CavemanLynn

That was the point though, I thought. Here's a free sampler of the entire menu, now pay yer money for a pay per view of the REAL matches. Not like today's "every show is an EVENT!!! 111!!!" mentality, post-Monday Night Wars.

Being part of the BCC kind of gives Claudio personality by association. It makes sense that a superb athlete wrestler would be mixing it with a dungeon of similar wrestling hard cases.

Penta vs Mox was great fun, but another frustration I have with AEW that great matches happen because they need matches to fill TV. It also felt hotshotted because of that iconic photo of blood soaked Penta. Just because there's a swell of buzz about a guy doesn't mean you just bung him into a main event. It comes off desperate. You've just had a champion legit knock out a contender with a lariat, and you've got a guy who has form as an arm-snapping skeleton. I'd have liked at least a fortnight of Mox clubbing jobbers while Penta snaps some arms elsewhere, so there's some in-AEW spice.

As great as he could be on any given night, he was never as great as he thought he was and, crucially, thought he should have been admired as. It feels like these most recent blowup is him crashing into another midlife crisis, railing against the realisation that his body simply can't do what he wants it to anymore. He's probably smart enough to work to his growing limitations (he was seemingly emulating Hitman, after all) but his ego and apparently real-life obsession with proving he could 'go' with younger, fresher, faster talent won't let him. Anything other than a match where he 'does it all', wins/retains a belt, and has pundits and crowds fawning over him simply isn't enough for him. He could be an asset; he just needs to get out of his own way. 

He'll love it. He'll get to rock up for a couple of days in a tailored suit, just to be grumpy and yell at people looking silly in PVC costumes. He's going to have a ball.

It doesn't matter if they're criminal masterminds or staggeringly incompetent - the whole party is culpable for their poisonous actions over the last decade, and especially the last few years where they've not even made an attempt to mask that they're happy to gamble with British lives. I'd be amazed if Kwarteng had a long term plan. He rode in alongside his longtime political bestie, delivered her agenda, wrought the necessary havoc, then got straight out again. They KNEW their mini budget would cause the monumental (I'm loath to say "irreparable", but still...) damage it did, deliberately ignoring the governmental audit, checks and balances designed to prevent such flagrant self-interest. That it was still allowed to go ahead, even on a technicality, demonstrates how culturally corrupt Westminster as a whole is. The immediate appointment of Hunt is a deliberate play to put a "safe" hand in public view. I expect the BoE to put some herculean work in to steady the economic ship, while the Government tries to keep a low profile, then they can roll out come election time, taking credit dePfeffel-style by virtue of being in power while someone else tidied up the shitshow. 

2 minutes ago, gmoney said:

Christ. 

He might have the hair for it, but I wouldn't go that far.

Just Hangman proving that Sniff deciding playing with his new ex WWE toys and forgetting about Page belongs in the Tony Khan Is A Twat Thread. 22 years in, and we have a genuine Stone Cold for the new millennium, but not one who's a loner from being a gobby arse to everyone else, but one who's been through real life and real, relatable troubles and come out the other side. He'll fight alongside any face in the company, and if they fall, he'll fight for them instead. One line, and he contextualises a whole bunch of offscreen aggro and let downs into perfect grist for the TV mill as to why he's the Man. Damn, I wish there was more than a couple weeks built to this. Testing his mettle against the BCC. Showing everyone that he hasn't missed a step and is still the AEW Original champ. Fucking fire promos. They may be on the outs, but Tony cannot repay the Elite enough for gifting him and us with the Handsome Cowboy. I hope Page's settled into fatherhood and can come back a bit more, because fuck industry pressers - this is the man you want on the mainstream couches, making twinkly doe eyes at the interviewers, flashing that boyish megawatt smile, and putting the company over.

Dammit, he's going to lose, isn't he? 

Marvel DAREN'T fuck this up. Black Panther might have been a superhero film, but it was a cultural milestone that tackled a lot of race and culture issues as smartly as any blockbuster can, and will go down as Chadwick Boseman's biggest hit. The trailers have covered all the bases brilliantly so far. I'm fascinated to see what the craic with Namor is, love the South American aesthetic of the Atlanteans, and the balance between grieving what has been and moving on to what's new. I hope they've given Ryan Coogler carte blanche and let him do whatever he likes, because I do fear anything overly tropey or with even a whiff of studio mandate is going to get mercilessly slaughtered, like the CGI mirror image fist fight of the first.

