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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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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Lit

What is god?

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

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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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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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Opinion

AEW Needs 13 Titles

AEW needs to add more titles. Did I get your fucking attention? Yeah? Good, because this is gonna be a pretty sober and theoretical article. The real lead-in should be “AEW could add some more titles if they want”. I’m not very good at the clickbait style of writing but we keep it moving. I find titles really interesting and while I work on a more comprehensive Philosophy of Pro Wrestling, I wanted to focus a bit on titles and how they can be used. The typical wisdom with AEW is that they have too many titles floating around, they aren’t focused on them enough, and they’re getting lost in the shuffle. I don’t disagree but… is that a bad thing?

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Opinion

High Stakes in Pro Wrestling

“Heat and hatred” has become a catchphrase of Joe Lanza from the Voices of Wrestling Flagship podcast. Heat and hatred draws money, that’s his point. It gets people excited so that they want to buy a ticket and see the show. It’s what creates interest. Pro wrestling has been built on heat and hatred, especially in the United States. I don’t disagree about this. One of the reasons that wrestling falls into the sports entertainment trap, though, is that they push for heat and hatred while forgetting one other thing: stakes.

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