AEW Dynamite Thread 2023

[Chili]

22 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

Adam Cole broke his foot jumping off the ramp, sometimes it's just a freak way it happens.

Yeah but it happened in AEW so you know...

[Loki]

34 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

Adam Cole broke his foot jumping off the ramp, sometimes it's just a freak way it happens.

As I say, in each injury you can look at it and say "well, that's unfortunate" but across a whole roster it's clear that they are getting more injuries than they should.  Adam Cole is incredibly fragile, but I bet you once he's back he'll be jumping over the ropes and then in 6 months will be injured again.  It's only a freak injury in isolation to everything else.  The next one will also be a "freak" occurrence.

Look, it's wrestling - it's high impact, injuries happen.  But you can and should analyse the number and frequency over time just as any workplace does.

Edited November 21, 2023 by Loki

[Lion_of_the_Midlands]

4 minutes ago, Chili said:

Yeah but it happened in AEW so you know...

Chill Chili Chill. There is no denying that AEW has a more dynamic style than WWE. That's why people watch it. The top rope to the outside flipside to that is that they will naturally incur more injuries on a day-to-day basis. That should be built into the booking, it isn't but it should be, but to be fair it very rarely is in any company. TK's booking is scattergun at best at the moment, the injuries certainly don't help. 

[air_raid]

2 hours ago, WeeAl said:

Hopefully he learns from this and reverts to doing bodyslams, side suplexes, clotheslines, dropkicks and powerslams.

Fixed.

[organizedkaos]

Clearly from the internet the way to go is encourage a more old school mentality,  spots the fans think are dangerous but actually can be done incredibly safely. Like drinking human blood

[Supremo]

I’d be genuinely interested to see how AEW’s injury record stands up against say WWE or New Japan. Is it really that much higher? I remember there was a solid couple of years there where anyone who came through the Performance Center was guaranteed to have fucked up knees due to the mad lifting schedule they had them doing. It might still be happening, in fact. Isn’t that why Nikkita Lyons is currently on the shelf? I’m not convinced Tegan Nox will ever recover. What’s the longest run she’s been on since signing with them, before getting re-injured? Six months?

My enthusiasm for the Continental Classic has plummeted. Going into the first night of the tournament without announcing over half the entrees, it sounding like a new fucking belt is going to be introduced for the winner, the slow sense that it won’t be featuring top guys like Omega and Mox, even Eddie Kingston’s promo didn’t make much sense. Are his belts on the line in every single match? Or just for the winner of the overall tournament? And if it’s every match, what happens if Eddie loses his first match? Does the victor have to keep up his rule of defending the belts therein? Show your workings, Tony!

Also, God bless them, I understand why they’re promising that there’ll be no outside interference, but announcing it on the show itself is a bit silly, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t they enforce that for every match? As a simulation of a real sport, what sense does it make that only specific matches for a specific tournament will be competed fair and square?

We now go live to the referees and agents in the Gorilla Position before someone goes out for a non-Continental Classic match.

Edited November 21, 2023 by Supremo

[andrew "the ref" coyne]

Introducing a new belt, only to then merge it immediately into a triple crown belt seems like cheating to me.

And will Tony Kahn have a Continental Title Belt made, which he then IMMEDIATELY switches for a Triple Crown Belt?

Finally Im actually slightly miffed by them announcing Danielson first, it just gives me that "he's making it into the final guys". 

Im just praying we get a good field of competitors and not just 2 potential winners and a bunch of schlubs.

[Infinity Land]

7 hours ago, andrew "the ref" coyne said:

And will Tony Kahn have a Continental Title Belt made, which he then IMMEDIATELY switches for a Triple Crown Belt?

While the AJPW Triple Crown is now a single championship belt, I think they're going with the original idea of carrying all 3. I'm sure future champions will be thrilled trapsing about with them all.

 

[LaGoosh]

9 hours ago, Supremo said:

I’d be genuinely interested to see how AEW’s injury record stands up against say WWE or New Japan. Is it really that much higher?

I doubt they'd be much difference. I think the only reason AEW's injury record stands out is because they've been unlucky enough that injuries have happened to top people in the middle of storylines. WWE have had worse periods of injuries, there seemed to be points in the 2000s and 2010's where it felt like a rotating door of people getting neck surgery.

But really I think the whole thing is a trade-off I guess. Yeah AEW's ring style is probably higher risk than WWE's but also in-ring AEW has had a spectacular few years with an insanely consistent level of of incredible matches the likes of which probably hasn't been seen in years if ever. Match-wise WWE's output is pretty generic, samey and unmemorable for the most part. As for what's best for the wrestlers health, that's up to them - we're not wrestlers so we don't really know what the fuck we're talking about when we talk about dangerous or risky spots. It's like when Ospreay dumped Omega on his head and everyone freaked out about how dangerous it was but then someone on Twitter slowed the moment way down and you can see Omega is actually positioned to land safely on his shoulders and wasn't at risk at all. At some point I just assume they know what they're doing. 