4 hours ago, Infinity Land said:

For the past two Dynamites her clips on youtube have been the most watched by a clear margin. 

I watched it on YouTube to find out how bad it was. Lots of views is not necessarily a mark of quality content. 

59 minutes ago, Loki said:

She’s incredibly green and shouldn’t be taking that sort of bump at all until she’s much more experienced.  I very much doubt they practice this shit, as they do in WWE/NXT.

 

 

AEW are doing a table with someone at least once a week now, and probably have been for a long time, so the worst thing is, she'll have been put in that situation for nothing. Even in context, she's still trying to get over as their spooky goth girl, so it wasn't even as if the table spot was comeuppance for anything.

We're getting into my reintroduction to WWF/E now, after my little brother's mates sessioned WWF Warzone one Saturday, we started getting tapes off the one who had Sky, so it was running home after school every Monday then on for the previous week's Raw (then Raw plus Smackdown). It's weird reading the results, and remembering watching some segments clear as day, but having zero memory of others. Cyrus with the Acolytes? We thought they got repackaged and thrown straight in with Taker after doing nothing fir ages. Test's debut, the Brood saga, and the Corporation shenanigans all stick, but Mero and LOD? Not a thing.

I can't believe we've got BCC originals Jon Moxley and Bryan Danielson for the World title in the main event of a big show in NEW YORK, and it's had a one-week tournament build.

Ah, Bull Buchanan. A simpler time, when all you had to do was skin the cat up a turnbuckle to get the whole playground convinced you were an unstoppable machine who would win the tag belts with Boss Man at Mania.

Overall, it felt at the time and even more now in hindsight that all was being sacrificed to the altar of Punk. Every time they pushed him on comms as rusty and the underdog, he'd still outlast and outsmart his opponents, which is no bad thing if the build kept going. The Eddie feud felt like a turning point for Punk, but three months later Punk's still working the "veteran proving his worth" angle, and beating anyone not called MJF. Then he got crocked, and instead of pivoting away to something else, the company seemed to put the whole show in a holding pattern, waiting with baited breath for their beloved Punk to return, all while their ACTUAL champion Moxley was doing more for that belt than anyone since Omega. Punk returns, they throw the title practically straight back on him, he injures himself yet again, and rather than step away, endorsing the belt and company, accepting his failure and vowing to return when he's fully healed, he sets fire to his toys and yeets them out of the pram in a public forum, massively abusing his employer's trust. This recent blow-up, just like Page's promo, feels like it should be the culmination of months of logical build, possibly of a bitter champion tiring of fighting all comers and holding the belt to ransom, but instead it's come out of the blue, a tiny self-inflicted crack in the dam immediately erupting into a torrent of petty vitriol.

Hangman got stuck with AEW's post-win Kane feud in Archer (which is a shame, because I like Archer, but realistically...), had no follow-up angle with the Elite, and had new toys Danielson and Punk pushed above him on the card as the stars of the show. The story they looked like they were trying to tell - of Hangman finding himself out of his depth but stepping up to the plate every time (the deathmatch with Archer, 90 minutes with Danielson) until he was comfortable enough to call on that experience to face down his rivals (deathmatch vs Cole) while still giving the up-and-comers in AEW's own a chance to test him (Dante), becoming and earning himself the right to call himself the face of AEW - was completely buried, leading to leaps in logic like the promo vs Punk which hadn't been given the TV to actually develop. Then they took the title off him and forgot about him.

I swear, AEW not pulling the trigger and having Page lose that first title match vs Omega, when he was absolutely red fucking hot, was the start of the current slide. Trying to work out if the current situation is a work or not is just exhausting because nobody would care if the show was hot, but it's not. It's well off the boil, and shooty bollocks, or even the whiff of shooty bollocks, is just throwing more ice on it.

Watching the ascension proclamation, and Raworth and the pundits marvel at the ethnic diversity of a room that's 98% old, rich, white men. 

I'd've preferred them to announce a Six/Eight-Pack Challenge match for a couple of weeks' time, then have the competitors wind each other up in angles for weeks in the run-up. A build, y'know.

5 minutes ago, Infinity Land said:

Based on CM Punk going into the crowd, and previously doing the snow angels waiting for Mox to turn up. I could see it starting with a brawl through the crowd before the bell rings.

This makes sense. Have him meet Mox on his way to the ring. Give the home town crowd the pop they want, give Punk the time to soak it up. But as soon as they're in the ring and the bell goes, Mox murders Punk foot-first, and taps him to a heel hook, so I get the Danielson tease I want. 

