Month: November 2024

Categories
Opinion

Pro-Wres Lab: A Mess of Rankings

Official AEW Rankings as of Wednesday August 31, 2022
Official AEW Rankings as of Wednesday August 31, 2022

As a sort of companion piece to my article Is the AEW Continental Championship Really Necessary?, I’d like to just go through a few different types of rankings/orderings that I’ll be using as we go forward, both here and elsewhere. I’m unfortunately a sucker for these kinds of setting-the-table posts so you’ll have to get used to it. At the very least, it’ll prevent me from having to delve deep into this every time I want to reference these concepts.

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Categories
Opinion

Is the AEW Continental Championship Really Necessary?

AEW Continental Championship
AEW Continental Championship

Check this article out on Voices of Wrestling: Is the AEW Continental Championship Really Necessary?

We wrestling fans spend a lot of time yapping about titles. Don’t get me wrong: I love yapping. The number of titles in All Elite Wrestling is especially a big topic. Usually, it seems like people think AEW has too many titles. Now, I’m not sure that I agree entirely, but it’s definitely worth thinking about. So let’s pick one and see if we can justify its existence.

How about the AEW Continental Championship? After all, it’s Continental Classic season and this fairly new belt is up for grabs. Does the Continental title really deserve its spot?

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Categories
Opinion

Review: AEW Dynamite 11/27/2024

Picture by: Ricky Havlik Claudio vs Ricochet Chicago, IL AEW Dynamite November 27, 2024
Ricochet wants the AEW Continental Championship

This was a pretty good episode of the old coyote stick, largely helped (I think) by the Continental Classic.

Also, since I’m here, I suppose I’ll explain how I’m currently viewing the star ratings. This might change as I keep going, especially as I understand more about how other people are making their decisions; these types of things always have an influence. I’ll also give them a score range out of 100 as that might help clarify more; this isn’t a real point scale, it’s just to help visualize what I think of as the quality ranges.

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Categories
Opinion

Pro-Wres Lab: Basic Finishing Sequences

Lou Thesz, Billy Robinson (I think), and Lord Blears (pretty sure) congratulating Takada Nobuhiko on winning the UWFi title
Lou Thesz, Billy Robinson (I think), and Lord Blears (pretty sure) congratulating Takada Nobuhiko on winning the UWFi title

Welcome to the Pro-Wres Lab! I always kinda struggle trying to lay out what I’d like to see in pro wrestling, so this is another attempt to do that. My strategy is to try and go slow, step by step, building out ideas that would make my ideal style come together. Hopefully as I keep writing, both with these articles and with other pieces on the blog (and elsewhere??), my perspective will start to come into focus. But I’m also not someone who likes to “start small”, so it’s not always easy for me to introduce a new idea.

All that’s to say that if this idea seems pretty big to be starting off with, I get it and I agree, but I’m doing it anyway.

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Categories
Lit

What is god?

If I had been Kierkegaard
And a woman had loved me
I would have loved her

Categories
Opinion

Review: AEW Full Gear 2024 + VoW Instant Reaction

Screenshot from AEW Full Gear of "Hangman" Adam Page looking crazy
Screenshot from AEW Full Gear of "Hangman" Adam Page looking crazy

I’m gonna start covering AEW shows when I can, I’ll be attempting to keep up with Dynamite and the PPVs at the least. Why? Well, I don’t like AEW, so it’s not out of enjoyment. I just need to get back into watching wrestling regularly and, more importantly, talking about wrestling. While I don’t like AEW, I like WWE less, and WWE is barely pro wrestling so there’s less for me to talk about.

I love pro wrestling. I do not love watching pro wrestling, I love the idea of pro wrestling. This is said badly: I do love watching pro wrestling. When I say that I don’t love it, what I mean is that I don’t love all wrestling and I don’t just watch wrestling that doesn’t connect with me. I haven’t been watching regularly for years because most wrestling does not appeal to me. The last promotion that really grabbed me was New Japan Pro Wrestling in its golden period under Okada, but that’s over now and New Japan stinks.

So why am I covering AEW? My ambition is to run wrestling. I don’t know how that’ll happen or if it’ll happen. It probably won’t. But I’m covering AEW so that I can think more about my ideas of what I want to see in wrestling. This is also why I’m going to be doing commentaries on audio from the Voices of Wrestling Flagship podcast fairly frequently as well. More than anyone else, I feel that Lanza and Kraetsch think deeply about wrestling. I don’t always agree with them but they are usually good at explaining trends and they at least prefer to think in a more sophisticated way than who is a fan of who and isn’t it cool that this happened (though they do that too, that’s what being a fan is).

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Categories
Opinion

Solidarity Is For the Cool

This is a particularly bad subject for a first blog on this… blog… but part of what I want out of this blog is a place to put less thought-out and less overtly political feelings, and this is something that I can’t get off my chest otherwise, so we’re starting here.

I think I’m largely abandoning social media as a place to be social. I am a weird guy with weird interests. I don’t enjoy going to sports games and shit like that all that much, I don’t like making sure I keep up with all the latest movies, I don’t like reading must-read books, and I don’t like listening to must-hear shows. Those things are simply not interesting to me. Because of that, I’ve always seen being online as a way to connect with people who do things I’m interested in and think in ways I appreciate.

What’s become clear to me, however, is that I haven’t gotten anything out of this.

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