was just generic JRPG-influenced fluff, rather than a direct call-out to that game in particular. 

Mostly, I just feel like Kenny is a victim of the "let the talent tell their own stories" approach. He's trying to tell this sweeping narrative about a wrestler losing momentum, and having to go outside his comfort zone and unlock some new thing inside of him to come out on top, and being pushed to extreme violence by his opponent - but he doesn't have the acting chops to pull it off, the rest of the company barely seems to be following the story along with him, and it's a story that should be stretched out over months once the character is already established, not over a matter of weeks in a brand new company. Like you said, I don't know who this Kenny Omega is, other than a nerd who we're told is the best in the world, but who keeps losing when it counts.

Something I found interesting in how Omega has been presented was in his match with PAC, and to a lesser extent in previous matches, particularly against Jericho; the fundamental truth of his wrestling style was being treated as a negative. While The One-Winged Angel is extremely well protected, he rarely gets to the point of being able to hit in, because it relies on an elaborate sequence of set-ups to get there, and he keeps getting cut off. With a focused announce team, that's actually an interesting story, and something that fits the "sports-based presentation" angle - he has to change up his gameplan to be able to win more in AEW. But that only works if he actually changes.
Similarly, the feud with Moxley has been built around how Omega needs to "get serious" - but even in his choice of weapons, he's still joking around. And even when he's in big brawls with Moxley, he still takes a break to play a drum solo, to pose, to joke around - so he isn't getting serious at all, he's still the same guy.

4 minutes ago, Supremo said:

 him and Becky had anti-chemistry together.

This is a huge part of it for me. If it weren't for the fact they were booking him to go over Lesnar, I'd say there was a conscious attempt to emasculate Seth since he and Becky went public - and I'm still not entirely convinced this wasn't the case.

If I were to think of WWE as playing 4D Chess in this instance, rather than just winging it, I'd say that WWE don't want Becky Lynch to be seen as being in a relationship, either because it undermines her as a independent woman for female fans living vicariously through her, because it undermines her being seen as "available" to male fans, or because Vince is a lunatic with weird views on women and doesn't think that Seth and Becky being a couple is "believable", a la Rusev and Lana, or Vince thinks Seth is already inherently emasculated by dating a woman more over than he is. He thinks Seth is the Marc Mero to Becky's Sable.

So Seth has been booked to look like a pathetic loser, because on some level Vince already thinks that what he is. Because all of this terrible babyface booking is post-Wrestlemania, post-Seth and Becky being an item. Pre-Wrestlemania, he was winning the Rumble, beating Lesnar, and knocking about with The Shield, post-Wrestlemania, he became Becky Lynch's second banana, dropped the belt right back to Brock, dropped the tag belts to a first-time team of midcarders, all the nonsense with The Fiend, and so on.

I honestly wonder if they're consciously allowing him to crash and burn, in time for Roman Reigns to step back up to the plate in Wrestlemania season and be welcomed with open arms now he's not the primary object of the fans' disapproval.

There's a broader issue of top babyfaces in general, though, as a result of 20 years of booking the WWE itself as a heel company, exacerbated by CM Punk and Daniel Bryan's main event runs being defined by not being WWE's idea of what a top guy looks like, and Bryan's run in particular teaching the audience that if you don't like something, and make enough noise about it, WWE will change their plans, meaning that any top babyface is automatically, paradoxically positioned as a heel to a significant portion of the fanbase, because they're the "Corporate Champion" by default.

It would all have been worth it if that Rowan lookalike from a couple of months back was driving the forklift.

Is it "traditional Labour voters" that doubt Corbyn, or is that just a cooked up narrative - genuine question?

The most recent poll I remember seeing of Labour members, saw a decline in confidence since the last election, though was still mostly positive. I don't think I've ever really seen anything broken down by demographic, though.

