Embrodak

Almost everyone on the Jericho Facebook fan page has probably had Covid so many times at this point that they’ve lost more gray matter than Foley.

I didn’t say it was. Every story we got out of the locker room before the brawl, other than the Cabana rumor, was that Punk was seen as a leader who was trying to bring young guys up, very generous with his time and attention. After the brawl, we got that one report that said Punk watched *everything*, even Dark, which makes sense if Punk was an under-the-table EVP or in the office in some way, as some reports indicated he was. The fact that they’ve settled on a particular narrative exiting all this in order to sweep it into the past, possibly without having even interviewed Ace Steel’s wife, one of the principal witnesses, if that one report is to be believed, doesn’t mean I have to go along with it, nor the clear agenda some parties have in using the fallout to get themselves over. If I have to pick a cancer, I’m going with the Covid-spreading, Capitol-riot-supporting clout shark who is setting an example that “good behavior” in the wrestling business is to buoy your own relevance at the expense of everything else. Punk was self-necrotizing when he buried the company and started a fight, but “cancer”? In terms of what cancer actually does, namely suck up resources and grow itself without contributing anything of value back to the body? In terms of how cancer actually starts, i.e. the mutation of previously functional tissue? Sorry, Chris, but you should maybe talk to the hem/onc specialist that put you on Eliquis, have him take a biopsy of any randomly-selected bit of tissue, see what the findings are.

Also, Jericho calling Punk a cancer when he is the guy who attaches himself to hot stars and angles and drains them of all their relevance and vitality, and the guy whispering terrible ideas in Tony’s ear as the company pisses away its years of good will trying to build up an RoH brand it was not in fact required to buy, is comical. Punk was making the product demonstrably better with his presence, while Jericho has been making it markedly worse with his self-indulgent bullshit and warmed-over Vinceisms.

I mean that’s the thing, maybe wrestling didn’t “need” a Punk return, but it sure as fuck needed (and still needs) somebody to do what Punk was doing! Maybe lifting Bret sequences was a hack way of doing it sometimes, but that style is both better to watch and significantly safer than some bastard hybrid of RoH, NJPW, and PWG.

I didn’t even understand why people thought that was an incredible angle. They did a heel package for Starks, then Hook comes out for some reason to do the open challenge, then Starks loses, then he does a tearful baby face promo, then Hobbs turns on him for reasons that took *weeks* to actually get him on the screen to explain and were, frankly, weak. Starks should already be a credible main eventer, even with the time out for injury, and Hobbs should either be there as well or on the precipice. The notion that that time was better spent on endless Degrassi-level melodrama between Page and the Elite, or Jericho and his shenanigans, is just silly.

Signing with WBD is exactly why kicking Punk, a ratings draw, out is a silly decision. Also, “with abandon”, lol. Dude had a lawsuit with an ex-friend because their friendship broke when a multi-billion dollar company tried to sue them into oblivion. Punk beat the WWE when they tried to prove he was a liar, and beat Colt when Colt was trying to prove Punk screwed him over. There’s one party here with a public record of being truthful in the least worked environment these carny fucks ever set foot in, and it ain’t the Elite.

Corny did so recently, it wasn’t pretty. Way too many.

Did they “bring legal with them”? What we know is that she was there at some point after the fight started and took the dog away from the vicinity of the fight, and we have a rumor that the Bucks were talking to her beforehand. Setting aside that these people (especially the fucking head of legal, who maybe should have intuited that Punk’s rant had contract implications that shouldn’t be handled absent Tony) still should have known not to go barging in a guy’s room when he was clearly banged up, bleeding, and pissed off, is it “They brought legal with them to keep everything above board” or “Legal followed them when they told her their birdbrained plan to go confront this guy ASAP”? Also, I know we’re all just blindly believing Meltzer when he says the thing about Larry the dog was bullshit because “eyewitnesses denied it” (no shit! The eyewitnesses have as strong a vested interest in denying it as Punk does in spreading it) and “he would have told me earlier” (lol, the fucking ego on this guy), but A) it explains why Punk was so pissed off he would throw the first punch better than anything else, and B ) it explains why Megha and Omega have both been claimed to have been trying to take care of the dog, as it makes very little sense so much attention would be diverted to the dog in such a chaotic situation. Punk is an asshole, but he’s never really been a liar.

Ring Rust Bray vs Ring Rust Bo is a struggle feud if ever there was one.