1 hour ago, DavidB6937 said:

Drew? Roman? Nope. New champ..

 

This is great. Vernon looks genuinely made up, and Triple H, though a bit creaky and croaky, comes off really well.

Tess is in for a wild one.

That gameplay video is appropriately the best it's looked so far. I love the chunky sprites, that are nicely exaggerated (love Omega's chunky bootees) without being full-on All Stars caricatures. Hopefully they do some more interesting work with the camera and FX to make it a bit busier. I'm disappointed at the lack of weird gimmick matches like Blood and Guts, Arcade Anarchy, and Stadium Stampede.

14 minutes ago, Duke said:

I also agree completely with @RedRooster(I think it was) who said that part of the reason it felt bad that it was in the middle of the show. It's not like the main had a clean finish, if they've ended with this I think it would've hit different.

It could end up being perfect, depending on what they do next, it's just hard to see what that will be.

That might well have something to do with it. I've long hated the structure of Dynamite, where they essentially bung their big stuff on that first hour, putting your main event stars in the midcard, all due to advertising or some such. If this had been built up and signed off the show, then I think it might have gotten a positive WTF rather than a negative WTF.

In fact, I'm more annoyed they didn't hold this exact finish off for the PPV. If it's true that this was brought forward due to Punk meta-storytelling or pulling a Bret in Montreal, then that's robbed us of Moxley in full-on antagonistic thug mode, rolling into Chicago as champ then battering their hometown boy in a minute. Hell, Mox gets in the face of and chucks bottles of water at fans he likes; imagine what he'd do with that crowd. Send them out there with 20 minutes to go on the card, do that exact same match, then have the last 15 minutes just the BCC lording it up, soaking in the jeers and garbage pelting the ring. Regal stomping around with a wild-eyed grin, barking "Undisputed!" at the camera. Cesaro doing his twatty arm-pumping to a chorus of boos. Mox giving it the NJPW in-ring post-match promo, proclaiming that the best in the world is in the BCC, while Danielson gives him knowing side-eye in the background.

2 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Maybe advise him to use a straight line to get from A to B and have something he’s familiar with as a visual representation of said straight line?

Just don't tell him his storylines would be better on rails.

13 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Feel like we've been saying this a lot recently. "Once the ROH PPV is out the way", "once Forbidden Door is out the way"...they just need to sort their shit out. There's so much fucking great stuff every week in this company but so often gets surrounded by shit.

This, with the addition that it often seems the good shit is in spite of the surrounding bad shit. No matter the rest of the show, you can always count on Mox and the BCC, Danielson, Kingston, and (yes) Jericho to turn out a quality match, promo or angle that gets your hopes right back up after a run of meh. It shouldn't feel like these guys are swimming against the tide or being relied on to prop up/mask the wider failings of the show's direction. An earlier post said that it just takes a decent promo next week to get things right back on track, but the problem is every week is hot then cold then hot then cold without any of the building of anticipation to fever-pitch. It shouldn't be two weeks out of a PPV and the main hook of the show being "what will the main event be?"; it should've been set in stone a month ago, then let the two opponents to do what they're paid to do best and add the spice in the run-up.

I also saw there was a shooty-bollocks war of words after the show between Omega and Osprey. It's creatively bankrupt and fucking everywhere. It's no wonder so many talent are getting restless, now the grass is looking DX-greener on the other side.

17 hours ago, NavigatorFan said:

I feel like this every day reading these amazing digests!! Keep up the good work

It must be a ton of work, but it's great when @air_raid manages to throw out a couple of months in quick succession. You can get a real sense of the flow of shows and careers, and spot patterns that you wouldn't have spotted before necessarily, like the many in-and-outs of the Anvil, to who the fuck keeps employing the Harris twins? My favourite narrative at the moment is Bret outdrawing Shawn so far; sure, there are other factors, but THE NUMBERS DON'T LIE.

I think the whole situation with this Punk/Mox match is pretty shit. Okay, I'm not a ticket-buying punter, and I suspect a lot of fans will have bought tickets to see AEW's biggest show regardless of the main event card, but to have a card still coming together with just a fortnight to go, AND to throw any version of your marquee match out on free TV a week beforehand is kneejerk fag-packet booking or out-and-out shithousery. The match quality will no doubt be stonking, but it sure feels like any other show, at the moment.