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TLC - it’s really soon


HarmonicGenerator

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9 hours ago, Fatty Facesitter said:

Not sure where the blame lies with Seth/Dean.

With them. Neither are very good wrestlers. At least not in singles. Seth in particular. He's AJ Styles with all character, emotion and psychology surgically removed.

Also Corey Graves...he's so dreadful. Genuinely painful to listen to. Colour commentators can be dicks if they're funny and charismatic with it...Graves is neither. 

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I didn’t know Dean Ambrose had a twat siren at the start of his theme now. Came out looking like a discount Javert, then I fell asleep and woke up to Asuka coming out, so going to have to give it another go later.

Rest of the show was pretty decent though, and I’ve no shame in admitting I enjoyed Nia Jax’s Boob-window

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24 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

With them. Neither are very good wrestlers. At least not in singles. Seth in particular. He's AJ Styles with all character, emotion and psychology surgically removed.

Also Corey Graves...he's so dreadful. Genuinely painful to listen to. Colour commentators can be dicks if they're funny and charismatic with it...Graves is neither. 

Rollins is more Ziggler than to me than Styles. Try hard nerds. No sense of the evolution from him, he’ll always be Tyler Black the indie wrestler. 

The commentary is stunning at the moment. Renee has become a whining idiot and Corey’s getting worse by the week.

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Daniel Bryan Vs AJ Styles was a fantastic match. It had none of the trappings of Styles Vs Nakamura & Joe or Bryan Vs Cass/Miz. A proper struggle of a WWE Heavyweight Title match, with a clear and decisive finish. Great job. 

Dean Ambrose Vs Seth Rollins severely undershot expectations. It just wasn't any good, but on top of that the commentary put forward by Graves and Renee Young was dreadful. 

I wouldn't have had McIntyre lose again already. I'm unsure if the reason I didn't like the result is because I see a future in Drew or because I don't see one in Finn. I'm surprised that it's this soon that we're expecting Drew to need rehabilitated, and sharpish. 

Someone who doesn't need rehabilitated is Baron Corbin. What a refreshingly lovely result that was. It was brilliant to see him finally get his head kicked in. 

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I'd actually forgotten about the commentary in Ambrose vs. Rollins. Fucking HELL. I almost turned the show off. Graves and Renee banging on like a pair of twats. Why they ever felt that they needed to acknowledge Renee's relationship with Dean on TV is beyond me. His turn has been shit already, without the commentary becoming absolutely insufferable.

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I think WWE should put an end to this "men's revolution" and admit it was a mistake to let the guys wrestle.  They're just dragging down the quality of the actual women superstars.

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Watching Ambrose, it's proper heartbreaking because I quite like the Bane jacket and the air siren at the start of his music is a nice new touch.

If he'd just turned on Seth normally and it hadn't became all about "LOL Leukemia," and being a germaphobe with arse injections, this would've probably been an alright feud. They keep subtly hinting at him hating being called a, "lunatic," and if that had been the crux, with him ironically going crazy at being called crazy, it could have had legs.

In its current form though they're honestly better off just binning the feud off. There's no salvaging it at this point. Also, just have Renee announce they've separated at the start of Raw tonight and have done with it. It serves no purpose other than to make the commentary impossible to listen to.

Genuinely, the best thing Nia Jax has ever done in her career has been big enough to allow Ronda to do those cool knees and punches where she posts off Nia first. Nia makes a great base for someone as athletic as Ronda to jump up on. Shame about everything else. Get her name out of your mowf!

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9 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

Strange to think Seth was pretty much the hottest guy on the roster fairly recently and people were wanting him to be the next challenger for Brock. Now he's getting boring chants. Weird.

Not really. 10,000 years of wrestling Dolph Ziggler four times a night and a terrible feud with Ambrose will do that to you.

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First show I've watched since Evolution - I thought it was mostly really good, but marred as usual by inconsistency and by their abject failure to actually deliver the story they're telling you is being told.

Something really minor, but that sums up WWE in 2018 for me, is that there were two adverts back-to-back - one for WWEShop featuring Sasha Banks billed as "The Boss", immediately followed by a trailer for RAW starting "The Boss Is Back!" referring to Vince McMahon. Just a dreadful choice from a production point of view.