Edited November 22, 2023 by LaGoosh

[RedRooster]

6 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Match-wise WWE's output is pretty generic, samey and unmemorable for the most part.

Not to make this AEW vs. WWE, but you could level the same accusation at AEW, surely? What differentiates one flip-fest, one six person tag or one Jon Moxley blood bath from the next? 

I totally disagree with what you're saying about WWE matches here, and I'd suspect (though I may be wrong) that you don't consistently watch WWE, or, at the very least, AEW caters to your tastes more in terms of wrestling style. There is a 'WWE style', that's indisputable, but even within that framework, in the past year you've had matches like Gunther vs Chad Gable, The Usos vs. Owens/Zayn, Gunther vs. Sheamus vs. Drew McIntyre, Carmello Hayes vs. Ilja Dragunov, Brock Lesnar vs. Cody Rhodes and Becky Lynch vs. Trish Stratus. All superb matches, all very different and pretty much all underpinned with strong storytelling. 

11 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I doubt they'd be much difference. I think the only reason AEW's injury record stands out is because they've been unlucky enough that injuries have happened to top people in the middle of storylines. WWE have had worse periods of injuries, there seemed to be points in the 2000s and 2010's where it felt like a rotating door of people getting neck surgery.

I may be misremembering, but I don't think that's true at all for the 2010s, but it is certainly true of the early 2000s - and WWE took action. That's when Vince McMahon told them to slow things down, and a more mat-based 'WWE style' was introduced. In recent years, aside from a few freak injuries (eg. Big E) I'm struggling to think of many situations where big name WWE wrestlers have been out for any significant period of time. They became hyper-cautious, ruling people like Bryan Danielson out for long periods of time, and ruling Paige and Sting out permanently. 

15 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

As for what's best for the wrestlers health, that's up to them - we're not wrestlers so we don't really know what the fuck we're talking about when we talk about dangerous or risky spots

I mean, while that's possibly true to a degree, wrestlers aren't doctors - so they're not exactly experts here either. All they can speak to is what they personally feel comfortable with, and what their own pain threshold is. 'That's up to them' would be a dangerous approach for any wrestling company to take. 'That's up to them' leads to Matt Hardy and Jon Moxley continuing to wrestle after potentially serious head knocks, or wrestlers foolishly moving an opponent after he or she has landed on their head. For me, all the evidence points to wrestlers being their own worst enemies. 

[BomberPat]

40 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

It's like when Ospreay dumped Omega on his head and everyone freaked out about how dangerous it was but then someone on Twitter slowed the moment way down and you can see Omega is actually positioned to land safely on his shoulders and wasn't at risk at all. At some point I just assume they know what they're doing. 

This is a big part of the whole conversation for me - there's a ton of spots that get examined to death and held up as dangerous, when they're actually perfectly safe because they're performed well by trained professionals who are very good at what they do. Of course, there are dangerous spots, but it's rarely the ones people highlight. It's amazing how many times I see people talk about an AEW wrestler getting "dropped on their head", and then see a clip of their head being no closer to the mat than Hogan's on the Tombstone Piledriver at Survivor Series 1991.

I don't really watch WWE any more, but the last few times I did, I was amazed at the amount of pointless bumps in throwaway matches that nobody will remember. AEW's biggest stunt bumps tend to at least be in big matches, but Big E's injury happened from taking an overhead belly-to-belly suplex on the floor in a nothing TV tag match - and that's a move that, during the early '00s spate of everyone getting neck injuries, was actually banned for a time in WWE. If it's not that, it's Shinsuke Nakamura a couple of years ago needing staples in his head from bumping on a grand piano in a gimmicky hardcore match. More recently, I saw on Botchamania that Ricochet kicked out of what was supposed to be the finish of his match because he was very obviously knocked loopy from landing on his head - if that had been an AEW wrestler, and an AEW referee, the discourse would have been fucking endless. 

There are definitely points where AEW could do with dialing it back - if only to make big spots matter more when they do happen - but avoidable injuries in pointless throwaway spots is far from unique to them, and I think WWE's style and schedule is more taxing on wrestlers than AEW's, outside of mad high spot affairs like the ladder match at the last PPV. It's like Mick Foley - it's not getting thrown off the cell one night that shortened his career, it's taking bumps into the ringsteps knees-first every night, and taking flat back bumps off the apron in a three minute TV match that all adds up. 

