AEW WrestleDream 2025 Discussion

[Hannibal Scorch]

Seeing the @The King Of Swing call Fletcher bland after that match has me clutching my pearls.

[The King Of Swing]

Honestly I just don't think that Fletcher has "it". 

Maybe it's the Don Callis connection that's soured me on him, over time. 

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

I wasn’t keen on the 11 belts Mone stuff to begin with but breaking it down it’s even more ridiculous given 1 title isn’t even a proper belt (the Women’s Owen Cup one), one is part of a unified title (the Queen of Southside one) and the newest one is a stand in because the actual champion is out injured (ROH Interim TV title)

[Supremo]

Although I attempted to avoid spoilers, I’d seen a headline about a HUGE HEEL TURN, and then also caught a glimpse of Santa Sting’s return, so going into this show I was expecting the Defcon-1 of big angles, with Sting turning heel and revealing a Death Rider logo on the back of his puffer jacket! Thank heavens that didn’t happen! Imagine Sting’s perfect retirement being sullied by him becoming the Plastic Bag Grandad!

An enjoyable, inconsequential show. Loads of good wrestling I mostly didn’t care about.

Wild that anyone could be up in arms about that daft main event. Considering what I was expecting, it was tame as fuck. A silly cartoon. They missed a trick not having Darby spit out a goldfish when his head came out of the tank for the second or third time.

This was obviously the highlight of the show. The perfect antidote to pro-wrestling’s worst trope. Some people don’t want to co-exist!

[The King Of Swing]

Surely it HAS TO BE Okada Vs. Takeshita in the Continental Classic final, right? 

I was delighted that they resisted putting the belts on them. Long may Brodido rule the tag division. 

[RedTwoster]

11 hours ago, sukhy said:

I get that, that's fine, but Wrestling has been pushing the envelope for years.

Triple H was hitting people with a Sledgehammer for 15 years.

Undertaker was zipping people in body bags.

Hell, even Jake got Damian to bite Randy Savage.

Firstly, that’s Whataboutism, secondly the question of whether wrestling should push the envelope is just as valid now as it was back then. I wasn’t bothered by the spot in question, but the fact that enough people are means it’s worth considering that. If spots like that turn off a section of the audience, are they worth doing at all? It’s a perfectly valid discussion, and the counterpoint shouldn’t be dismissal, it should be an argument as to why they’re worth doing. 

11 hours ago, sukhy said:

The quality of the wrestling on the show was outstanding, probably one of the best bell to bell shows AEW have ever done.

I enjoyed the show, but I wouldn’t go that far - I mean, look at the competition. But even if you treat that viewpoint as the gospel truth, the fact it’s still being overshadowed by the Allin/Moxley match should tell you something. The people complaining on this thread clearly aren’t doing it in bad faith, they’ve seen the show. And if they don’t like it, they’re just as entitled to say that as I am to say it didn’t bother me.

[LaGoosh]

I feel like I've seen quite a few attempted drowning spots over the years in wrestling. I can think of at least three off the top of my head.

Brodido are great. Bandido in particular is excellent, but I despise the 21 Plex finisher. It's one of those moves that requires the person taking it to manoeuvre themselves into an unnatural position in a contrived way. At least when Rey does the 619 he has offence designed specifically to get his opponent laying on the ropes in position for it. I don't really like the weird Go 2 Sleep type move he does either. Too convoluted!

Edited October 20, 2025 by LaGoosh

[RedTwoster]

42 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I feel like I've seen quite a few attempted drowning spots over the years in wrestling. I can think of at least three off the top of my head.

Personally, I didn’t even take it as an attempted drowning, he wasn’t in the water for long at all. It was controlling his ability to breath and effectively torturing him. Moxley screaming ‘don’t make me do this’ and seemingly being unwilling to go too far added a wrinkle to it that might be picked up on come Wednesday - Mox has long accused his enemies of being unwilling to do what needs to be done. Here’s an example of Moxley being in that exact situation. What will the other Death Riders make of that? It’s why I love @FLips’s tremendous suggestion that Moxley should have quit, knowing the only way he could stop Darby would be literal murder. 