Extremely anecdotally, but much of what I've seen from family and friends is that the older Labour members who had been turned off by Blair and New Labour have gravitated back to the party under Corbyn, because they see him as a return to the Labour values of their youth. I agree with David that reverting to the New Labour playbook would only serve to further alienate the "heartlands" where received wisdom is they've turned their back on Labour because they felt neglected by them.

Jeremy Corbyn is at his best as a campaign politician, and I feel Boris Johnson may well be at his weakest as a campaign politician on a national scale, so it's going to be interesting to say the least.

Barely even that. It's about signalling to the wider world that Saudi Arabia is "liberalising" and "open to business" as they try and prepare themselves for remaining an economic power in a post-oil economy, and they do that by selling the world footage of Saudi families enjoying western entertainment in their propaganda videos. 

Myles' apology on Instagram was, I believe, specifically for his (now deleted) Tweet directed at Jay Lethal and ROH, not for calling out the shirt.

As much as the cross-pollination of MMA and pro-wrestling is something that fascinates me, it really should be a one-way street. Furthering wrestling angles on MMA shows always looks corny as hell.

They're risking a lot by hedging Hager's credibility on his MMA record anyway. They keep putting him over as an unbeatable monster in the MMA world, but what happens when he gets knocked out in the first round, or taps out? It's such a risk to present one of your wrestlers as unbeatable based on their MMA record, when that record is completely out of your control. 

Unfortunately there's a significant portion of the voting public for whom Corbyn is more toxic than a No Deal Brexit. 

29 minutes ago, MVP RULZ said:

Smackdown lost the casual viewer as I did mention in my original post and your right the number of Die Hard fans might be lower then they anticipated

I think they should be worrying about wrestling fans instead, the Die Hard fans will do alright with Christmas coming up.

6 minutes ago, Michael_3165 said:

a communist who seems to have no clear Brexit plan.

Corbyn is not, by any rational metric, a "communist". 

Quote

He says the same shit over and over again every week on PMQs (NHS, food banks, poverty, inequality)

Yes, God forbid a political leader concern himself with such trivialities as the health, wellbeing and economic stability of the people of his country.

oh God, just realised we have Poppy Fascism season to get through before then anyway, so that'll be a perfect opportunity to rile up some "unpatriotic" slurs against Corbyn et al.

5 minutes ago, PowerButchi said:

I'm pretty sick of the ballot box tp be honest. I can see a shocxking turnout and a tory romp home.

This is what I'm expecting.

Labour really needs to mobilise the youth vote to have any chance of winning this, and I don't think the degree of youth interest in Corbyn last time around is something that can see lightning strike twice. Low turn-outs and a Tory win seem almost inevitable, short of significant scandal (does scandal even still matter?), major Brexit developments, or a very interesting election.

EDIT: Wrong thread, like an idiot.

I'm currently dividing my time between the Ace Attorney trilogy and Ni No Kuni 2. 

I never played the first Ni No Kuni, but watched my (then) girlfriend play bits of it, and it seemed charming enough if a bit simplistic. This one so far has been great fun, and has the exact right balance for an RPG of being able to play it reasonably well just by mindlessly button-bashing your way through fights, but if you want to get into the fine details, tweak things, and work on strategies, it looks like there's a ton of options there.

Story-wise it's all a bit generic, but has a sense of humour with it, and is bloody gorgeous. I prefer games that look like playable cartoons to attempts at photo-realism, but full of nothing but shades of grey and brown, any day. It seems almost absurdly ambitious, given that in addition to the main RPG gameplay there's also a (seemingly quite in-depth) city-building section, and strategy game "skirmish" sections. 

Win/loss records will become detrimental pretty quickly, unless they split into "seasons" and reset them at a certain time of year.

Say someone is booked as a jobber for three years, but then starts going on a winning streak. Saying, "he has a twenty match winning streak!" is impressive, but "he has 20 wins, but 80 losses" actually makes him look considerably worse than he's being booked, because the W/L record is presented without broader context.

17 hours ago, Jonny Vegas said:

I might be in the extreme minority here but for me if you look at that t-shirt and immediately your mind makes the immediate link to minstrels then I don't think thats very normal.