I don't get why the Baron Corbin match was a "TLC match". We had a TLC match later in the show in which the only way to win was by retrieving the championship, yet this one could end by pinfall? So what makes it a TLC match? And given that the match itself never incorporated ladders or tables anyway, why bother billing it as one? I hate that WWE's idea of a heel getting their comeuppance isn't them losing fair and square in a match to a superior babyface (because wins and losses don't matter), but getting beaten up by a gang of babyfaces who think nothing of teaming up for a 7-on-1 beatdown.

The tag title match was good, though found it odd that you'd do a three way tag match on a TLC gimmicked PPV and it not get the ladder gimmick, though at least it meant the main event stood out and we weren't oversaturated with gimmicks.

The Ruby/Natalya match was the first where they really just didn't tell the story the announcers insisted was being told. At one point Michael Cole asked, "it's been a long time since you saw a smile on Natalya's face", apparently forgetting that she had spent her entrance grinning from ear to ear, slapping hands with fans and wearing cutesy cat ears, despite being on the way to the ring to fight a woman who had been disrespecting her dead dad. At no point in this match did Natalya actually feel angry - she should have been a ball of rage throughout, and either tear from the Riott Squad, with Ruby going full Vince McMahon trembling bottom lip of terror when she realised what she'd got herself in to, or the Squad taking advantage of Natalya being over-emotional and luring her into a beatdown. It just didn't feel like there were any stakes, so everything they'd done to invoke Jim Neidhart added no heat whatsoever, and the eventual closing image of Nattie in his gear didn't feel as cathartic as it should. 
Two other things I disliked about this match were that the gimmicked tables looked too professional - it didn't feel believable that the Riott Squad had made that Jim Neidhart table, it felt like a WWE prop department job, so it didn't feel believable. It should have been a little rougher around the edges, held on with electrical tape, to feel like something the heels had put together to mess with Nattie, not a glossy product as part of a TV storyline. The other is that this followed on from the Corbin match, where we were shown that it's perfectly acceptable for people to gang up on their opponent in this kind of match, yet the other two members of Riott Squad were content to stand around and wait for their spot, rather than ganging up on Natalya from the opening bell.
As an aside to that, it's typical WWE that "group of women who are close friends and will do anything for one another" could only possibly be a heel act. I genuinely think Vince McMahon sees friendship as a weakness - "best friends" are only ever heels.

 

Another bit of failing at "show don't tell" is the Finn/Drew match. The announcers explain how Finn is a "rebel", and how he was the only person on RAW prepared to stand up to Baron Corbin - despite the fact that, earlier in the night, we saw him as one of a parade of midcard scrubs prepared to do exactly that, and neither the ringleader of that group nor given the kind of impactful character moment that Heath Slater got. So, actually, Finn Balor here is, from a narrative perspective, roughly equivalent to Apollo Crews. 
Last time I checked in with WWE, Drew McIntyre was being touted as a main event act and now he's losing to a guy that they felt was unremarkable enough to have him take part in a midcard angle earlier in the show, prior to his match, and to Dolph fucking Ziggler. The match was fine, but minus three stars for Ziggler showing up.

Rey Mysterio vs. Randy Orton happened.

For all the praise Ronda Rousey has got for how quickly she's picked things up, the main thing is that she still, on some level, feels believable. Her promos are corny, but they sound like a fighter hyping a fight. Contrast that to Nia Jax's "facebreaker" promo they played in the hype package, and I don't believe a word of it - she's delivering a WWE promo, with the exact same diction as everyone else, pausing in all the same places, putting emphasis on all the same syllables, and I don't believe a single word of it. Then, when Ronda gets in the ring, her stance, the way she moves, it all points toward someone on another level to her opponent, and because she's still a big deal, they put a level of focus on promoting her matches that makes them feel like a fight.

Speaking of feeling like a fight, Bryan vs. Styles was fantastic. My first time seeing this incarnation of Daniel Bryan, and I love it. People have been rightly raving about his heel promos, but everything is spot on - his body language, his facial expressions, he just carries himself like an absolute prick. Bryan's always been good at making his matches look like a real struggle, and historically AJ Styles' biggest weakness was that everything looked too much like a video game wrestling match, but since the Samoa Joe feud, Styles has been shit hot at having a believable fight, and this match delivered on that basis.

Contrast that to Ambrose vs. Rollins which was fine. I can't understand how the same two guys who managed to have a fucking Lumberjack match that was exciting and heated could have put this match on. A heated feud between two former best friends now hellbent on destroying each other, and they're doing collar-and-elbow tie-ups and Seth Rollins' fucking Falcon Arrow spot. The commentary was ignoring the match for the most part, and all I could think was of William Regal's line from an old podcast; "the only time we don't talk about the match is when we'd rather not be drawing attention to it". If they'd been having the kind of violent, emotionally driven match they should have been doing rather than their standard formula with the occasional forced bit of WWE melodrama, Corey berating Renee Young actually could have played perfectly into it. But for the match they had, it didn't at all. 

