Embrodak

I get that it’s a surprise, but having a big tournament to make the women’s tag titles feel like a big deal, only to have them become a prop that gets put on a pretty weak team in order to build heat on a PPV match not *involving* said weak team, or the titles, is just nonsensical.

Omos is absolutely terrible. Braun had a period where he was pretty good. No real reason he should be brought back, but he’s absolutely preferable to Omos if they’re gonna have a giant.

See this is my assumption, and what I was thinking when I posted that. Jericho is a vulture, he wants to be at the center of every wrestling happening.

Cody is still young enough to get a few years out of him and had the Dusty story to pitch. Jericho is gigging himself in the middle of the ring on camera and arguably hasn’t had a good match since the one with Kingston two PPVs ago. Idk, I don’t see it.

I think people were seeing what they wanna see in that Yamashita match, tbh.

I just don’t believe that WWE reached out to Jericho. I can believe that they called Swerve because they were bringing Hit Row back, or Keith Lee because Trips is a fan, or either Starks or Hobbs, but I cannot imagine anybody at WWE looking at Jericho’s self-indulgent bullshit and saying that they want to be in that business.

I can’t stand Moxley, but if Punk needs a longer time out, either because of his foot or because he and TK can’t agree, it was the right call, I guess. Thunder Rosa has been a dud of a champion, but idk why people are buying that “sandbag” stuff, it was Marina goddamn Shaffir she was wrestling when that came up.

Omega turning the AEW video game into a huge financial debacle because he’s a picky video game nerd is pretty funny, if true, so there’s at least that component.

I get that. I’m burned out on cool shit, been watching old Mid-South of late.

In terms of this year, I liked it when Danielson was being a grumpy dick treating Hangman like an upstart goober and MJF-Punk was running. I strongly dislike the AEW “house style” (to the extent one can say there is such a thing) and, to be honest, Moxley and Jericho are both huge turnoffs and have been the biggest focus of the show for months.

Did he piss someone off? Was *he* pissed off?

Tony is definitely spreading himself pretty thin, will be interesting to see how he handles the backstage drama and if the people he hired to deal with it are up to the task.

Because Last is one of the only people with an encyclopedic knowledge of territory history that can keep up with Jim.

Corny digs into his archives and reads a 1997 memo from USA Network that may have gotten Vince Russo a spot on the creative team and inadvertently kickstarted the Attitude Era. I honestly think he should just retire the podcast and write some memoirs and history books, this is much better than him reviewing goddamn Smackdown.

Danielson is about as “Left” as a wrestler gets, and even he wouldn’t say anything bad about Vince in all of this. (Granted, his father-in-law-in-law was also implicated, so he may have a legal reason to stay quiet.) To the extent that it’s “culty”, I think it’s just that Vince has an interpersonal charisma and magnetism that doesn’t translate in anecdotal form.

Maybe, but then you have Dax telling Dave he was full of shit when he stated confidently that the Bucks hadn’t been holding back FTR, the Punk stuff, MJF being upset with his contract, all the people mad at how Tony and Daniels are running talent relations, people openly airing their grievances with Thunder Rosa on Twitter, and a few other stories that have come out in the last few months. In my head, I’m laughing at the idea that Punk is such a bitter, anhedonic asshole that he ruined the locker room with his bitching, but I’m also wondering if maybe Cody was doing some informal talent relations work, as a lot of this stuff seemed to start burbling around the time that he left. All we heard was that he had a big ego and was kind of insufferable to work with, but he was also the most traditionally “wrestlery” EVP, he may have had some hand in calming locker room unrest and bringing it to Tony’s attention.

Weird that all these stories about the AEW locker room are coming out now, whereas for three years it’s all been sunshine and roses about how great of a boss Tony is and how fun and chill it is there. Was all of that bullshit, did something big happen that turned a lot of people, or have they just been sweeping a lot of issues under the rug and now they’ve piled up to a degree they can’t be ignored?

I have strongly disliked the last several months of AEW without Punk, MJF, and partially without Danielson (though I don’t care for what they’re doing with him), so different strokes.

I mean Punk has been doing tributes to Bret Hart, someone who took wrestling deathly seriously. It could just be that AEW’s free form “let everyone do basically what they want to do within the purview of Tony Khan’s preferences” booking style is not in fact what he wants, and he’s frustrated that the promotion is not tacking toward what he’s doing when he’s on-screen.

Punk was killing it last night, I don’t really care why he said it. I don’t think he’ll go as evil as he was with Taker, that shit with Bearer’s ashes was truly special, but Punk free to be a petty, smug asshole? That’s a change I can get behind.

Maybe Punk has enough clout that he can just make up angles off the cuff in his promos and force Tony Khan to do them. Hangman has taken a huge dive for me in interest, but I would certainly rather see him wrestle Punk than Moxley. And them both as tweeners is more interesting than Page being whiny and cryptic while Punk no-sells.

Their lead-in is Big Bang Theory, which makes it even more bizarre. I’m not an Orange Cassidy guy, but I at least understand the logic for why he might be a good opener for that audience.

Seems like it’s people who got into modern Japanese wrestling, where the crowds are either inconsistently hot or poorly-mic’ed, and backfilling their preexisting cultural stereotypes. Meanwhile, I’ve rarely seen a crowd love a wrestler as much as Japan loved Terry Funk.

Not from this week, but I caught that Karrion Kross promo from last week, just abysmal. I get they may have been sending a message to the roster by bringing him back, but he’s like a fifth as good at Bray Wyatt’s schtick as Bray Wyatt is and that shit hasn’t made sense since like 2014, and even then, just barely. And he’s not even as good as Bray Wyatt in the ring, and Bray Wyatt is average in the ring unless he’s working with a top-tier talent like Danielson. Vince was an idiot to put him in fetish gear when he has that killer entrance with his hot wife, but Trips is a hack if he thinks it’s a good idea to keep doing “cryptic creepy guy” to ever diminishing returns. The entrance will sell T-shirts, bruh, no need to gild the lily.

Yeah, I get that. He prob fucked himself in terms of free agency by no-showing that meet and greet, WWE doesn’t look kindly on that kinda primadonna behavior, but I think it came off well enough for what it was.