sek69

Popping for guys in jeans and t shirts for a streetfight style matches.

It's long been a (somewhat overlooked) Vince fetish to give women only one name.

Breaking news: MJF is still great. Film at 11.

This may all be 100% true, but it's something how nothing that went bad anywhere he went was never Eric's fault.

Yeah he was one of those weirdly anti AEW types from the start.

Also they totally need to do a Midnight Rider gimmick with Moxley where he comes back as the masked Mr. Good now.

It's still real to them, dammit. Also $10,000 is just the cost of doing business there. It's hardly the harbinger of doom.

That's absolutely true, but I think the argument can be made that wrestling fans just aren't liking the crowdless shows. I don't think it's a coincidence that AEW's drops are lower (granted they had less audience to start with) because they've put more of an attempt in to make shows look as "normal" as possible. WWE TV has just been strange to watch, with entirely empty arenas and wrestlers having to still do their video game entrances and poses to crowds that aren't there. WWE's style has just been so exposed as rigid and inflexible at a time when the whole world had to change how they do things, they keep doing things as if nothing different is going on.

I will say the best part of Raw by far was Asuka trying to resist being able to sing Nia Jax's theme song as she came out for that MVP segment.

I'm not saying I think it's what they are doing, but if someone wanted to argue that Vince is trying to do some "The Producers" shit and purposefully make a bad show I would at least hear them out.

Inserting Roman into a WM main even for reasons is the kind of thing that turned people against him in the first place, so I would suspect a lot of people saw that as opening old wounds. I'm at the stage where Roman's a sympathetic character to me for how the company has so badly bungled making him a top guy when it should have been a slam dunk. He's one of the most charismatic people you'll see when he's away from WWE TV, and it seems his biggest flaw as a performer is not having that ability to spin the shit he's given by creative into gold.

Dr. D seemed like the most straightforward person though. He felt he had to do what he did to protect his livelihood and felt betrayed that his boss didn't have his back. Now you can fault him for expecting Vince to have any kind of loyalty that wasn't a top level star, but I never got the sense he was bullshitting at any point.

Considering the ladder match was set up due to Shawn losing the IC title due to a flare up of not-gonna-job-itis, you could make the claim the seed were already planted for the Kliq to run amok.

it actually would, since he'd either be forced to up his game or get eaten alive. I'd be down to watch either. Corbin seems like a guy who "gets" wrestling and would probably be more palatable in an environment not so micromanged.

Next show is going to be about Herb Abrams, which is the one I've been waiting for all season.

It was as if since he couldn't convince Harley to no show and jump to the WWF, he decided to convince damn near every other main eventer of the time to do so instead.

Tiger Mask/Dynamite might be the most influential match of all time. Not only was it responsible for creating junior style in Japan, pretty much the entire current generation of wrestlers across the world grew up basing themselves either on that match directly or on wrestlers who were influenced by it.

It always seemed that Shane was more like his mother and Steph is more like her dad. Shane doesn't seem to have enough "ruthless aggression" for lack of a better term, and Vince probably sees that as weakness. He ended up getting frustrated like a lot of the wrestlers do at his ideas constantly getting shot down, plus getting politically outmaneuvered by his own sister probably stung a little too, so he saw the writing on the wall and left. In the end I think a lot of it came down to Steph just being way more savvy and Vince-like, and Shane just not being alpha enough for daddy to care.

It would make sense in Vince's super alpha male brain that since he took over from his dad, that Shane would be the one to take it over from him. In fact, I'd have to look at the timelines to make sure but it certainly seems like Vince's obsession with brass rings and those who grab them really ramped up after Shane left the company in 2009. I don't pretend to have any special access to Vince's brain (and I'd probably be scared to look inside if I did), but I wouldn't be surprised if all the last second plan changes and randomly throwing folks overboard all while claiming to enjoy being challenged by someone bold is all just overcompensation for not being manly enough in his own eyes to be able to sire a proper heir to the kingdom. I couldn't think of anything being a bigger failure in Vinceworld than not having your son take over the company.

Why does Bayley look like she's been using Trump's tanning googles?

I think it was kind of understated that all these old timey rasslin' guys thought exposing the business would bring everything crashing down and they'd all starve.....and then Vince just goes ahead and does it to get tax breaks and wrestling goes on to be way bigger than it ever was before years later. It's almost as like all of that worrying was just based on workers self conscious about being workers and/or promoters preying on that to keep the boys under their thumb. John Stossel kind of had both sides going, he absolutely did deserve to get paid because slapping the shit out of a reporter because he dared question the integrity of your fake fighting is bullshit. However it probably was lost on him that he ended up handling it exactly like a worker would. Even if it was more of a "fuck you" at some point, they kind of deserved it, y'know? Dr. D came off best, for better or worse he is what he is and makes no excuses. He came off way more honest than most guys of his era.

Johnny Gargano is quickly showing (not unlike our boy Seth) that he's a lot more palatable as a douchey heel. Evil Candice was just as amazing as I was hoping it would be, even if her Disney fetish has to peek through with the name of her new finish. Damian Priest should have a job for life doing voice over work for all the hype videos WWE produces going forward. Dude can sound like the coolest motherfucker in the room just reading a shopping list. Next week looks to be pretty stacked as well, but at some point we're going to have to come to terms with Charlotte being put over all the NXT women even if it means we get great matches leading up to it.

I love these Taz segments where he breaks it down like a football play.

I need a segment of Tony checking out a death metal show at some point when we're allowed to do such things.

OK that parade of cameos in the Bubbly Bunch was great.