The finish should move the Death Riders story on, and that certainly would have. But even what they did could be presented as such. Add this to the failed recruitment of Statlander and defeat to Hangman Page, you have a leader who is no longer getting the job done. On Dynamite, I’d love to see the other Death Riders ousting Moxley, having Garcia - who has been brilliant as of late - step up to the plate as their new leader. 

[LaGoosh]

24 minutes ago, RedTwoster said:

Add this to the failed recruitment of Statlander and defeat to Hangman Page, you have a leader who is no longer getting the job done. On Dynamite, I’d love to see the other Death Riders ousting Moxley, having Garcia - who has been brilliant as of late - step up to the plate as their new leader. 

I was with you until that last bit. I love Garcia but he's not ready for that. And the visual of small babyfaced Garcia ordering around Pac and Claudio would be absurd. 

To me the way forward is clear. It has to be Claudio who ousts Moxley. When it's come down to the person who actually drops the hammer and does the kill it is always Claudio. Reveal him to be the real evil all along. Then you have a beaten, battered and broken Moxley having to fight off the new Deathriders because there's no one in the world willing to help him after the past year. Well...maybe one man. You all know who.

[BomberPat]

24 minutes ago, RedTwoster said:

 Moxley screaming ‘don’t make me do this’ and seemingly being unwilling to go too far added a wrinkle to it that might be picked up on come Wednesday - Mox has long accused his enemies of being unwilling to do what needs to be done. Here’s an example of Moxley being in that exact situation.

This is something that Moxley was really hammering in this match, and the last one, and that nobody else in the company seems to really be exploring all that much - one of the faults of AEW allowing wrestlers a lot of creative freedom is that the commentators don't always seem to be clued in on the story they're supposed to be telling, and the Death Riders in particular have been victim to this.

Moxley's dynamic with Darby Allin is weird. He claims to love him, and to care about him, and initially that was all obviously a ploy to try and coerce Darby into handing over his World Title shot at the start of this angle, but maybe now Mox actually believes it. After the Casket match he wanted to be alone with Darby and almost pay his respects, after dismissing the other Death Riders. In this match, he was talking about how the other Death Riders, the crowd, and the ref, all don't care about Darby but he does. I don't really care for that kind of in-ring monologuing, but Moxley's motivation doesn't seem to be wanting to put Darby out, it's wanting to save him from himself.

It doesn't scan perfectly, but Mox claimed at the start of the Death Riders that it was inspired by American History X, and it feels like Darby is supposed to be the Danny to his Derek.

[LaGoosh]

It's a weird one because yeah multi-layered storytelling is a good thing...but not always. Wrestling is a very broad and unsubtle medium - it's sometimes very easy for things to be lost, overlooked, seem messy or overly complicated if they're not laid out clearly. Some type of storytelling just doesn't really fit the mould of what professional wrestling is at it's core. The Deathriders/Darby stuff already has absolutely loads going on with it and is already pretty messy - once you start adding in a weird and ambiguous father/son dynamic to it I think you start to lose the thread.

Edited October 20, 2025 by LaGoosh

[BomberPat]

Yeah, I tend to think that when the story requires you to shout your motivations out loud in the middle of a match, then wrestling probably isn't the right medium for that story - Bret Hart didn't spend the I Quit Match with Steve Austin shouting, "I can't beat him, and I'm so angry about it that now I'm the bad guy", because everyone involved trusted that wrestling was sufficient to tell the story they were telling, and that any nuance or explanation could be handled by commentary, because that's what they're there for. The trend towards main event wrestling being full of monologues is one of the things that completely turned me off WWE, and I would rather not see it in AEW either.

