El-P

Apparently Kiera Hogan has been signed. Yes ! Hopefully she keeps on doing that good heel shit she was doing in IMPACT. She just can't stop moving her lips, just annoying (and funny) as hell, pretty cool to have a very vocal kind of worker these days (see also White, Jay).

That would be pretty cool. And have Brian Pillman Jr. work against Rey Fénix or something.

Honestly, having Wyatt & Rowan show up to pay homage to Brodie would not be the worst idea. Bray and him were very close.

Holy shit ! Clap clap clap

The old idea of "cool" looks like "toxic masculinity" to younger folks.

The Young Bucks are the GOAT tag team. Kenny Omega is a GOAT contender. All three have pushed pro-wrestling forward in more ways than one (stylistically, building upon teams like the MCMG but also bringing that meta aspect we talked about before; building upon the deep modern Japanese style created by Tanahashi & Okada with a twist from the geeky culture of comedy wrestling via DDT) The Usos are a good tag team, they are better than the GoD for sure. Roman Reigns is a good wrestler, he's also the most protected pro-wrestler in the last 10 years so like Orton and the likes, we'll never know exactly what he could be all about outside of the overproduced, overpatterned, and in his case, overprotected environment. With his physical attributes and charisma and tendency to be game, I think he would have done pretty damn well, probably be more interesting even. Young Bucks & Kenny Omega are part of the foundation (including in term of in-ring style, but also in term of relating to an audience that has been dying for a main alternative product) for the hottest new pro-wrestling product in 20 years. Roman Reigns will always be synonymous with WWE fighting and trolling his own audience and has been the Top Dog in an era ratings and attendance have dropped (of course, being pushed forever as the Top Dog makes him still the biggest "mover" by default, as showed by last Monday). John Cena he ain't (in any way shape of form). Usos have produced lots of good matches and many DUIS but are protected because they are not related to Samoa Joe. There. I think this is about the fairest picture I can paint. (and I do mean everything I wrote here)

Totally agree.

Kurt Angle vs Mr. Anderson in TNA at Lockdown 2010. Awesome match, brillant performance by Angle (as a pissed off babyface), Anderson is game as fuck (in more ways than one). Angle walks out the door by stepping on Anderson's balls. One of my favorite TNA matches ever.

They need gamers from Twitch. Youtube is almost for boomers at this point. Is WWE still streaming stuff on Facebook ?

ZSJ is trying his best to steal the MVP status from Ishii. Terrific match with Ibushi, who looked better than he has in the last few matches. Ishii gave one of his selling masterclass in an excellent outing against KENTA. Nagata vs Takagi was also excellent and a mighty fine replacement for Naito. Nagata is what, 53 ? He's way into that "greatest post 50 years old workers ever" conversation. The lesser be said about the other two matches the better. Next day for A Block is gonna be super rough (plus Nagata won't be there, instead we get... Bushi... yikes) apart from the main event, as there will be a curiosity as whether the usually waste-of-time guys can be carried to something good or at least not offensive (Great O-Khan has the best chance), so less easy fast-forward.

I don't watch MMA and know jackshit about it, but the segment itself came off hot. Paige Van Zant seems like she could be fun to have around and Masvidal looked like a star. On the other hand, after the awful Wardlow match, I have no desire whatsoever to see another bad shoot-style match involving Jake Hager. So, jury's out on this one. Lambert as Jim Cornette (and every boomer wrestling fan) has been awesome, I can have him as a manager every week forever.

Everyone wants to forget the neck tattoo even exist. Every AEW fan has PTSD from the neck tattoo. The neck tattoo doesn't exist, like Indiana Jones 4 and the last Star Wars trilogy. The neck tattoo should be blurred on TV.

The one case that has always fascinated me, and much more now, is the infamous Malenko vs Benoit match at HoggWild 96. First off I talked about how crowds should not be judged at all, but this is a special case as this was not a pro-wrestling fan crowd at all, but still. But the thing is, the exact same match happening in Korakuen Hall or the ECW Arena at the exact same date is probably a great match. But in this context, I have no idea what to make of it. It's a very unique case of course, but it's a fascinating one to me.

Holy shit didn't see this one coming !

It is. I don't mind supernatural stuff, I don't even mind when it's done in a straight camp way (and I mean, I was eating up the LU stuff). The Alexa Bliss stuff is something I suspect a part of me would actually enjoy if the execution/production was not so WWE (watched a bunch of it on Youtube, so there goes the "social media numbers mean something" out of the window !)

Wasn't that Lawler's deal too ? Not sure in his case it was just to not seem too old to headline though...

Ashley Valentine actually sounds like a cooler name than Charlotte Flair, which does have a gimmicky feel to it (the Charlotte part next to the Flair last name). Of course it's not as odd, in a way, as Dominik Mysterio !

Three words : Reality TV show. At the time when the Elite, which is basically the foundation of the promotion as far as what the style goes, was finally placed as heel main-eventers (which is their best act, Young Bucks especially are natural heels) and finally getting the focus (after a year of Jericho & Mox on top), Cody was seen as aping WWE shit, in a move totally contradictory with the philosophy and taste of most of the AEW audience. Then you add the incredible tone-deaf jingoist promo during the Ogogo feud, which ended up being a fail, and you get Cody going from beloved TV champ to a guy who looks out of place in his own promotion.