Love ya, stro, but your personal dislike of CM Punk is, frankly, a lot stronger than most of his stans' love of him. Been following you since the GAF and Legit Shook days, and you talked shit about things he was *right* about, like the lawsuit he won against the WWE doctor, arguing that he was complaining about behaviors that any big company would have engaged in. Right or wrong, I don't think there's a world where you would have given him a fair hearing in all of this. On-topic: I'm sorry, but no matter how much Punk's Bret Hart-gumming annoyed anybody on a personal or aesthetic level, the notion that AEW is better off with Moxley, Jericho, the Bucks, and Omega as the tastemakers and advice-givers is fucking ludicrous. Every one of them but Moxley is operating off of a perception of wrestling that is two or three years passe at this point, and Moxley is basically just doing shitty Terry Funk - which is to say, doing basically the same thing CM Punk is doing, just with a different icon as the locus of his imitation game. The proof anyone needs that AEW is not a serious company with long-term potential is that literally no major promotion in history with even half a mind toward its own aggrandizement and growth would want to kick CM Punk out over the shit that transpired at All Out. Put him on a tighter leash, sure. Give him less dates, maybe. Spend millions buying his contract out? That's something you can literally only do if you have a billionaire daddy who just wants to see you happy and playing with your inheritance before he dies. I don't care how "wrong" he is, an unwillingness or inability to make money off of all this is a Deadly Carny Sin. That's setting aside how silly it is to create a locker room where your creative vision and business strategy holds basically no water with people as compared to their personal relationships with a coterie of insiders.

Idk, some of those moves Athena was hitting were on the reckless side, esp. that drop out of the ring and that dropkick through the barrier. Also, one must consider the difference between a PLE match and a Dark match a few thousand people will see, in terms of whether it's responsible to work that stiff or responsible to ask a debuting wrestler to take those stiff shots for you. As for WWE vs AEW, WWE is def a lot more open to reckless shit than it used to be, but I am dubious that you could do as many compilations of people landing on their head for them as have been done for AEW. Would be a good vector of statistical analysis, though. WWE definitely wouldn't let Sammy and Darby do the stupid shit they do as often as they do it, I can say that much.

To be fair, we don't actually know if it was Punk threatening to sue. Could have been the EVPs threatening to sue if Ace doesn't get the boot, which is what I'm sure Punk was fighting against.

Idk, way too many videos of people in AEW being dropped on their head or falling on their head doing flippies for me to chalk it up to pure randomness. AEW wrestlers are encouraged and/or incentivized to have longer, more intricately laid out matches than are typical for a promotion of their size, increasing the wear and tear on their bodies and increasing the probability that even innocuous-seeming moves can have bad consequences. This is counterbalanced somewhat by their lack of house shows, but then you have the counterintuitive thing some guys mention where wrestling more frequently actually locks in the muscle memory and makes the matches hurt less. Like I said, you can chalk up individual incidents to randomness, but there does seem to be a lot of recklessness toward self and others in the wrestling culture of AEW that management really should crack down on.

You know, any individual incident can be chalked up to bad luck (or bad health/genetics in Punk's' case), but at some point, AEW needs to get a handle on their high injury rate. This year alone, you have Orange Cassidy, CM Punk twice, Adam Cole, Adam Page, Kyle O'Reilly, Fenix, Christian Cage, Ruby Soho, Thunder Rosa, Santana, Kris Statlander, Darius Martin, Leyla Hirsch, Scorpio Sky, Lee Johnson, Alex Reynolds, and Red Velvet. WWE also has a lot of injuries, but as a proportion of the roster, and as a proportion of the *actually important* roster, that's an insane %.

So apparently Ace Steel was released, and The Elite and Punk were both referenced on Dyamite last night. So the situation may be shaking out the way people initially assumed - everybody stays but Bitey McSteel. But I remember Meltz saying he thought Punk would walk if they let Ace go, so maybe they gave him a severance package or something to sweeten the deal.

Having a Titantron of you talking to yourself does not bode well. Why are people so excited for Bray being back again????

I don't mind Page, he's clearly a talented guy, but I hate the junior high soap opera shit they do with him and the Bucks and the Dark Order. I actually think a heel turn could do a lot for him, have him start plugging up the anxiety and self-doubt with dirty tricks and angry ass-kickings. Then he can rebuild as a babyface when someone eventually beats some sense into him, and maybe we can stop with the "omg I'm so anxious and tormented" stuff and actually have this good-looking, athletic guy acting like the star AEW wants him to be, because whatever they've been doing with him since he won the title, it is just not working for me. "World wrestling champion who's an anxious cowboy with imposter syndrome" is like a Chapo bit.

