Categories
Opinion

Commentary: Thursday Dynamite Review 12/5/24

Here is my commentary on the Voices of Wrestling Thursday Dynamite Review posted today, December 5, 2024. If you’re not aware, you can listen to this by checking out the VoW Patreon, which I’m going to trust you to be able to find. I’m not gonna shill every week but I figured I should at least point out exactly what I’m reacting to once. The host is the inimitable Joe Lanza; I’d have a specific nickname for him but they stopped doing that bit like a year ago.

Anyway, I have done a review of this event on my own where I give thoughts on suspension of belief, and I refer to some of these thoughts in the commentary so it’s worth checking out first.

Spoiler ahead for something that happened after the broadcast ended.

Categories
Opinion

Review: AEW Dynamite 12/4/24 – Disbelief

This episode of Dynamite is a great example of why I don’t like AEW. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the show and I still thought it was godawful. Now look, I admit that I’m in a bad mood for other reasons today, but usually, good wrestling can brighten my mood. I didn’t feel like we got a lot of it here, and it’s for one main reason: suspension of disbelief.

To be specific, I was not suspending my disbelief for any of this shit.

Why not? Well, let’s go through the show and I’ll point it out to you.

Categories
Opinion

Review: AEW Dynamite 11/27/2024

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.

Categories
Opinion

Review: AEW Full Gear 2024 + VoW Instant Reaction

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).