The Man in Blak

Amen.

Sure, but AEW is still ultimately responsible for that, whether it comes directly from Tony Khan’s pencil or otherwise. If they’re aren’t overseeing any of this stuff from a creative standpoint, then this is a byproduct of them abdicating that oversight. It is unfortunate for Juice that this happened because he’s been operating on another level since he found his heel persona on Collision and I can very easily see him taking the brunt of this, but he had a chance to speak up here too.

Since the other thread is devolving into…whatever it is that’s going on there, I propose we revive this thread to discuss AEW losing to NXT in the ratings and Tony Khan having a normal one on Twitter about it.

I can't get the first part of @NintendoLogic's post to quote for me for some reason, but I'll elaborate further since I was unnecessarily terse in my first post. There are multiple lines to cross when it comes to something like this: you can have an angle that's just bad or ineffective from a creative standpoint...and then you can have an angle that's irresponsible. I've generally seen more criticism here and elsewhere along the lines of the first case ("they stole an idea from ALVAREZ????") but, even when there's been discussion of the second case, Tony Khan and AEW largely get a pass based on prior good will and/or a presumption of ignorance: the TNM "spreadsheet booking" line (which we've already seen in this thread) is a fairly common defense. In either case, I feel like discourse glides past the more pertinent issue that Tony Khan and AEW as a company are ultimately responsible for the content that they produce. Even if this is ultimately being spurred by MJF -- and even if MJF's heart is in the right place -- the company needs to step in and say "no, there are better ways for us to make this point." But we'll see what happens, since MJF and AEW are leaning all the way into it:

Everyone involved will skate until Cornette praises the promo as an example of MJF seeking old-school ethnic babyface heat. Then people will get irate. (At Cornette, of course. AEW has built up too much good will for anyone to bother holding them to any sort of consistent standard for anything.) I refuse to believe that this wouldn’t be an ongoing story coming out of WWE TV this week if it had happened on Raw or NXT.

They absolutely could have done this if they had anything resembling consistent and coherent booking around Danielson up to this point. Roman Reigns only occasionally descends from the heavens to grace Smackdown or a PPV in WWE and that company is in one of its hottest periods in recent history.

AEW arguably hasn't had a coherent direction since the 1-2 punch of the ROH acquisition and Cody leaving. There have been blips here and there where things looked like they might finally be stabilizing -- most notably on PPVs, where it feels like 80% of the roster could be killed in a tragic bus accident and they'd still put on a good show somehow -- but those moments of promise have always been just that: moments, anomalies and outliers in an overall trend of stagnation. I don't really see Copeland as a remedy for this either, though he's certainly the freshest name that they've featured in a while. These YT segments are the first showings he's had in AEW, outside of social media posts of footage from his debut on Wrestledream - the numbers aren't going to get any higher than this without AEW making some significant changes in how it handles itself as a company.

The Bucks are better as heels and, frankly, they’ve been so ice cold for the last couple of years that they desperately needed this, so I get it. I’m just not interested in watching it.

I’m not going to say that the Bucks’ victory lap was the last straw, but it’s certainly makes things easier. Other than Collision, Forbidden Door II and a couple of stray Dynamites where the Collision crew were making appearances, I’ve basically been checked out of AEW since Brawl Out anyway. I’m happy to keep it on the same plane of existence as Impact or New Japan now, where I’ll pop my head in to see matches after the fact that people are raving about (like Danielson/Starks from tonight, apparently), but that’s it. I have wanted more from AEW from the beginning and there have been so many moments where it looked like it could get there, especially early on when the promotion felt like it cracked the code of finding meaningful angles to bring life into athletically impressive -- but utterly synthetic -- modern ringwork. Maybe it’ll get there someday after all. But this is a promotion that feels like it has been in a slow-motion tailspin ever since the ROH acquisition and (yes) the Cody departure. The reason why they could fill an entire roster for Collision is because they have almost an entire indie promotion’s roster full of talent that they’ve squandered, alienated, or just outright forgotten about. The return of CM Punk was just the sales pitch for the island of misfit toys and his firing, as justified as it looks like it may be, isn’t going to fix the culture of dysfunction that’s left behind. Yes, everybody came out with something to prove for the PPV because that’s the only consistent thing that AEW has been able to do in the promotion’s entire history. The wrestlers always work hard; as the cranky grandpa on Christmas Vacation says, so do washing machines. Whenever any of it means a damn thing, just let me know.

Should have never got to this point. TK never should have brought Punk in without explicitly addressing the elephant in the room with Cabana. TK or the EVPs or whoever is allegedly management/leadership in this shitwreck should have squared things away after both Page and Punk were shooting on each other before Brawl Out. TK shouldn’t have brought Punk and the Elite back if they weren’t willing to work with each other; a soft brand split isn’t/wasn’t a solution as much as a deferral of the real problem. Punk is an impossible asshole, but firing him can be both the right decision and also something that’s ultimately more of an indictment on the company rather than the individual.