Moxley is clearly the most universally beloved figure amongst the AEW hardcore, but I just can't stand him as a performer. Good promo at times, but terrible look to back it up and has the same "omg chaos let's fight on the floor i'm bleeding omg" match all the fucking time. Plus he never lays his shit in, which is just so lame for a brawler/street fighter gimmick.

Remember when he stole Undertaker's lightning powers

His debut match on the main roster was an inferno match with Kane, dude had bad augurs all over the place. If not for the Shield/Wyatt family matches, and interacting with Danielson when he was a goddamn nuclear reactor, I don't think people would have any positive memories of Wyatt whatsoever. I'll cop to having been taken in by some of the early promos, but how the hell are people excited by someone whose gimmick is "spooky and crazy, but also able to coordinate the activities of a solid dozen production professionals and get it approved by the office".

Don't get this at all, tbh. I get if it's a belief that he was or probably was guilty of the workplace harassment he was guilty of and therefore unsupportable, but Lethal, to me, is obviously better at the craft of professional wrestling than most of the people AEW is currently employing. Re: Andrade, just pay him to stay home and do a better job of vetting people next time. Caveat emptor runs in both directions in a situation like this. AEW doesn't have a chance in the world if the WWE can just scoop up any wrestler of theirs anytime they want.

Get rid of both Sammy and Andrade, the former because he seems like an overly dramatic little punk (who doesn't even take care of himself and is just fucking begging to be paralyzed with some of the shit he does) and the latter because he doesn't actually do anything worth watching on AEW television. Andrade doesn't seem crazy and abusive like del Rio did, but he does seem to have the same problem of assuming that he's more important than he actually is because there are not a lot of workers to appeal to the Hispanic demographic.

I don't think they're at risk of getting booted off television, but I think they're at risk of not being able to do the kind of ticket sales that allow them to keep running big buildings with big crowds that create hype around the product and buoy those ratings. Some of that you can smoke and mirrors, but AEW is also a little sketch in the production department sometimes. Grand Slam had a smaller crowd this year, but it also wasn't shot in a way that covered that up. And we all saw how they somehow cut from Jericho gigging himself to an even more obvious angle of same. I don't think we're looking at a full-blown WCW situation here, but there do seem to be some real obstacles without apparent institutional capacity to traverse them.

It's a lot of bad signals all at once - unhappiness in the locker room, diminished buyrate for their biggest PPV compared to last year, multiple high-profile injuries, aimlessness of the product with all the RoH and NJPW stuff coming in, attendance going down, etc. TV ratings have been good recently, but even increased TV licensing rates can't finance one or several arena rentals per week if the attendance isn't keeping up. It seems like the actual gates have remained stable because the prices have gone up - supposedly the Arthur Ashe show was more profitable than last year despite the crowd being way down - but you can only squeeze the hardest of the hardcore so much more firmly before even they start backing off. You can placate some of the growing rumblings of dissatisfaction among the hardcore audience by getting rid of Punk and maybe FTR (who now seem hated by a decent chunk of AEW fans), but that's a salve that will only last so long. It's easy to say that Tony Khan should just make better use of his roster, but a lot of guys just have not shown the chops to handle the big time. Adam Page had the longest-running and most over storyline in the company, then had one of the more lackluster title reigns in a major company I can think of. Brian Pillman Jr. did absolutely nothing with a crapton of free publicity from that DSotR episode. Jungle Boy has been an absolute flop on the mic as a singles performer. Sammy Guevara doesn't know how to protect himself as a performer and has go-away heat with large portions of the audience. Daniel Garcia and Wheeler Yuta have gotten as strong of a push as any two performers at their level could ask for, and neither one has gotten especially over or shown the kind of natural charisma and likability that got Bryan Danielson over beyond what his look and physique would dictate. Maybe it really is the case that AEW's hardcore audience just really wanted to see the Bucks, Omega, Orange Cassidy, and the Lucha Brothers, and they're not interested if they're not a part of it or featured as prominently. If that's the case, it seems like AEW was a quixotic venture to begin with, because there's a shelf life on them even if most of them didn't work a style that puts a lot of stress on their bodies.

Honestly, the more of this game I see, the more it looks like it’ll need all the help it can get. With as much money and development time as have been put into it, why are the graphics so bad?