Embrodak

I am genuinely surprised they didn’t have Best Friends win the Trios belts considering PAC already has a belt and has more frequent absences from the show than a lot of the wrestlers.

Okay, but is he donating money to any Republican politicians *at all* right now? Because I think pretending there’s a difference between supporting even Mitt Romney and supporting Trump is the most translucent fig leaf imaginable at this point. He might not support Trump qua Trump because of his particular biographical details, but the only functional difference between (most of) Trump’s presidency and a normal Republican presidency is that people got more mad at business owners and major companies for donating to him. If he donated a bunch of money to Trump *as* a generic Republican, then he supports Trump, even if he’s not a self-identified “Trump supporter”. Re: the Bucks, I could swear there were right-wing likes and retweets from the Obama years.

At this point, with everything that’s come out, I don’t know why people feel so strongly that Punk is leaving. Nothing that’s come out has made Punk look *better* for going off at the scrum, but The Young Bucks, Kenny Omega, Cutler, Nakazawa, Pat Buck, and Christopher Daniel’s have *all* been suspended. And Megha Parek was there, too! 6-7 people coming into his locker room with his dog and his friend’s injured wife, uninvited, possibly even forcing the door open? On what planet is that not “fighting words”, in terms of the image it projects, especially if Megha wasn’t in the initial group? And on what planet do executives grab their doofus buddies, the talent relations guy, and the top lawyer in the company to go and confront the top star while the boss is *still in the middle of a press conference*? Do people think WBD is going to be inclined to raise their TV licensing rate if they’re doing dumb backstage antics that push out their top star out of nowhere, after giving them a Friday night slot that they’ve pissed away the viewership of and when Dynamite viewership dropped nearly a third from start of program to conclusion this week? I get that there is heat on Punk in the locker room, but if Tony Khan is really a wrestling promoter and not a money mark, I don’t think you can justify giving Punk the boot to keep The Elite from walking. And frankly, if they’re dumb enough to put Tony in a position where he has to consider giving Punk the boot for any investigation result other than “Punk is an unhinged maniac and a persistent danger to the locker room”, they’re not any kind of executives.

That is literally the only excuse for how they’ve booked him, at this point. When you have to go the “high drama” route to explain wrestling stories, though, you are pretty much inherently running cover for lousy booking.

Fell down a surreal Twitter rabbit hole of people that wish FTR ill will every time they’re booked because they’re friendly to Cornette. I get hating the guy for a variety of reasons, but I don’t get why Jericho or the Bucks get a pass for their politics. Or Tony Khan’s company being *financed* by a Trump supporter, for that matter.

So many ways that could go wrong, though. He’s a prodigy, but putting the world title on a guy with like a year of experience is begging for trouble, especially if you’re giving him underlings that are also, frankly, pretty green, even if also very impressive and promising. I get why people would be not into Cody, but his work in WWE so far has totally washed the odd flavor of the Codyverse out of my mouth. And given what we’re seeing in AEW these days, it doesn’t seem impossible to me that some of the bullshit stemmed from backstage intrigue we won’t hear about for another decade.

More bizarre than Bobby Fish’s behavior is the choice to still do the UE beating up The Young Bucks angle when he was on his way out, Adam Cole was injured, and Kyle O’Reilly was also injured and having a potentially career-ending neck surgery shortly thereafter.

Bron is so fucking young and green, there’s no way he’s taking the title from Roman unless they want to do like a four-year reign.

Babyface/babyface is a meh dynamic most of the time, though. If they’re gonna push Darby to the title outside a tournament context, I’d imagine it’ll be after MJF wins the title, let Darby get his win back from their last feud. MJF has to be fuming, him vs Punk redux was a money feud compared to him vs some random tournament winner.

I remember the usual timeline people were floating for a pec tear plus surgery was shorter than 9 months, with 9 months being an especially long recovery time. I assumed they padded the projected recovery time so that it would seem like Cody was a superhero for coming back early.

It’s not even clear that Big E will be able to return to wrestling.

With Kingston, you can maybe say he’s a little old and a little volatile backstage to give the push he seemed to merit after the Punk feud and the Player’s Tribune article. And unless he was willing to wrestle like a scrappy babyface instead of a wannabe strong styler, I can’t say for sure that the push would even have gone well. But with Darby, I think it’s just that Tony just cannot call audibles and change his plans except when circumstances compel him.