I don't think so at all. 

I showed it to two friends at the pub last night - both white, one in his mid-30s with an anthropology degree, the other in his mid-60s, a former teacher who grew up in Rhodesia. The latter took one look at it, with no broader context other than "it's a shirt for an African-American wrestler", and said, "fucking hell, it's like Tintin in the Congo".

8 hours ago, Richard said:

Look up bomberpat. Look up chest rockwell. Two of such well known forum members that i have slain with ease.

Sorry, who are you?

Ogogo also trained at the London School of Lucha Libre pretty extensively after his stint with the Knights.

Private Party remind me of the Young Bucks ten years ago - the talent is there, the gimmick is there, but it all needs fine tuning to make it actually work

I'm also generally not convinced by "WWE has sabotaged people who were over" - because, again, we don't have access to the same metrics that they do. I don't know who shifts the most merch, has the most social media engagement, sees the biggest increase in ratings or house show attendances when they're on the card, let alone who's moving even less publicly visible metrics for them, like who's turning up earliest to every show, who's prepared to learn Mandarin for their Chinese press conferences, who's fitting in the most public appearances and charity glad-handing, and so on.

One of the biggest shifts in recent years has been the make-up of the live audience, in my opinion; ticket prices have increased drastically over the years, to the point that I think the make-up of a TV taping crowd is completely different to what it would have been twenty years ago, even factoring in for the decline of WWE as a "hot ticket" event the way it would have been in the Attitude era. In a major market, good WWE TV or PPV tickets are prohibitively expensive (cursory glance tells me ringside tickets for an upcoming taping in Boston vary from $100 to $300, $30-40 in the cheap seats) - so you're not going to see many families of four forking out for wrestling tickets, despite years of attempting to pivot to a "PG" audience, which means you're not going to see the "casual" WWE fan in a TV audience. Your ringside seats, at $300 a pop, are the exclusive domain of the people either wealthy enough, or a big enough fan, to justify forking out for them.

So they're skewing the live TV audience towards people far more likely to be invested in rumours, in backstage gossip, and everything else that would make them more inclined to root for a Daniel Bryan over a Randy Orton, rather than what makes up the vast majority of WWE's actual viewing audience - people who watch it as a Monday night TV show, for a couple of hours, and barely give it a moment's thought once the TV is switched off. It wasn't that long ago that WWE fan surveys showed that the overwhelming majority of WWE viewers couldn't name a single other wrestling promotion.

What that means is that we watch TV, and see everyone boo John Cena or Roman Reigns. Then we go online, and see everyone say that they hate John Cena, or they hate Roman Reigns. And it creates a perception of WWE stubbornly plowing on without regard to the fans' wishes, clearly doomed for failure as they put all their stock behind someone no one likes. But then, the person "no one likes" sells a shit-ton of merch, draws viewers, sells PPVs, and so on, and we can't square that circle. Because we're all in the bubble, and we still only see things from the perspective of probably less than 10% of the WWE's total audience.

Not that I think WWE don't carry on stubbornly without listening to the fans - they absolutely do, but they pick and choose which fans to listen to. And, by and large, they listen to the ones spending money. And, again, it's only when someone forces their hand that they do something different - and at the moment, Vince's "forced hand" move seems to be to rely on Brock Lesnar, or Triple H, or The Undertaker - but is that so different to him bringing Warrior back in '96, before having to try something new? If Vince had access to Hulk Hogan in '95/'96/'97, do you think he'd have been wasting his time trying to seriously push anyone else, or would he just go back to the well again?

30 minutes ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

Unless I've misunderstood I would argue that is one of the things that he used to be best at.
I would argue that Vince's 'eye for talent' is actually not as good as some may think - we've all heard the stories that he didn't think Foley or Austin were worth a shit at first, that he was going to fire John Cena because he couldn't see anything in him and could not see the appeal of CM Punk and Daniel Bryan for the longest time - and that what he was good at was going with the tide when it changed and helping make them into stars.
 

