Embrodak

“Assault” is a term with both legal and social dimensions. Regardless of the letter of California’s statutes, I really don’t think a performer playing a bad guy in an interactive show intentionally throwing a drink on a kid to show how bad he is would rise to the average person’s intuitive sense of what “assaulting a child” entails. And if it meets *your* threshold, it is what it is, but I cannot agree that that is a morally or socially proportionate internal calibration. The fact that we live in an incredibly litigious and impersonal society wherein that act *would* have had steeper consequences under other, non-performative circumstances is not proof in and of itself that those steeper consequences are in fact more reflective of the gravity of the act; it’s proof that living in mass society entails stripping context and common sense out of how we adjudicate interpersonal interactions. (Putting on my pretend internet lawyer hat, I’m not convinced a judge wouldn’t take the performative context into account in determining whether the complainants have grounds to sue or whether MJF could actually be charged with anything, but that’s a question for someone with a real internet lawyer hat.) An apology, free tickets, probably a backstage meet-and-greet, and setting firmer boundaries for how your performers interact with fans in the future is perfectly sufficient redress for this, and it’s a much better, healthier lesson in conflict management and resolution for this kid to learn than immediately jumping to the top shelf of outrage, frictionlessly imbuing the absolute worst reaction the kid could have had into the situation, and demanding the guy’s scalp. (Also kinda weird to have that reaction when the company the act occurred in regularly has performers brawling and doing dives into the crowd, which is objectively much more dangerous and could do a lot more damage if it went wrong, as AEW spots have a nasty habit of doing it we’re being honest.)

Yeah I can’t really fathom wanting more than this. It’s not like he slapped the kid.

Look I’m fine with MJF being disciplined for creating unnecessary liability, but pulling out your fainting couch over a heel pouring a drink on a kid is just silly.

Idk, I pretty much always at a minimum enjoy MJF’s singles matches, and I usually think they’re quite worthwhile. While we’ve seen a higher-level shortcoming in his creative faculties the last few weeks, I don’t really see any reason to think he can’t find a bunch of entertaining heel stuff to do so it’s not an hour of “THIS IS WRESTLING/FIGHT FOREVER” stuff.

“Mogul Affiliates” is a terrible group name, and larding someone as talented as Swerve with a green doofus like Parker *before* he’s even gotten himself over as a singles act is ludicrous.

Bray Wyatt had a 4-4.5 star match with Danielson, matches featuring him are rarely proof of anything about the other guy.

Dom going from “embarrassing LARPer nepo baby” to “actually alright and promising” is the feel-good story of the year. Get a fucking physique, get less stiff on the mic, and you might actually have something with him. That whole “son of Eddie” thing having a weird meta resonance 15 years later is hilarious.

I think Roman *has* to go on ice for a while after Mania. It’s booking malfeasance if he doesn’t, you can’t end a titanic reign and have the ex-champ still hanging around all the time. Maybe you could do one rematch, but no more than that. Bring him back to do something big for Summerslam. Would love to see Roman vs Big E if he’s able to come back and decides to do so, or a rematch against Zayn without the title if it makes sense. Wasn’t Edge saying last year he’s prob gonna retire again in August of this year? Roman as Edge’s final opponent could be a good rivalry to return to.

See my post above. Tony let the emotional and psychological core of the feud go back to WWE, and they’re just rehashing a storyline MJF has done before.

Roman was also pretty limited in the ring when he was first pushed, which didn’t help. I know his main event heel run is a little too samey in the ring for some, but I would still say he’s much improved.

Why is Brock wrestling Omos Who gives a shit about Omos

Let’s not forget that this whole fucking feud was supposed to be premised on William Regal as the emotional lynchpin. Regal betraying his FCW protege Moxley to embrace a new young villain that he can mold in his own image, then having divided loyalties when his new ward immediately butts heads with his star pupil, Bryan Danielson. There was a *lot* of juice in that, whereas there is just not two months of material in MJF and Dragon building up to an Iron Man match where the premise is that Danielson thinks MJF is a scrub who can’t hang and was very mean to Regal before he left. MJF eating popcorn with the “only hot chick in Denver” or wherever in a skybox to watch Danielson wrestle is great, but that’s one week. They’re having to get a lot of blood out of a stone without Regal, and I think that explains why MJF is drawing from so many weird wells to try and get this thing to feel like there’s some substance. Re: the fellatio car accident promo, I think Brian Last made a good point on Corny’s show, that that’s the kind of promo MJF should have done in MLW as a 21-year-old, not in AEW as a 26 year old. It could sell a young wrestler in a small promotion as a real piece of shit and get some buzz, whereas it just comes across as awkward coming from someone almost a decade out of high school and the champ of the world’s #2 promotion. It’s not that it was *bad* in some absolute sense, it was just the wrong material for the wrong program at the wrong time in the guy’s life. And in kayfabe, why the fuck would someone confess to a *relatively recent* crime (that he could prob still be prosecuted for) on national television? MJF could do the “I got bullied and you abandoned me” shit against CM Punk and make it work, but you can’t keep talking about high school as an adult and not come across as juvenile. Is he going to be doing Tik Toks about how being in the gifted program fucked him up next? How *should* this program have been booked? Maybe the match could have been announced, with the stipulation that neither guy can touch the other until the PPV, and they each engineer proxy feuds for the other to take up the time until the PPV? That’s kinda what happened with Takeshita, and the MJF/Takeshita match went over well. Could they have expanded on that, conceptually? Maybe MJF could have gotten Hobbs to fuck BD up like he got Wardlow to fuck Punk up, while BD enlists Takeshita to give it back to MJF? Thus getting two young guys over as credible upper card players and not putting MJF in a position to have to get creative to try and imbue this thing with life? I’m just spitballing here, but there has to have been a better way than just asking MJF to invent emotional stakes where there clearly are none.