Just looking at AEW's roster on Wikipedia to get a sense of the injuries currently affecting them - Adam Cole's was a freak accident, and beyond that most of the people currently inactive are with injuries that are fairly routine in wrestling; wrist and shoulder issues, most picked up during the course of an ordinary match. And most of them are midcard guys that aren't really affecting the direction of the company. The only big ones were Moxley's concussion, which looked to have been from getting knocked back and catching his head on a camera, not from any of the deathmatch stuff he does (which is generally pretty safe and easy on the body, just visually nasty - it's why guys like Atsushi Onita are still going today after first "retiring" in the '80s), and Bryan Danielson's eye injury, and that's the only one that there should be alarm bells around, for him having worked through it.

[LaGoosh]

40 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

Not to make this AEW vs. WWE, but you could level the same accusation at AEW, surely? What differentiates one flip-fest, one six person tag or one Jon Moxley blood bath from the next?

You could make this accusation against any period of any wrestling company ever. Wrestling is by its nature very repetitive. However as you yourself said, there is a modern WWE style and while not a consistent watcher I feel comfortable saying that it's made the majority of WWE matches pretty generic and average. I didn't say WWE don't have good matches, of course they do. I've seen all the ones you listed (though outside Gunter vs Gable which I very much enjoyed, I wouldn't rate them as highly you clearly do). However AEW has definitely had significantly more good matches on their shows than WWE have.

And yes of course wrestlers are their own worst enemies. But the level of risk they take is up to them, the producers, the company...basically anyone involved in the production of the match from start to finish. No amount of internet hand-wringing makes any difference. And if watching wrestlers take risks makes you uncomfortable as a viewer then perhaps wrestling isn't for you because literally every single thing they do out there can lead to long term injury. William Regal's neck problems are some of the most horrible injuries I've ever heard about and he didn't take any high risk bumps in his entire career.

On a slightly different note, I saw a ladder match this year from NXT which featured some fairly green looking womens wrestlers taking some absolutely horrific shit. The worst thing I've seen in wrestling this year was Ricochet doing a spot with Logan Paul where he did a backflip on his head from the ring directly onto a table on the floor on the outside where he nearly died. So let's not pretend WWE are innocent here.

Edited November 22, 2023 by LaGoosh

[mim731]

13 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I feel comfortable saying that it's made the majority of WWE matches pretty generic and average. I didn't say WWE don't have good matches, of course they do. However AEW has definitely had significantly more good matches on there shows than WWE have.

In fairness, that's a matter of personal taste and preference. You are supposing that your criteria for a "good match" is the same as someone else's. I'm not even necessarily saying I disagree with your assertion, it's just a little too subjective to quantify what is "good" when really it's a matter of opinion rather than fact. 

In a wider context, I also feel this also applies to the Meltzer ratings, which always seem to be hilariously over-analysed given it's just a guy giving out stars for what he liked. 

Edited November 22, 2023 by mim731

[LaGoosh]

16 minutes ago, mim731 said:

In fairness, that's a matter of personal taste and preference. You are supposing that your criteria for a "good match" is the same as someone else's. I'm not even necessarily saying I disagree with your assertion, it's just a little too subjective to quantify what is "good" or when really it's a matter of opinion rather than fact. 

Yeah obviously that's true of any opinion and I wasn't trying to be a dick or anything. Everything anyone posts is just their opinion and I don't think we need to label it each time we post anything as such. But some opinions are definitely more true than others e.g. if someone says Michael Bay is a better director than Martin Scorsese that's just their opinion which they are entitled to but I'm pretty confident they are wrong.

Edited November 22, 2023 by LaGoosh

[mim731]

2 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Yeah obviously that's true of any opinion and I wasn't trying to be a dick or anything. But some opinions are definitely more true than others e.g. if someone says Michael Bay is a better director than Martin Scorsese that's just their opinion which they are entitled to but I'm pretty confident they are wrong.

I totally get what you mean, and appreciate it wasn't intended as a dig at anyone. Although again that example you've given depends on your criteria, so in that scenario commercial success/mainstream appeal vs artistic excellence (Bay is that latter, naturally, Scorcese is a hack, and those Transformers movies are the peak of cinema history).

It's all a subjective experience, and I'm not trying to drag us down the blind "just enjoy wrestling" road either, of course there is ample room for a discourse on all aspects of wrestling. I think it's just important that everyone is able to feel as though they can have their personal preference on what they enjoy without it being a default "good/bad" situation. All wrestling companies, are a mixed bag in terms of their output and people enjoy different stuff, which is great too.