Matt D

I am the lowest guy on Adam Page on the board, but before they announced Briscoe, I thought Page was the best choice for an opponent stemming off the current BCC vs Elite feud and as a fresh match up with a guy with some ROH history. The Briscoe match felt super cold even given a pretty good promo from Claudio and an Eddie one from Eddie. I figure they should probably just go back and go with Hangman at this point (Unless it's some crazy ruse to have Eddie come back from the G1 and put aside his dream to stand up for honor and fight Claudio once and for all).

My only guess is that Athena needs an opponent for the PPV and this is a different way to get there than an eliminator. In some cases ways Willow is the perfect opponent to Athena, light vs darkness and they could have built a year long story around that leading to Final Battle. Ah well.

I’m going to hold out a tiny bit of hope for Athena to be the Faces of Fear vs Ruby’s Outsiders.

Adam Cole should work a George McFly gimmick.

If nothing else, we have the sheer variety of the "Rugged Russians" WWWF match and his Japan work. That gives you a sense of potential breadth. Still, I get the sense he was absolutely great. Unquestionably great. He is one of the greatest wrestlers ever. I just don't think I have enough to rate him relative to other wrestlers or figure out where he'd be on a list.

Beating Omega with a side headlock takeover would be pretty good heat.

The whining about a long ROH show (really two put together) was absurd. You can watch it whenever. On paper, there were maybe 17 of the 19 matches (sorry Cole Karter and Action Andretti) I wanted to see and I'll watch them in between other things as it fits into my life over the next week. I think a lot of the whining about it had to be a Twitter thing. On Twitter, you have to stay up with the most recent thing to be part of the immediate discourse. On Twitter, you watch wrestling not necessarily because you love wrestling but because you crave being part of something immediate and live and bigger than you. You derive part of your identity from it and therefore you have to consume it as soon as possible so you don't fall behind the curve, because the curve is only going to last a few hours. ROH is made for a message board crowd by a message board poster. I kind of feel bad for people who can't find joy in a show that kicks off with Mark Briscoe vs JD Drake. Those people are definitely doing wrestling wrong.

Now I want to see them vs RUSH.

I don't push SC stuff often around here, but I covered a few HH matches from House Rules over the weekend (where Darby and OC tried out some of their spots that htey used last night) here: http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2023/05/aew-five-fingers-of-death-and-friends_0255000681.html And a couple of things from last week including the great Athena vs Skye Blue match that not enough people saw here: http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2023/05/aew-five-fingers-of-death-and-friends_098280981.html

Robert Kirkman? Dan Slott? There are no money mark comic book writers? It's probably Mark Gruenwald. Fanzine writer who cares way too much about continuity.

That’s when you appeal to comics fans and go full CHIKARA

This is also a potential side effect of the west coast touring. The build is the build though, short term cost for long term gain, etc. Presumably if they announce Anarchy in the Arena or something tomorrow, that might help.

I think I'm going to run through some of Jarrett's pod but I want to hop around and do it at least roughly chronologically. I wish they'd have taken the Arn/Fuller approach with him, just like I wish they would have with Regal. My early impression is that Jeff's memory is better and he's more able to hit coherent and interesting points with less deviation more quickly so it'd work for him.

My poor Tuesday morning commute.

It was just because Doc/Gordy had a Japan tour.

No security blanket quite like a Bullet Club shirt then?

I’ve enjoyed the shows, but I enjoyed the first four episodes more. Bring on the tapings.

They can only add so many undercard guys to Bullet Club Gold, but if they can put just one guy in there, I want it to be Lee Johnson. I think he's ready and he got the unfortunate side of the Factory to QTV transformation, but he wasn't there long post-turn to get tarnished either.

We've started a project on Panama, though @Rah is the man doing the heavy lifting on the research. http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/search/label/Espectáculos Promociones Panama

You didn't give us criteria. The board is almost always going to gravitate towards "in-ring output based on footage."

I am going to drop some stuff I've written over at DVDVR about incentives and chemical changes because they feel tangentially relevant. There's actually a lot to unpack there. There are maybe three different strands. Also note, I'm most interested in how wrestling matches are worked but the overall presentation and how angles operate are important too. Wrestlers being fans of wrestling who are in it because they are fans as opposed to people mainly trying to make a living. Current wrestlers growing up on post 1990 (or even post-2000) wrestling as opposed to older wrestling. The different incentives re: the fans and what draws. 1. is very similar to things we see in other mediums, be it genre writing or comics or animation or whatever else. Almost every stream of entertainment right now is "Fan fiction" to a degree in a way that it really wasn't in 1980 or whenever. 3 is mainly what I'm focused on however. Let's minimize the idea that people are wrestling for the sake of wrestling or having great matches for the sake of having great matches. In some ways, that'd be pulling wrestling even further away from the medium it once was and into something else. Let's assume that the point of pro wrestling is still to make money and as such, to get fans to spend money on a product. The way this was done changed over the years from just buying regular tickets to local shows, to buying tickets to more occasional nationally touring shows and merch, to paying for PPVs, to buying DVDs, to signing up for streaming. And that's important and it's also connected to the change, but I think we should be focusing on what drives fans to give up their money now relative to thirty years ago. In that regard the change is making money by creating heat and stoking emotions vs making money by supplying a stream of qualitatively, socially agreed upon, good matches.

I will say this: a soft brand split can work. I choose who to “work with” around here and what arguments to avoid and how to engage and I’m pretty happy. You end up watching someone work with himself in the end but that’s ok by me.

Slim J is the new fifth finger.

Working!

I'm just glad I'm not going to have to write up a bunch of Elite matches for Segunda Caida, honestly.