All Elite Wrestling

[Timbo Slice]

Yeah, but goodwill and being over was very helpful, along with them helping get Page over the hump. There were good reasons to keep the group intact, but the days of them being a necessary act are long gone. 

[El-P]

1 hour ago, Blehschmidt said:

I can't see them cutting Silver, Anna Jay, or Preston Vance. But at this point I would say the rest of them are all quite expendable.

Anna Jay & John Silver aren't going anywhere. Preston Vance honestly, he's just a JTTS and don't see him going much higher.

[NintendoLogic]

Good sign for AEW. Some folks were worried that with the Warner/Discovery merger the new parent company wouldn't be too keen on wrestling. Guess those fears turned out to be baseless.

[Jmare007]

Can we get more of this please, gawd damn William

https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1521618856053067776

[sek69]

6 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

Good sign for AEW. Some folks were worried that with the Warner/Discovery merger the new parent company wouldn't be too keen on wrestling. Guess those fears turned out to be baseless.

While you can never be 100% sure, I was pretty confident AEW would have nothing to worry about. They get good ratings and even with a big increase they are still a great value for them.

[Timbo Slice]

20 minutes ago, Jmare007 said:

Can we get more of this please, gawd damn William

https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1521618856053067776

This shit is catnip to me, more head butting Yuta in the face, please. 

[Jmare007]

Regal saying people will forget being stabbed in 6 months is the kind of ignorant violent shit I need on my wrestling.

[DMJ]

TK just announced Dante Martin vs. Rey Fenix tomorrow night in the Owen tournament.

As expected, fans on r/SC and elsewhere are losing their collective shit. 

I'm not even a massive fan of either guy, but even I'm excited to see this. And it does feel a bit like a "dream match" of high-flyers or a throwback to the best of WCW's cruiser era.

I know making comparisons to WWE is old hat, but no matter how much people hyped matches on 205 Live, I rarely found myself seeking those much-hyped matches out. I just didn't care enough about the wrestlers involved. Being secluded on their own separate (read: irrelevant) show or being "spotlighted" a handful of times on RAW as something "different" (read: lesser) didn't work. And why would it? Practically everyone on the WWE's roster was doing dives or other aerial moves and, much of the time, the 205ers were treated as wholly separate lesser characters wrestling for stakes of little consequence.* In the WWE, you'd never see a competitive match pitting Gran Metallik vs. Seth Rollins or TJP vs. Kevin Owens. In AEW, meanwhile, Dante Martin may not be a top guy but we've at least seen him in ring with major acts like the BCC, Young Bucks, and Adam Page. He feels like he could be a guy who could one day win the TNT or Tag Titles.  

And because AEW has adequately built-up Dante Martin as a hard-working, plucky babyface and Rey Fenix is coming off a sweet return on last week's show and they both have built a resume of good-to-great matches over the past few years with credible opponents and the match has stakes of consequence, I'm hyped. 


* The clearest example of 205 Live workers being "lesser" is the fact that, despite being under 205 pounds, guys like Finn Balor, Rey Mysterio, Kofi Kingston (Google says he weighs 212, I say bullshit) and others who the WWE saw as actually being real main roster stars weren't a part of the division at all. The implication was that they were too good for the division, too big of stars, etc. It was a division built around a championship that nobody of any stature wanted. 

[strobogo]

There was definitely a lot of awesome stuff on 205. There was a string of multiman matches every week that were great, the Ali/Murphy series, Lio Rush vs Cedric Alexander. In general, Ali was probably having the best face run in WWE since Bryan in 2013. 

[sek69]

Fenix vs Dante in a battle of one of the world's best high flyers vs someone who probably will be one of the world's best high flyers before too long is going to be amazing. 

[C.S.]

3 hours ago, DMJ said:

* The clearest example of 205 Live workers being "lesser" is the fact that, despite being under 205 pounds, guys like Finn Balor, Rey Mysterio, Kofi Kingston (Google says he weighs 212, I say bullshit) and others who the WWE saw as actually being real main roster stars weren't a part of the division at all. The implication was that they were too good for the division, too big of stars, etc. It was a division built around a championship that nobody of any stature wanted. 

To be fair, they did try with Enzo. Before you say, "But Enzo couldn't work, brrrrrrother," maybe not, but he was still a bigger star than the rest of the 205 Live roster combined.

