Embrodak

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?

Well in all fairness, FTR barely does tag team wrestling on TV lately. Is Cash working hurt? All we hear about is how Dax’s shoulder is held together with chewing gum at this point, but he’s the only one that wrestles singles matches.

Cabana got his teeth kicked out by Danielson this year.

Moreover, even if The Elite weren’t the ones talking to Da Sheetz, they certainly could have been the gossips who spread it to people who *did* talk to Da Sheetz. Punk is a bitter old asshole, but I don’t think he’s such a social inept that he can’t put two and two together about why there’s a shitty locker room rumor about him.

MJF rules, suck it haters.

Punk, to me, put on by far the most compelling story in the history of the company, idk how one could call that a waste. Even with the bullshit, I fucking loved this run.

I love FTR, but we should be willing to consider that Dax may be as annoying in real life as he can be on Twitter.

What are they doing with Dexter Lumis? I don’t care how many cheers they pipe in, you can just look at the crowd and see they’re ice fucking cold for this abduction shit.

I agree, though Kenny has a pacifist vibe that makes it plausible to me that he was just trying to pull the guys apart and Ace misinterpreted it in the heat of the moment. There is a part of me that thinks Punk was immensely dumb to think the Elite were going to jump him. They are like the least likely three dude combo ever in wrestling to form a posse to initiate shoot fisticuffs. If he wasn’t (probably) hurting like crazy from the muscle tear and tired of having blood all over him, he probably would have realized that they were just coming to chew him out and throw their EVP weight around. This would all be much simpler if we lived in more of an honor culture. A duel would be a very straightforward resolution of this conflict.

Stokely is theoretically fine, but dude cannot catch a break on his booking.

Whatever Punk said, anybody with a modicum of managerial sense should have known that barging into Punk’s dressing room before Tony even finished the scrum was a boneheaded move. Dude was possibly still covered in blood! The act would be proverbial “fighting words” in basically any wrestling locker room prior to the last 15-20 years. If Megha and Daniels were there for any reason other than to try and stop the Bucks before they went in, they’re fucking nitwits, too.

Dude saw three guys on his friend and immediately threw a chair and bit a dude. He’s the designated wild card of the squad.

The only thing with the SS matches is it’s hard to create stakes.

Should have just said “willing”, because I do think Omega would prob not wanna work with Punk on his terms at this point, but I’ve not seen Omega do anything like the style Punk’s favoring in this run.

Other than abusers/creeps like Velveteen Dream, or weirdo narcissists like Enzo, I can’t imagine anybody less appealing to bring back.

Would throw the “I’m trying to run a business” line in a different light if Punk is something like an informal/unofficial EVP. Punk vs Omega sounds terrible, tbh. Total clash of styles, and I don’t think either would either want or be able to modulate themselves to match the other.

I don’t watch NXT, what’s up with that Quincy Elliott dude? Was anybody clamoring for Mabel with a Goldust skin?

I don’t think Dave is as bad as some people say, but The Elite being the top dogs in AEW provides him with the most access and influence he’s ever had, after decades of people in the business mostly rolling their eyes at him and finding him an annoying gadfly who exposes the business without actually knowing how it works. I think it’s fair to say that there is at least a subconscious bias on his part.

And if a slow burn Punk heel turn wasn’t what was agreed to? Page could have just done a “I built this, I won’t let you take it away from me” kinda babyface vs babyface promo, but instead, he implied that Punk was secretly an asshole. Eddie clearly had longstanding heat with Punk and has venom toward almost literally everybody, and MJF is the most vile heel in the company and not to be taken at face value. Maybe having the top babyface champion come out and imply you’re a two-faced piece of shit was not actually the story they were supposed to do? I certainly remember the Page promo feeling odd and being bewildered at people who said it was some perfect continuity with the Eddie feud, and based on how mad it made him, it seems like Punk felt similarly. “Make your niche audience on the internet hate your top star” and all that.