NintendoLogic

Here's Kylie Rae on her departure from AEW. Make of it what you will.

I know firsthand how crippling depression can be, and I wish Mauro all the best in his personal life. But if your mental state is such that you can't deal with trolls on social media, you're probably better off not being a public figure. Of course, it doesn't help when you have coworkers doing shit like this: Corey Graves ripping anyone's announcing, particularly on the grounds of not letting other members of the broadcast team get a word in edgewise, is truly the pot calling the kettle black.

Mauro deleted his Twitter. I hope you guys are proud of yourselves. Anyway, it sounds like skipping this show was the right call. I don't even particularly care for the classic War Games matches, so a WWE workrate version with silly weapon spots and towers of doom and cage dives is certain to do less than nothing for me.

I cancelled my Network subscription after Hell in a Cell, but I'm seriously considering re-upping just to see Brock/Rey.

The deal with Cornette and Justin Roberts reminds me of a couple of months ago when some people were trying to make a big deal out of Nyla Rose responding to a transphobic troll on Twitter by asking if he was molested as a child. It's all bullshit on both sides. Completely insincere weaponized outrage.

I think it's far more likely that he's just a reckless fool and will be for the rest of his (probably short) life. The fact that he took his ring name from two famously self-destructive punk rockers doesn't exactly scream long-term perspective.

I'd like to see Shayna/Charlotte at some point. They're both in dire need of fresh opponents, they match up well stylistically, and Shayna is probably the one person Charlotte could face and have the crowd completely behind her.

I continue to be taken aback by how technically unsound Riho is. She's a joshi dojo product who's been wrestling for 13 years, but she looks like she just got out of the Performance Center. Nothing she does looks crisp at all. She does have a connection with the audience, and AEW's women's division isn't exactly a murderer's row, so it's not that big a deal. Still, it is rather jarring.

Guerrillas of Destiny (Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa). EDIT: beaten to it Anyway, I'm shocked to see a Sinclair subsidiary behave so unethically.

The "90 miles" botch was scripted. "90 days" was not. Of course, that's the length of WWE's non-compete. Could it have been a Freudian slip? Looking forward, the 12/23 Raw seems guaranteed to set a new record low rating. Not only is it the Christmas Raw, it's going head-to-head with Packers/Vikings on MNF. I wouldn't be surprised if all three hours ended up with under 2 million viewers.

Cornette likened the way he felt when Meltzer defended Marko Stunt to finding out a close friend was a Trump supporter, so jumping on the MAGA gravy train would be a pretty severe volte-face.

NWA White Powerrr.

Lagana is the one who edits the shows. I don't know if he's the sole editor, but he's the one in charge.

Something tells me that we shouldn't expect much in the way of contrition.

These weekly WWE threads should consist entirely of British people taking the piss out of the company.

I'm sure Cornette was thinking mainly in the sense of Ethiopia being a famine-stricken region (which is a dated reference in itself given that We Are the World was recorded over 30 years ago). But anyone with an ounce of common sense should know that fried chicken is such a heavily racialized trope that it's better to just avoid referencing it. At the very least, someone should have caught it in post-production.

Dave has a clear double standard when it comes to the HOF. When people would point to Sting's world titles and main events, he'd dismiss them because it's not supposed to be the Hall of Pushes. But with Orton, it's a feather in his cap.

Cena/Orton became insufferable after WWE beat it into the ground, but their very first match (at Summerslam 2007) is a genuine classic.

You should know by now how I feel about triple threat matches, bubba. Remember how Wrestlemania 2000 was nothing but multi-man matches and it sucked and everyone hated it? There was a tendency for WWE PPVs that didn't look so hot on paper to overdeliver, but Hell in a Cell ended that streak with a vengeance.

The Survivor Series card outside of Brock/Rey is looking positively dire. I know I should be excited for the Universal title match, and if anyone can get a decent match out of Bray, it's Bryan. But it seems more likely than not that there'll be some Fiend bullshit to turn the match into a joke. Something like one of the Firefly Fun House puppets knocking Bryan out with a mallet.

In his lawsuit, Johnson claimed there was dashcam footage of Charlotte making racist remarks to police officers. WWE settled with him out of court. That's very unlike them, which leads me to believe he had some serious dirt on Charlotte and they cut him a check to buy his silence.

It stands to reason that WWE largely mails it in during the fall precisely because of the competition from the NFL. I don't think it's a coincidence that the bulk of the Wrestlemania build takes place in the sports dead zone between the Super Bowl and March Madness.

You guys are seriously underselling Chiefs/Chargers. The outcome will play a massive role in determining who wins the AFC West, so it has major playoff implications. As for King Corbin, a big part of the problem is the inherent silliness of the King of the Ring gimmick. Wearing regalia to the ring while making no significant changes to your overall gimmick would make anyone look like a dork.

UFC isn't no-holds-barred combat, though. It's a sport with rules. Harley Race would've gotten destroyed in UFC, but he could more than hold his own in a bar fight.

My main issue with deathmatch/garbage wrestling isn't the danger involved, although that is a concern. What it comes down to is that I find the use of things like barbed wire and mousetraps as weapons, even in gimmicked form, inherently barbaric. They're not items that would normally be at ringside, and the pain they inflict isn't the kind of incapacitating pain that would put someone down for a three-count. Wrestlers using them on each other is far removed from a simulated combat sport or even a simulated street fight. It's closer to a simulated human cockfight.