Embrodak

The fans were cheering like hell for him during that promo, idk what else you’d call it when the fans agree with a bad guy who’s saying things a non-insignificant number of fans agree with.

Black and gold NXT felt like a wrestling TV show, NXT 2.0 is just a joke.

Punk looks like he got in mildly better upper body shape while he was gone. Also that first clothesline he hit looked really good, a rarity for him. I don’t know that it’s possible for me to look forward to anything Moxley does, but I’m certainly glad Punk is back. Would also be kinda interesting to see Punk and MJF reignite the feud at some point, with Punk now in the John Cena role vis a vis MJF’s put-upon antihero. I wouldn’t do that first, but I’m also not sure who’s a heel who’s over enough to credibly challenge Punk at this point, given Kenny is supposedly gonna be doing Trios stuff when he comes back.

Well acknowledging that means acknowledging that Vince probably reduced the total audience of wrestling fans, even at the height of the WWF’s popularity.

I don’t disagree about Kross’s in-ring blandness, but letting talent know that Vince’s absolute borking of the developmental program is a thing of the past seems like it’s a good political move to shore up the legitimacy of the new regime with the talent. Turning him into a guy with a helmet was up there with “Bearcat” on the scale of things that must have completely demoralized anybody working in NXT, so reversing that decision and trying again with the original gimmick is at least a step in the right direction, optically. And having a guy with a spooky/atmospheric entrance and a hot wife adds some visual variety and spectacle, which that Brock/Roman match pretty clearly signaled they were going to be striving for going forward.

Good or bad, I think bringing Kross back is about sending the message that guys from developmental will get a fair shake. “You’re not going to have your name and gimmick fucked up when you move to the main roster, you’ll get to sink or swim on your own merits.”

Dragon Gate water is just the squeezings of Billy Gunn’s sweat rags.

Christian may not be an official coach, but the younger guys he works with can learn a hell of a lot more working with him than they will working with each other. Jungle Boy showed some degree of passion and personality for the first time possibly ever a few weeks ago, and that happened because Christian knew to set him up for it it, as well as how to do so.

Fair enough, I suppose. I’ve always thought Jay Lethal was a pretty strong performer, and I certainly prefer him to OC. I also think “months of him being promoted” is rather a strange way of phrasing it - Lethal has barely been on TV since he got there last year, lost on tv almost every time, and the “promotion” for the RoH match was mostly 30-second unadvertised backstage promos. If you don’t like him, it’s whatever, but Tony hasn’t given him even 5% of the push Orange Cassidy has gotten, either.

Jay Lethal rocks and is barely ever on television, why is him prevailing over the underneath comedy guy so disagreeable again? If it’s his purported inappropriate behavior in RoH, fair, but that’s an argument against him being signed at all. If he is going to remain signed, he very much seems like he should be going over Orange Cassidy.

Y’know, I may be on an island where I actually kinda prefer Dean Ambrose to Jon Moxley. Dean’s wacky antics were incredibly tiresome and annoying, but I honestly buy them more than Moxley trying to be badass and bloodthirsty. Plus his physique is just asymptotically better the closer you get to when he was riding with The Shield.

Jim Cornette has been talking shit about Ric Flair wrestling another match at his age and with his health for months, and basically agreeing with his cohost that Flair needs to exit the public eye because he’s embarrassing himself. Corny is many things, many of them bad, but even if wrestling were more like he likes it, I don’t think he would have shown up to something like this. Bizarre, sad, cynical, business-exposing, needlessly reckless, this checked all the boxes he hates.

I mean even if it is true. it’s honestly not a terrible argument to make when Tony Khan clearly takes things like match ratings and PWI rankings seriously - not necessarily in a mark sense (although I wouldn’t put that past him) but in the sense that he clearly uses those things as proxies for what is likely to keep his fans watching. Haven’t the PWI rankings been mentioned in AEW before?

Flair doing his entrance looked like that scene in The Irishman where they slapped de-aging tech over a clearly elderly Robert De Niro beating a guy up, only they forgot the VFX. Just incomprehensibly old-looking - pudgy, stiff and slow mannerisms, cheaply-made robe.

Hangman has been kinda pissy and petulant ever since the Punk feud. Honestly, considering his title reign seems to have left him less over than before he got it, a heel run would not be a bad idea.

I actually don’t mind it as a general thing, I just can’t stand the Paul brothers and wish he’d be a douchebag heel so I could see him get pummeled.

Also, why did they give Theory MITB if they were just going to book him like a fucking goober? He’s building up a stink it’s going to take years to wash off.

Yeah the reasons celebrities fit in in modern wrestling is they put all their XP into the speech and charisma stats, which most modern wrestlers just don’t have as much of as their predecessors, and wrestling has become so much less specialized and psychological of a physical art that the actual athletics are not super hard to learn, especially if you’re in a position to have your match choreographed for weeks or months beforehand.

He only reviews three matches from the RoH PPV, and he only really liked FTR-Briscoes. The segment from the last episode where he talked about taking a bat to cases of merchandise in his garage because of how pissed he was at Spectrum and almost lost his dog in all the commotion was more entertaining than the review.

I’m not opposed in theory to Starks turning babyface and Hobbs turning on him, but it would be more impactful if they had actually gotten some kind of a concerted push as a unit, rather than mostly being in the background for the last year. Starks going on about how he made the FTW title so meaningful by his efforts when we barely saw it and it was a fake title in the first place (in a company that is following the WWE down the path of having way too many fucking titles, to boot) is not the solidest ground on which to launch a babyface turn. Starks rocks, he made the most of it, but it feels like Tony jumped the gun here.

I do hope that the new regime has a less obsessive drive to rewrite history to make WWE both inevitable and transcendent. Let some real wrestling historians get at that footage and tell some stories, a Tim Hornbaker or Brian Solomon.

Well it’s not for nothing that Corny said he sounds like Frasier Crane. I’m a big word user myself, I’m totally sympathetic to how hard it is to tone down language when you have a decent vocabulary, but I’m also not a professional wrestler.

Dax has certainly been making the beginnings of a case for himself this year, eh? If he ever has a singles run, look out.

WWE used Limp Bizkit because they were huge, not vice versa. It’s impossible to overstate how perfectly fitting to the type of angsty teen that existed in the late 90s and early 2000s LB was.

He lacks conviction and has kind of a lilting, sing-songy cadence that undermines the aural effect of his otherwise deep voice. He often *over*enunciates words in an unnatural way in the middle of a sentence such that it sounds like he’s reading dialogue, not talking. He doesn’t really have an ear for memorable wrestling lines, like when he riffed on how he uses the word “plethora” online in that promo they posted to YouTube a few months ago. Idk, always sounds to me like he’s performing and reciting, not talking, not dissimilar to how Danielson sounded on the mic back in like 2009 but with different qualities of artifice. Whether it’s really the way he talks or not, the effect is jarring, at least to me.