The main event was great, with some really fun spots, though sometimes fell into the "now it's your turn to do a spot" and "person just murdered in a high spot is perfectly fine seconds later because we need her to knock a ladder over to get to the next bit" routine of every match of this ilk. 

What's fascinating is that, despite a year of WWE's booking of the women's division being heavy-handed, everybody hugs "FIRST TIME EVER" with no real compelling stories, the way Becky Lynch has forced their hand has led to a situation where they're the most fascinating, believable part of the show, with stories interconnected across multiple talents and across both brands - Becky has beef with Nia, who has beef with Ronda, who has beef with Becky and Charlotte, who have beef with each other, and Asuka's in the midst of it trying to get the championship. That Asuka was able to win because of Ronda, and because of Becky and Charlotte being too focused on each other, makes perfect narrative sense, though it's a shame that, much like the Rumble, her big win has been overshadowed by the other story. 

I don't know if it speaks to the ability of Asuka, or to how homogenous WWE's "nobody gets over" booking makes a roster have no real stars, but it's interesting how Asuka can have had an absolute stinker of a year since Wrestlemania, but now it feels like she's back to being something special again.

It seems pretty clear we're getting Ronda/Charlotte/Becky at 'Mania now - my first thought is a Luger/Bret with Becky and Charlotte both winning the Rumble, though we could get a Smackdown Rumble win to challenge Asuka instead, as the Ronda match doesn't need it. Hopefully Asuka can get a big match and a big win at Wrestlemania anyway.

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@BomberPat RE: Corbin/Braun being a TLC Match - when they announced it, they were hoping that Braun would be back from his elbow surgery, although obviously that didn’t happen. Had he been back I imagine they would have done a TLC Match with some sort of Paperwork to retrieve. As Braun wasn’t good to go we got what we got, and you can maybe explain it away as TLC Match with titles involved need to have them retrieved, but matches with no titles on the line can end by pinfall but Tables, Ladders and Chairs are legal. It’s tenuous I know, but it’s as good as I’ve got

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20 hours ago, Love-Wilcox said:

Can we just take a moment to acknowledge that fucking BRUTAL shot Charlotte took to the ribs from Beckys leg drop off the ladder?!

Jesus Christ, I thought she was legitimately injured.

There's a WWE Instagram video from the crowd where it looks like Becky lands squarely on Charlotte's tits and bounces off them, I'm not sure if that would be better or worse.

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AJ/Bryan and the TLC rank extremely high on my WWE main roster matches of the year, possibly #1 and #2. Particularly can't get over how good Bryan is. He's what 6 months into probably the most miraculous comeback in wrestling and he's that good at being such a loathsome little shit? Also, if like me you love his 06-07 ROH heel run, he does a homage to his "I have until five!" bit you'll get a kick out of

His stuff really might get me watching smackdown regularly again, as I loved seeing him palm smack the shit out of Mustafa Ali in that great little segment

Those matches aside, there was some alright stuff in the midcard, that Smackdown tag did well to not be a big mess seeing how multi team matches usually go, and obviously with those teams the work was good

Got a kick out of Rey being needlessly inventive and taking big bumps for such a pointless midcard match. What a guy

I was vastly disappointed with Drew v Finn, purely because I expected the take-away to be that "Drew McIntyre is really badass" but instead the take-away was "Balor will have a match with Ziggler"? Zero interest. Have people at large finally admitted Balor is really nothing remotely special yet? My favourite Balor match is him v Low Ki v Kota Ibushi at Wrestle Kingdom 7 - if you REMOVED him it would become an even better match. He just feels completely disposable and "the extraordinary man who does EXTRA ORDINARY things" tagline has got to be a rib

 

Rollins/Ambrose was shite. Not much more to say. Really wanted to enjoy heel Dean as I find him very endearing but they've made a complete baboon's arse of this and one of them needs to go to Smackdown asap now, to try and forget it happened.

I saw Brock Lesnar Guy whinging on twitter about fans being disrespectful for giving Dean v Seth boring chants and I do love the idea of needing permission from BROCK LESNAR GUY to voice disapproval of a WWE match.

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