NintendoLogic

I wish Logan Paul wasn't such a scumbag because he just seems to have an intuitive grasp of pro wrestling.

Orton in that stage of his career where he's just having fun out there.

I always enjoy being reminded of how much better pro athletes are than the rest of us. Bron Breakker is so freakishly gifted it's almost absurd and he got cut in training camp.

That was pretty dope as well. We're off to a hell of a start so far.

Oh shit, they got fucking Slayer. This has already blown away night 1.

That match got really good by the end. I'll be surprised if anything beats it out for MOTN.

Starting out with Stephanie McMahon is not the most auspicious beginning, to say the least.

It's a pretty common metaphor for someone who continuously holds positions of influence and prominence despite being widely loathed. Nobody likes cockroaches, but you can't get rid of them. Since Mania has become a two-night event, it seems like night 1 has been the workrate night and night 2 has been the sports entertainment night. If that pattern holds true, tonight will be pretty dire from an in-ring standpoint. Cody/Cena should at least deliver as a spectacle.

As much as I hate to admit it, El Grande Americano being billed from the Gulf of America will always pop me.

If Jacob Fatu can't wake this crowd up, this show is beyond hope.

Is it just me or is this crowd totally dead? It seems like they're hardly reacting to anything.

The Harris campaign objectively did a good job. None of you are ready for that conversation, though. As for Punk, expecting him to walk out of the company and subject himself to a breach of contract lawsuit just because the company's executives support the current administration is extremely unreasonable. Nobody expected WWE's Canadian wrestlers to quit after Trump threatened to make Canada the 51st state. By the way, Punk also said the following: "I don’t think the company (WWE) wants us to be outwardly political. I don’t think, and I do feel there is probably different rules for different people. I don’t talk about politics with Triple H, Paul Heyman, Roxanne Perez. It’s 24/7 wrestling. I think it’s pretty obvious what my ‘politics’ are." I'm a bit surprised to see Heyman on that list since he supposedly liked to give AJ Styles grief about being a smooth-brained conspiracy theorist (then again, that did come from rovert, so you have to consider the source).

Mania becoming a two-night event was probably a bigger blow to the indy shows than anything else. With that said, most of the young'uns are better off working actual matches with different opponents in front of different audiences than they would be having a cup of coffee in the Andre the Giant Battle Royal.

The flying headbutt is hands-down the dumbest move in wrestling history. Not only is it a virtually guaranteed ticket to a wheelchair or worse, it doesn't even look good from a work standpoint since it's plain as day the person delivering it is taking the brunt of the impact. As for Benoit, the concussions obviously didn't help, but blaming them is too simplistic. Plenty of other wrestlers took horrifying bumps while abusing steroids and other drugs, but none of them murdered their children. Researchers of familicides divide them into four main categories: Self-righteous: The killer seeks to locate blame for his crimes upon the mother whom he holds responsible for the breakdown of the family. This may involve the killer phoning his partner before the murder to explain what he is about to do. For these men, their breadwinner status is central to their idea of the ideal family. Disappointed: This killer believes his family has let him down or has acted in ways to undermine or destroy his vision of ideal family life. An example may be disappointment that children are not following the traditional religious or cultural customs of the father. Anomic: In these cases the family has become firmly linked in the mind of the killer to the economy. The father sees family as the result of his economic success, allowing him to display his achievements. However, if the father becomes an economic failure, he sees the family as no longer serving this function. Paranoid: Those who perceive an external threat to the family. This is often social services or the legal system, which the father fears will side against him and take away the children. Here the murder is motivated by a twisted desire to protect the family. If I were to hazard a guess as to Benoit's mental state, I'd say it was a mix of paranoid and anomic with maybe a bit of self-righteous. I don't know if he would have killed his family if he had become an insurance salesman, but he likely had a few screws loose before entering the business.

What about Daniel? It would be a lot easier to explain or at least rationalize if Nancy had been Chris's only victim. The fact that he killed his kid is what makes it so incomprehensible.

If WWE has hit a plateau, could that simply be due to the economy as a whole? I've long theorized that external economic factors play a bigger role in how hot a company is than most fans like to admit, so I wouldn't be surprised if all the recent uncertainty causes WWE to cool off somewhat. By the way, the Jacob Fatu/Braun Strowman LMS match is my current MOTY. You can always count on an Anoa'i to deliver in that environment.

I do enjoy a good trainwreck, so that segment was right up my alley. It was amusing how Tiffany bailed right after dropping the 0-3 line like she was afraid Charlotte would beat her ass for real if she stuck around. I don't know if they worked themselves into a shoot or there was always animosity between the two, but I'm pretty sure they genuinely hate each other at this point. It also continues to be hilarious how Charlotte has no problem going off-script when it suits her but gets completely flustered any time someone flips the script on her.

Tony Halme really is an ideal DSOTR subject. His life was unquestionably fascinating and certainly tragic in a sense. At the same time, he was so irredeemable as a human being that it's hard to have any sympathy for him. I was a bit disappointed they didn't touch on his time in RINGS since that was his best work from an in-ring perspective, but that's to be expected from a production aimed at a mass audience.

In other news... https://x.com/WrestleOps/status/1907493851209539784 And on Rusev Day, no less. Not gonna lie, Gunther/Rusev will probably bang hard.

Not only did the gimmick play into the most vile and offensive racial stereotypes, James Harris believed that years of wrestling barefoot were at least partially responsible for the foot problems that led to both of his legs being amputated. So no, you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Kamala (the gimmick, not the wrestler). For what it's worth, Harris thought that Lawler, who came up with the gimmick, was not racist himself but knew how to exploit the racism of fans to sell tickets.

I don't know if he trash talked Gino, but he said something to the effect of "We've had two terrible tragedies this past week: Chris Adams is blind and Gino Hernandez is dead" on World Class TV after Gino died (they had just done an angle where Gino blinded Adams with Freebird hair cream). Of course, you can't really hold that against him since he was just following orders.

Charlotte ate Tiffany alive here. Even in split-screen interviews, she must pose.

The Cena segment was a pretty big letdown, to be honest. It seemed intriguing at the start when he came out with the same entrance music and ring gear (he even dropped one of his cornball Twitter affirmations), but then it turned into a ChatGPT-tier YOU PEOPLE promo. And Cody didn't even offer an explanation for not wanting to immediately go for the throat of the guy who kicked him in the balls and busted him open with his father's Rolex. To top it all off, it was in front of a typical godawful Euro crowd. I don't know why European wrestling fans are so in love with the sound of their own voices that they feel the need to burst into chants every ten seconds, but I fully support imposing tariffs to get them back in line.

The Punk/Rollins cage match flirted with greatness, but it was brought down to Earth by finisher spam and the inherent silliness of winning a match by running away from your opponent. Regardless, I appreciate that Punk is seemingly the only guy today who can make exchanging blows feel like a fight rather than sadomasochistic performance art.

You mean Kickboxer, right?