Perhaps, but I tend to think of Vince as like the old adage about America, "can always be relied upon to do the right thing, after exhausting all other options".

As much as Cena had a stint teaming with Billy Kidman, even before the rapper gimmick he debuted against Kurt Angle, feuded with Chris Jericho and was positioned as part of a clear "this is the future of the brand" babyface group alongside Edge and Rey Mysterio. If there was a period in Cena's career where Vince wasn't trying to get him over, it can't have been for more than a couple of months in late 2002; by 2003 he was fighting Brock Lesnar and The Undertaker, and being very clearly positioned as a top star in the making.

Similarly with CM Punk - putting aside the weirdness of the ECW brand, he was a featured part of WWE TV from the moment he made it on to one of the "main" brands, multiple time holder of just about every title there is, consistently pushed and given near unprecedented creative freedom for the time period. The idea that Punk was ever held down or unappreciated just doesn't really ring true with how he was actually booked.

Going back to only making people stars once he had no choice - WWE like to condense history into key moments, and one of the big ones is "Steve Austin did the 'Austin 3:16' promo at King Of The Ring, and became a mega-star". But we all know Austin was, at best, the second choice to win that tournament. The next PPV he was in the midcard against Marc Mero, at Summerslam (were, generally, you'd expect the winner of King of the Ring to be in a featured match) he wasn't even on the main card, he then didn't make the next PPV at all, was in the opener at Buried Alive in October, and it was only really by Survivor Series '96 that he started to move into a main event picture, in his first PPV match with Bret Hart, and then on the Royal Rumble where he cements himself as a top guy. 

That period isn't exemplified just by Austin getting himself over at a main event level, though - it's typified by Triple H being punished and having his push temporarily curtailed, by a failed Ultimate Warrior comeback push, by the relative failure of Vader in the WWF, by the main event push and departure of Sid, and so on. And then Austin becoming the absolute megastar he became off the departure of Bret Hart, and the McMahon feud...I'm not saying Austin wouldn't have got there one way or another, but it wasn't just a case of "Steve Austin got himself over, and made Vince McMahon take notice". Every step of the way, Vince was trying something else, up to and including negotiation with Warrior again in '97/'98, and potentially with Hogan and/or Savage in '98 too, before 100% committing to Steve Austin as the guy. If Warrior had stuck around, if Sid had stuck around, and if WCW weren't piling on the pressure, would Vince have taken a punt on Austin? 

The inverse of that is the John Cena era - why take a chance on making anyone else a potential top star when you have the most reliable top star in history showing up to work every day for a decade? It's been too long since Vince's hand was forced. 

6 minutes ago, The King of Old School said:

I was hoping he would be in a tag team with Rey for a bit after this, hope it would breath some life into the division whilst hiding his weaknesses and also honing his craft a bit more.

Could be a good story with him turning on Rey a year down the line or something.

He's booked to team with Rey on a show in Mexico coming up. I can't imagine he's on a full-time schedule, though, and needs knee surgery by all accounts.

Presumably beheadings?

It's a boring answer but, ultimately, we don't know what goes into the decisions made in booking.

Sometimes there's a wrestler who your audience really respond to, and looking from the outside, it would seem like common sense to get behind them as a major babyface. But from within the company, maybe you know he's got a reputation for forgetting spots and being unreliable to work with, or he has some skeletons in his closet, or some other reason you don't want to take the risk. Maybe he's just a dick. The Invasion is this on an insane scale - do you assume that "WWF vs. WCW" is enough of a draw in its own right that it almost doesn't matter who the talent on either side are (which the buyrates for the initial Invasion PPV arguably support), do you risk making the extremely damaged WCW brand look superior to the WWF, or do you fork out millions to buy out the Turner contracts? People will always say, "Vince could have afforded it", and that he should have put up the money to bring in Goldberg, Sting et al in 2001. But then what happens to the likes of The Undertaker, Kane, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho and so on, to say nothing of midcarders wanting to break through to that upper echelon, suddenly earning less than a crew who just walked through the door and started earning that huge money from day one? You're risking a locker room mutiny. 

