Embrodak

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.

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.