Cody was over as fuck when he came back to WWE and is made for life after that HIAC match. He’s the guy. The Codyverse stuff was bizarre, but with a few people to tell him no, he’s been doing great stuff.

I kinda love Darby, he’s like Jeff Hardy with Shawn Michaels’ selling and charisma, but he is very tiny even for AEW. Tony referencing Corny in his Tweet promoting Rampage is really weird, considering Corny doesn’t watch Rampage and like 80% of his online audience wants to do a Moxley promo to the guy.

One thing people haven’t mentioned Re: the crowd at All Out being kind of cold is that they had Dynamite and Rampage there like five days earlier. Between that and the heavy weekend of wrestling, it’s less surprising to me that they weren’t too engaged, especially given how long everyone knew it was going to be.

See this is really weird to me, because I don’t remember Punk being “anti-veteran” in any kind of programmatic sense. He spoke absolutely reverentially about Eddie Guerrero when he was at his peak, in that doc WWE made. He specifically disliked the Kliq, and Vince’s physique fetishization, and WWE’s rigid corporate structure and rules, but he never worked or talked like he didn’t value the legacy of wrestling, or those who had proven themselves quality performers. It feels like people are operating off a kind of ossified sense of who they think or thought Punk was when he was last active, or retrofitting a long-standing distaste for him into some cutout of hypocrisy that, to me, seems ill-fitting. For better or worse, this CM Punk is acting exactly congruently with *my* memory of him since at least the pipe bomb, so I’m not sure what people are getting at with this stuff.

To be clear, if I recall correctly, he said the EVPs couldn’t manage a Target, and he said Adam Page had never done anything in the business. I don’t think he meant to conflate those two sets of claims, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Adam Page, however over he was at any given time, was pretty ancillary to any success they had.

Punk having the heel John Cena run we never got would actually be the only way I could see him coming back and not feeling awkward, but I can’t imagine Tony ever wants to put his title on him again, if only for the questionable state of his musculoskeletal functioning. And I guess Roman is kinda sorta having that run already, idk.

8 month recovery time if Punk has a torn tricep, oof. They should not have brought Danhausen in, he is not good at aiming his curses apparently. Bad, bad year for this company.

Danielson was kept out intentionally longer than protocol because of his history with concussions, though. Punk had a terrible foot injury, was out three months, came back, wrestled one and a half matches, and now has a pectoral tear that will have him out for at least several weeks, if it’s minor, or many months following a surgery, if it’s major. He just turned a significant chunk of the audience and the locker room against him, and nobody else in the promotion other than FTR is really getting on board with “Let’s try to wrestle like it’s the mid 90s again”, however much I wish they would. I love what Punk has done in AEW so far, I’m sympathetic to him in all this fracas (and as was said by someone in the other thread, the fact that Parek saw what happened and both Punk and Steel seem not to be headed for a firing as of right now suggests that their version of events is not total bullshit), but at this point, if his mission was to come in and steer the promotion toward a more mainstream audience and more classical style of wrestling, that’s pretty clearly been a failure. Also, I actually do think there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s responsible to keep booking Danielson in a promotion where they’re constantly doing hardcore matches and people have a nasty habit of dropping people on their heads and necks.

Gotta say, if I’m Punk and potentially staring down another surgery, I’m thinking about just hanging it up. Whether it’s just too many accumulated bumps, bad training, decades of insomnia, or too many muffins, a major injury in your first real match back from the previous injury feels a lot like a “wheels falling off” moment. Hard to have legitimacy in the fans’ eyes going forward, even if they forgive you for all this bullshit or accept you as a heel, when they perceive you as held together with chewing gum and duct tape.

I mean I don’t care about the guy at all at this point, he was a bad champion, very often dresses like shit in a manner not keeping with his character, went into business for himself when it wasn’t called for, and agrees to do too much silly and melodramatic stuff. But I do think an extremely cryptic reference to backstage nonsense that wasn’t all that diegetically different to Eddie Kingston’s promo is a minor offense in and of itself.

I mean what he did was a little shitty, but not the biggest deal in the world. 2 or 3 weeks in the cooler, then in a crowded tourney for the pointless and ice cold trios titles seems about right, idk.

I think Page kinda got punished for the thing he actually did wrong by being relegated to purgatory until a few weeks before the Trios tournament.

Does it seem like both Punk *and* The Elite are kind of hard to bring back after this?