With Zack Ryder, someone summed it up as, "he did really well, considering he's Zack Ryder". There's a difference between being popular and being a viable star - Ryder was getting cheered, but was it translating into anything? Were the ratings higher when he was featured, was he shifting merchandise in any great numbers? Even aside from all that, on a purely character-based note, Ryder's popularity was based on a YouTube show in which he presented himself as a schmuck - so you can't really complain that he was booked as a schmuck as a result.

I don't think Vince has ever really run with someone getting organically over unless his hand was forced. People point to Steve Austin, but that was a long and grueling process to establish himself as more than a midcard hand, and more or less after Vince had exhausted all other options, and had his back to the wall. If anything, the key talent Vince has really lost over the past ten years is the ability to dictate to the audience and convince them of what they want - a good promoter doesn't necessarily give the audience everything they want (because the audience don't always really know what they want), a good promoter convinces the audience that what they're being given is what they always wanted.

The main criticism now is how often the WWE breaks its own internal logic, abandons angles halfway through, and just drops thing. But really 'twas ever thus - the Attitude Era was rife with stories cut short, stipulations ignored, and logic thrown out of the window. I'd still say it's worse now, but perhaps only because we're not getting enough quality stuff to balance it out.

The received wisdom seems to be that WWE suffer because they have to answer solely to the whims of a mad pensioner, and maybe there's some truth to that. But surely right now Vince has less absolute control than he's ever had? Maybe the issue isn't that Vince is the be-all and end-all, but that Vince - unlike in years past - now has to answer to a wider range of outside stakeholders. FOX are demanding this while the USA Network demands that, sponsors aren't happy with X, while shareholders want more of Y, but the fans wish they'd do Z, and all the while the Saudi Royal Family still want Q from twenty years ago. Can you imagine the Vince McMahon of 1998 introducing a new title belt because the TV network asked for one?

Case study of one, but I've completely fallen out of the habit of watching NXT already because I don't even know when it's on the Network any more. I used to stick it on when I got home from work on a Thursday, but it's not on the Network at that time any more, so by the weekend I tend to forget. Whereas AEW is still fresh enough that I'll go out of my way to watch it - even if ITV's schedule is even more confusing!

TV companies must take all of this stuff into account, though, and measure up different metrics accordingly - though the appeal of live wrestling should be that it's "event TV", and can't miss in the way that a big live sports game is. That's surely where the appeal for sponsors comes from.

In terms of audience drop off - I have a theory that one of the problems with modern wrestling audiences is that they convinced themselves that a very narrow window, say 1996 - 1999, is how wrestling is supposed to work, and that everything else is doing it wrong. Not just in terms of how shows are booked and presented, but in how promotions relate to one another; everything has to be a reframing of WWF vs. WCW, any other promotion has to be "at war" with WWE. Impact pursued it, fans tried to will it into existence with NJPW as a rival to WWE, and it's how the entire dynamic of AEW is framed.

So with this being presented as effectively a do-over of the Monday Night Wars, and with a preposterous level of hype going into it, I do wonder how much people are tuning out because they're not getting the big surprises and ex-WWE talent debuts and so on that they maybe convinced themselves they were in for. A lot of people seem more prepared to speculate about someone like Randy Orton jumping ship to AEW than to invest in the talent already there - and AEW aren't blameless in that, as we've discussed their failure to establish characters already. 
I like that they're taking it slow, but I assume there's an awful lot of fans expecting something big from every AEW episode, and not getting it.

15 hours ago, Michael_3165 said:

Ah if I stood across the ring from that I'd punch him in the fuckin head. It's embarrassing and nobody that sees him for the first time will go 'wow he looks like a cool badass wrestler'. My 16yo bro could take him! 

Is anyone trying to present him as a "cool badass wrestler", though? Were we supposed to think Spike Dudley "looks like a cool badass wrestler"?