Fuck Orange Cassidy, and I have plenty of joy.

I really think the extent of the “badness” or “cringe” or whatever is greatly exaggerated in these parts, in fact I think most of it is at least fine taken in isolation, but it seems fair to say that “Ace of the company *and* sustaining a middlingly booked feud that’s a half assed repeat of what he’s done in the past on personality alone” is a little above his skill level at this point.

Well that and it ruled. Haitch’s failure to revitalize the tag team division is my biggest disappointment thus far, in the realm of “things that could actually have happened”. Like I knew he wasn’t gonna fire the writers or change Kevin Dunn’s hyper-streamlined production and formatting, but credible tag teams seems like something he could have done, imo.

Cody at least has Gunther, but they’d have to get the IC title off him first. I’d also be super into him having a program with Damien Priest, but I just know they’d have him fight Finn Balor in a snooze-fest instead.

Dynamite card looking *rough* this week. Mox vs Uno, Yuta vs Orange, tag team battle royal, Saraya vs Skye Blue, Acclaimed vs The Firm, Tony maybe appearing on camera… looks like a two hour Rampage card. Danielson promo and Christian stuff should be good, but it seems like they’re dropping off steeply from those few weeks where it seemed like the old magic was back.

I mean the whole Sami/KO thing is absolute nonsense if considered psychologically. You just kind of have to accept that it’s a private joke between buds and go with it.

Yeah the IWC’s bete noire mentioned recently how one of the arts of booking is striking the balance between giving the audience what they want and making the audience want what you want them to want. I’d say that WWE has done that pretty much perfectly with this storyline thus far. I guess if you just really dislike or are indifferent to Cody, it doesn’t work - that’s true of my dad, for example - but I think Sami losing in Montreal was fine. He got to bask in two nights of adulation and wrestle his highest profile match in front of them. He doesn’t need the title or the win over Roman, and that’s frankly a distraction from the story they’ve been telling, which was about Sami USO, about Reigns trying to use him to keep his belligerent cousin in check but ultimately undermining the stability of the faction that is keeping him on top. Whoever is the creative behind this story, they’re doing a good job for once, and it’s a shame to see the persistence of this antagonism toward the usually overbearing and inorganic WWE creative process the one fucking time in ten years that it actually delivers.

What are we blaming them for? “It’s a huge missed opportunity if it’s not Sami” seems to be an internet phenomenon without much purchase amongst the attending audiences. They’re loving what WWE has been doing with these two storylines, and the way they’re intersecting has complemented both of them. They gave Sami an out by having him basically “win” with no ref in the ring (and Roman, in turn, has the out that he’s not obligated to waste energy kicking out if nobody’s counting), and it makes sense in storyline that it would take two or three top babyfaces working in sync to end the Roman Imperium and Bloodline reign of terror.

Cody has been absolutely killing it and is way over with the WWE audience. It seems really weird to talk about WWE “dropping the ball” when they are poised to exit Wrestlemania with two of the most over babyfaces they’ve had in years. Sami versus Roman was never the main beat of the story, either in terms of screen time or in terms of emotional heft; it was always Sami and Jey’s back and forth. They can have Jey go either direction now and have it make sense, and Sami tearing down the Bloodline and setting the stage for Dusty’s baby boy to win the Big One for his Daddy against a denuded Roman Reigns at the end of his God Mode run is like the most perfect booking I can imagine WWE doing in 2023. This is the rare situation where we can have our cake and eat it too, where the only predictable beat of the story thus far was Cody winning the Rumble and where the “swerves”, such as there have been some, have not been bad Russo bullshit. WWE still sucks overall, we can all still have our Two Minute Hate at Chad Gable having the stupidest gimmick for someone of his talent in years or the asinine decision to rehire Top Dolla, but let’s take our victories where we can get them.

Nervous breakdown or health thing, tbh. Can’t imagine anything else breaking the money mark autohypnosis.

The thing I love about Reigns is he really has a signature swagger, a way he carries himself that is distinctively “him”.

Keith Lee looked rough last night.

If TK meant it as a joke, AH calling TK “snowman” seems to imply he didn’t take it as a joke.