The problem is that they've never been clear on what the Death Riders story was. From the beginning, it was Moxley bullshitting, but everybody took it at face value - neither commentators or babyfaces were calling him a hypocrite, and so the story didn't really add up (to say nothing of the amount of people who bizarrely thought it was a "higher power" story or that it was a prelude to Shane McMahon coming in!). It's only really Hangman Page, and to a much lesser extent Darby Allin, who made it clear that Moxley was only interested in himself, and that all the rhetoric was a distraction from that - the running thing of him panicking when he starts getting choked out is one of the few bits of consistency.

 

I don't think Claudio should be the one to take Moxley out. Marina should be. She has been by Mox's side more than anyone, and knows his weaknesses more than anyone, and her recognising that he's outlived his usefulness for her idea of the Death Riders is the most interesting outcome for me. The problem, as it always has been with Marina, is that there's no satisfying pay-off to her being involved in main event male wrestling angles, when the best pay-off you can hope for is her getting carried to the back like a child throwing a tantrum, and it still needs to be one of the male Death Riders carrying the in-ring side of things.

What I've been suggesting for a while is that any schism in the Death Riders basically exposes who is a true believer in what Moxley was selling, and who was riding it for their own selfish reasons - I would put PAC and Claudio in the latter, and then Marina, Yuta and Garcia as the true believers; I think Marina forcing Yuta to put Moxley out is the move.

[Supremo]

Meltzer reporting on Observer Radio that the Missouri Pro Wrestling Commission put restrictions on this show regarding blood and crowd brawling, which probably explains why the main event was nowhere near as violent or nasty as expected.

Quite funny to imagine Moxley getting to the building, angrily reading through the list of stuff he wasn’t allowed to do, then furiously storming off, Googling where the closest Pet Shop was.

Whilst I haven’t minded Darby vs. Mox, it’s been so messy and daft that it makes me extra happy they went with Hangman at All In. Crazy to think there’s an alternative universe out there where they don’t suddenly discover this time last year that Danielson’s neck is now made exclusively of Choc Lick and Darby doesn’t decide to climb Everest. In those circumstances, there’s every chance Darby wins the World Title instead.

I like Darby. He’s an amazing wrestler. But he and Hangman are so many levels apart when it comes to making me care about their characters. Darby Allin would never be Champion of the Fuckin’ World. Champion of the Fuckin’ Skatepark, at best. Bet he can’t even ID flowers!

Edited October 20, 2025 by Supremo

[RedTwoster]

3 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

I was with you until that last bit. I love Garcia but he's not ready for that. And the visual of small babyfaced Garcia ordering around Pac and Claudio would be absurd. 

To me the way forward is clear. It has to be Claudio who ousts Moxley. When it's come down to the person who actually drops the hammer and does the kill it is always Claudio. Reveal him to be the real evil all along. Then you have a beaten, battered and broken Moxley having to fight off the new Deathriders because there's no one in the world willing to help him after the past year. Well...maybe one man. You all know who.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I don’t think Claudio has the ability to play that leader role - or any sort of upside if they were to do that. That’s why I favour Garcia, although I’d have preferred someone like Statlander or even Darby. Heck, that’s what I’d probably do - the Death Riders come out on Dynamite and surround Darby implying an attack, they round on Moxley, before Darby himself joins in. Moxley has shown that he’s unwilling to go as far as it takes to get things done - whereas Darby has shown that he’s unwilling is willing to do that. 

Darby has behaved like a psychopath and while he’s smaller, the fact he’s willing to go too far still makes him dangerous. I think he has what it takes to be a decent heel, and and eventual heel Darby vs Hangman feud could be a compelling story - particularly given that Hangman has recently returned from the dark side himself.

Heel Darby might flop, but AEW needs new top villains. It’s hard to see who else that could be in the short term, so I think it’s in their interest to roll the dice on someone unexpected or different.

[The King Of Swing]

The Death Riders started with Mox and needs to end with Mox, imo. 

Only idea worse than that colossal bore Claudio taking over would be Jericho.