Omega & Page vs The Young Bucks is probably the match that had the deepest psychology ever in term of storytelling. Like, the amount of layers was just out of the world (but at the same time anyone could enjoy it, hell, I did not get all of the layers, I had to read about them later from people who paid better attention and with better memories). And that's not an exception at all in their body of work. The idea that they are just doing spots for the sake of it is a complete misunderstanding of their work. Also, the idea that pro-wrestling is only about the inner narrative is extremely reductionist. I've said it before, pro-wrestling stories are not exactly super interesting in themselves. Most of the times it's actually pretty mundane, when not totally dire and tired (not to mention the repetition of the exact same tropes in classic southern tag-team wrestling storytelling for instance, makes the responses just as Pavlovian as people popping for a gratuitous table spot). Excluding the form of pro-wrestling, or making it a secondary element, to concentrate on the infamous "storytelling" is simply erasing a huge part of what pro-wrestling is all about and why it can be so great. The "lol mOveZ" meme was funny for about two minutes in 2007 or something, but when it became an "argument" it has tremendously hurt the perception of pro-wrestling in some circles, including this board (not to mention it was a way to disqualify de facto people who would love a certain approach and paint them as stupid, and with poor taste basically, as the appreciation for supposedly "smart work" is also a way to gain some social capital, as a famous sociologist would say, in the little society that is the internet pro-wrestling fandom).

The question is, did they ever need to ? A hostile crowd is not something you see everywhere, and it has been pretty much a staple of WWE thanks to their ridiculous booking. John Cena has been a master dealing with (semi) hostile crowds. As far as indifferent (or simply tired) crowd goes, the exemple I use over and over and over again is Raven vs Saturn at WWIII (I think) 1998. Crowd is *dead* at the start of the match. By the end the heat is molten, peaking with the infamous Kidman turn. Raven = genius.

Of course it is. There was a study about pop music that stated that more or less people got settled in their ways at about 35 and past that point they really weren't open to new things. But the beauty of knowing that you (I mean you and I and everybody) are biased is that it's the first step in eventually seeing through those bias and avoid them as much as possible. In a way the last few years with me as been a process of unlearning what I thought I knew (always gotta ask yourself "How do I know what I think I know ?"), and it's an incredibly liberating process. Fact is, I was brought up on early 90's pro-wrestling, I basically checked out for a while in the early/mid 00's, which really doesn't help, but now I'm very comfortable with the idea that I've seen the best pro-wrestling I've ever seen happen in the last 5 years. And I'm 45. So yeah, it is a part of getting older, but it does not *have to* be. Agreed. The thing that is clearly undersold with Meltz because he's very polarizing and you're either a haterz or a stan apparently, is that he has learned first hand from some of the smartest people in pro-wrestling, including Terry Funk and Jim Cornette. Like him or not, he's not just some dude. One of the most interesting anecdotes he tells is how he learned very young that the whole "believability" thingy was totally relative when his friends from Mexico were telling him how US wrestling looked totally fake and phoney (yeah, those words again). Or stuff about Terry Funk telling him to study Japan because they were always more or less 5/10 years ahead of the curve. Like I said before, there is definitely a meta aspect to the Bucks & Omega (but that's part of their own identity and not a global generational thing, although they are not the only ones, Orange Cassidy comes to mind to), which is a new thing. I mentioned Thesz being goofy and comedic at times as a reference to the so-called "believability" of the "old-school".

I have no idea what the hell happened on this PPV reading this thread (apart from Bliss being jobbed out in her hometown), but it looks like a "so bad it's good" case. And it almost gives me the urge to check it out...

Glad you bring up Savage, I think about him *every time* when people talk about Omega doing goofy faces and gestures. Yep, this. Also, pro-wrestling has nothing to do with believability, it has to do with acceptance. Plenty of stuff in pro-wrestling looks dumb as fuck, awkward, or just plain nonsensical in a straight physical way (the way people move, bump, go along with spots, sell), the question is not about it being believable or not, the question is about whether it's accepted by the crowd or not. If it is, then it doesn't matter if it looks "phoney" or "not believable", there is a dialectic between the move (which can be anything, a spot, a sell, a facial expression), which is really nothing more than a sign, and the viewer. And BTW : Yep. That's another thing. Let's stop judging the crowds as if there were the "good" fans (the ones who provide "real heat", whatever it's supposed to be) and the "bad" fans ("This is awesome!", "fight forever!"). That's just awful (and yes, I have done it myself too, but it's never too late to change). That's basically a not so subtle form of classism in the context of pro-wrestling fandom. When you are judging a crowd to argue a point about a worker, that means you have no argument whatsoever.

And I'd bet you anything that if Tenryu and Terry Funk were 50 years old in 2021, they absolutely would do it ! And people would got batshit insane for it. I mean, Ricky Morton did it at past 60 and Dustin Rhodes has made the Code Red a part of his arsenal, so, it's totally in line with the kind of workers they were/are and their mentality.

Wait, you Aussies (it isn't a bad word, right ?) use the word thongs for flip-flops ? That's funny, French use it too (written tongs) ! And of course we call thong a "string" (en français dans le texte), because that makes all the sense in the world, right...