[strobogo]

Also when 205 Live started, Finn Balor was suddenly billed as 206 pounds 

[NintendoLogic]

WWE ran a 205 Live tour headlined by Enzo as champion and it bombed at the gate. That was the end of any real attempt to make the division mean anything more than a piss break.

[kas]

Pretty stacked Dynamite and Rampage cards this week. Martin vs Fenix and Yuka vs Riho should be barnburners.

[KawadaSmile]

16 hours ago, Jmare007 said:

Can we get more of this please, gawd damn William

https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1521618856053067776

The man is essentially a 007 villain within the Grappler Baki universe. 

All the BCC needs now is a true program. Enough of victims. Let them have challenges.

[KawadaSmile]

Fucking Yuke's, man. I mean, fucking yikes!

[sek69]

A video game company trying to take advantage of someone less experienced? Perish the thought!

[SirEdger]

Info is confusing though....is there only 50 wrestlers in the game that will be available to play with or will they be adding 50 wrestlers by DLC after launch?

[sek69]

9 minutes ago, SirEdger said:

Info is confusing though....is there only 50 wrestlers in the game that will be available to play with or will they be adding 50 wrestlers by DLC after launch?

Per FIghtful's report they have talked about DLC but haven't made any firm plans yet so 50 seems to be the base roster.

Also a PC release being announced is pretty big, as the only other major wrestling games on that platform would be the WWE 2K games and Fire Pro. 

[Coffey]

The amount of people that complain about graphics & lack of roster size is crazy to me. The one & only thing that really matters is if the game is fun to play. If the games looks beautiful & has 600 wrestlers but plays like shit, who gives a fuck?

50 people is plenty. We don't really need every single jobber having their own character anyway.

Right now, from the trailers I've seen, the game looks very early in development but I heard it was supposed to come out this year? That can't be right. 

Also, don't read the comments on that NoDQ article. Talk about people having an agenda... goddamn.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Now that I'm watching AEW weekly and loving it, I have to just say... Aubrey Edwards is fucking terrible. She's the modern day Dick Wohrle, always making herself part of the show instead of being an invisible part of the match.

Refs as characters is never good. She stinks with all the poses you can't not see once you see them,

[El-P]

There's nothing wring with Aubrey being charismatic. There's nothing wrong with a referee being charismatic and notable. There's a difference between being charismatic and actually adding to the overall picture of the match (like Aubrey or Red Shoes) and disrupting it (which is why most "guest referee" gimmick matches suck). What really annoys me are ref who do the awful delayed third count in a very obvious way, which has become a trope (it can still be effective if done right, but for instance that NJPW ref whose name eludes me at the moment, who does the upper-midcard matches, if fucking terrible at it and ruins every near falls if you pay attention to his count). The thing is the ref remains the most mysterious element of a pro-wrestling match to the outside observer, because half of his work (communicating with the workers, making sure they are safe) flies under our radar. Despite being the the camera all the time, he/she's actually half-execution, half-production.

[NintendoLogic]

3 hours ago, El-P said:

What really annoys me are ref who do the awful delayed third count in a very obvious way, which has become a trope (it can still be effective if done right, but for instance that NJPW ref whose name eludes me at the moment, who does the upper-midcard matches, if fucking terrible at it and ruins every near falls if you pay attention to his count).

Marty Asami? Yeah, that dude's the shits. He single-handedly ruined the Ishii/ZSJ match I watched a while back by going out of his way to telegraph every single near fall.

[WingedEagle]

5 hours ago, Johnny Sorrow said:

Now that I'm watching AEW weekly and loving it, I have to just say... Aubrey Edwards is fucking terrible. She's the modern day Dick Wohrle, always making herself part of the show instead of being an invisible part of the match.

Refs as characters is never good. She stinks with all the poses you can't not see once you see them,

She usually looks interested and engaged in a match she's officiating, but outside of the rare instances where she's been booked to get involved with someone in the match I can't recall her doing anything to outshine what's happening in the ring.

[El-P]

21 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

Marty Asami? Yeah, that dude's the shits. He single-handedly ruined the Ishii/ZSJ match I watched a while back by going out of his way to telegraph every single near fall.

Yep, that's him. I manage to block him out at times, but it's a struggle when nearfalls are so important in the pacing of the match. He should only ref EVIL's matches, that way I would not see him ever again.