The investigation can’t proceed until Tony clears concussion protocol after getting hit by a monitor during the fight.

The greatest of all time, now and forever. RIP

I think the general idea comes from two things: - Punk saying he had attempted to reach out to the Bucks during the suspensions and getting rebuffed - The Bucks being religious and some folks using that against them (because they aren’t being as “forgiving” in the Christian sense in this situation) Whether you trust the former or think the latter is fair is up to you, of course.

Work or not, maybe you keep Punk away from live microphones for at least a couple hours after a match. Good episode of Collision otherwise, though.

I had a slightly different read on this. While I think Ruby's overreaction of "either we trust each other or I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands" wasn't well thought out (especially given Tay's background in Judo), I also think Tay actually set a lot of this stuff into motion by apparently not talking with Ruby at all after the injury. Not sure if that last part was kayfabed for the show or not, but that behavior runs counter to the usual wrestling etiquette of following up with someone if you happen to injure them in the ring.

I’ve never been given a reason for GC specifically but I find that, even online, most word counts are meant to triangulate a happy medium between SEO optimization (which generally favors longer pieces), editorial bandwidth (not much at a volunteer site) and content throughput (also limited with volunteer writers). In a world increasingly populated by nine hour Youtube critique videos where written reviews arguably have the least amount of mindshare they’ve ever had with gaming as a whole, I don’t mind aiming to be concise, even if it introduces some interesting challenges with structuring a piece like this.

Yeah, I submitted it on deadline for the embargo, but...things happen. Some of it was CMS troubles, some of it is working with a volunteer site where people are working outside of their regular jobs on editing and publishing. That byline is me, though - we just had to re-associate every piece I wrote for the site (including this one) under a new user to fix everything. @_@ The CAW breakdown was a word count casualty - I was limited to a thousand words - but I would agree that the lack of appearance customization (in particular) was a little disappointing, especially compared to some other wrestling games out there. I had to make a similar compromise on describing the mini-games -- they weren't particularly great mini-games, but I thought they worked well enough as a change of pace for the Road to Elite. And yeah, the baseball one is silly in the best way; of all the ones they did, that's the one that seemed close to being on par with a Mario Party level of minigame quality. And I still don't know how to trigger chain wrestling. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Well, my AEW Fight Forever review is finally out there - it's a month after I filed it for embargo (and after the CMS apparently decided to scramble my byline), but it is live: https://gamecritics.com/stevegillham2gc/aew-fight-forever-review/ There won’t be any revelations or hot takes here; it’s a very tight word count for a more general audience. It’s not even especially well-written…but I’m just happy that it’s published.

Commentary aside, I thought the more methodical opening made sense. It’s a 2/3 falls match; nobody wants to make the first mistake. I actually thought the weakest part of the match was near the beginning of third fall, where the action spilled outside to the crowd. It just felt like a weird diversion for the match that ended up slowing things down a bit too much. Even with that, though, I’d still say it was the best tag match and TV match in AEW history.

Yeah, the body he was dragging into the pit was wearing his old Jungle Boy boots. I actually thought the whole opening of the show was the first sign of life for post-turn Jack Perry - Beethoven's 5th (and the opening, in particular) is such a classical music cliche that it's perfect for someone like Heel Perry to signal that he's above it all. And he did a surprisingly good job heeling it up throughout the match with Hook, including the perfect finish: the smug smile on the pin after he clobbered Hook for his first loss and the FTW title. It's taken him multiple weeks to get here, but maybe now Perry has finally found something that fits for him in this role.

Outside of the gimmicked boot that the Bucks use and maybe Omega, I don't know that anybody else would have taken a weapon-based angle on this sort of match other than Moxley, since he seems to be incapable of eating breakfast at this point unless he's taking a cheese grater to the face of the Waffle House line cook. That said, it's all speculation on my part - who knows who was actually planning what with this match. Which gets to your second point, which I completely agree with - this was the ultimate "wrestlers getting their shit in" match. There wasn't really a protracted violent struggle as much as there was an ongoing your-turn-my-turn exchange of spots; it ended up feeling more like a (bad) hardcore Royal Rumble than a Wargames match.

Moxley brought the right energy -- the shot of him flipping off Ibushi while covered in blood and smashing Omega's hand into the bed of nails with his foot is probably the one iconic image that will survive out of this mess -- but I also feel like he's mostly responsible for bringing a dollar store deathmatch mentality into the match that almost singlehandedly sunk it. Crappy fork spots with no color, a bucket of broken glass that Nick Jackson didn't even bother to sell when he came into the match, a bed of nails that mysteriously couldn't draw blood from Omega when he was body slammed directly on top of it...all of it signaled a level of brutality that superficially felt like an escalation in the moment, but ended up going nowhere because the match ended up going way too long afterwards.