Categories
Opinion

Wrestlers Are Best at Wrestling

I’ve been pretty out of the loop on wrestling recently, but I happened to need something to listen to so I put on the most recent Flagship Plus from Joe Lanza (patreon link). The theme of his monologue was inauthenticity in wrestling, talking about the fact that Samoa Joe – a guy who is past his prime, who isn’t a draw at this stage – is the most badass person in All Elite Wrestling today. It’s been a while since I’ve watched the show but that’s what I remember from when I was watching. As Lanza says: “The guy has an authenticity and an I· Will· Fuck· You· Up· energy that breaks through the walls of kayfabe and jumps right off the screen, YOU· BELIEVE· in Samoa Joe.” He’s real fired up about Joe and it’s hard not to be. Everything that Lanza says is absolutely true.

The specific line of thought that made me want to reflect on the monologue was Lanza feeling disconnected from AEW today, despite the fact that they put on what’s pretty uniformly thought of as great wrestling. Early on he says “This [Dynamite] had all three of the elements you look for in a great episode of Dynamite. … There are wrestling shows historically where maybe the boxes that need to be checked would be a bit different to constitute what a great show would be.” A couple of minutes later, he follows that up with “The problem is … I am struggling to connect with this promotion right now. Or maybe it’s the other way around, this promotion is struggling to connect with me right now, and I can’t really pinpoint why.”

That sentiment hit me hard because I have been extremely disconnected from AEW for a few years now. I know last year I was making an attempt to watch Dynamite weekly… but that didn’t succeed, did it? And the reason I stopped is largely because it began to feel like a chore. In the beginning, I was engaged because I was primarily using it as a launchpad to reflect on Lanza and Kraetsch’s thoughts about the shows. But if you’re doing it week after week, the show itself starts to loom larger, and the fact that I wasn’t really enjoying it became more critical.

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).