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every time i think of how AJ's character is 'crazy', i think of Saturday morning watchmen's bit with Rorschach

"I'm Wacky!"
 
Demonito vs La Yesca - feud of the year. That suicide dive from La Yesca, planting Demonito on the floor, perfecto!
 
fac said:
Demonito vs La Yesca - feud of the year. That suicide dive from La Yesca, planting Demonito on the floor, perfecto!
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Unapologetically, I love it when wrestling gets ridiculous and silly like this and I was SO here for all of this.
 
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Wrestling really works best for me when it is more in the Batman '66 vein than in the Nolan Batman vein.

Along those lines, I am thinking that Dirty Dom Mysterio could be this generation's The Miz, in that I can see him being used against anyone at any level, mostly as the arrogant yet cowardly heel, but also able to pivot to face in the right circumstance because he is so good at being annoying that you start to like and respect the guy.

I mention this because they really should pull the trigger on Balor vs Dom and the implosion of Judgement Day soon.
 
fac said:
Wrestling really works best for me when it is more in the Batman '66 vein than in the Nolan Batman vein.
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I think I'm into all of it pretty equally. Like, I'll watch two guys do a wrestling match with puppets, but then happily watch something like Bret v. Owen in a steel cage, and then watch Undertaker fucking literally crucify Stone Cold. That stuff can all be on the same show and it will make me very happy. In fact, I think wrestling is actively better when all that stuff is on the same show.

And yeah, Dom is doing great work. He's definitely his father's son. And by that I obviously mean he's a lot like Eddie.

fac said:
I mention this because they really should pull the trigger on Balor vs Dom and the implosion of Judgement Day soon.
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Sometimes I feel like Trips took the 'Vince only takes a week to forget storylines even exist' criticism TOO much to heart. I really love the movement toward longer-form storytelling with stuff like The Bloodline and Judgement Day storylines. But they've definitely dragged both out for way longer than they should have, seemingly going in the opposite direction of 'cut short because Vince got bored' into 'they didn't have more ideas so they just kept going.' They've GOTTA hit that sweet spot of killing a story right when it's red hot. They've failed with pretty much all the big current things, honestly.
Except Cena. Because they were on the clock with Cena's final run, they had to speed through some of the feuds and stuff and it -mostly- worked except where The Rock showed up and then decided he didn't wanna anymore. That was weird (but welcome, because fuck that guy).
 
If WWE was a novel or regular TV series, I'd be criticizing the pacing quite a bit by now. Its like 1980's X-Men where we'd get a panel or some small subplot appear randomly in an issue that is then ignored for 20 issues then reappears.

The AJ Lee return was just about perfect timing wise - get Becky involved with the Vision one week as a surprise, next week she confronts Punk, the week after AJ is back - you could add a week or two in maybe and not hurt it, but it is nice and compact and keeps momentum.
 
Yeah, the AJ return is paced really well so far. Be interesting to see how far they push it before the story is considered 'finished.' Again, I'm all for longer form storytelling, but they still really need to know when to stop. No good book was ever 47 books long.
 
Surprise surprise -- Nia Jax has injured someone again. If she weren't related to Dwayne, she would have been fired six times by now. She's so incredibly dangerous. And, maybe worse, she's also incredibly flippant and ignorant about how dangerous she is. Straight up does not care and trolls fans about it.

Also not surprising, the person she injured is Jade Cargil. I'm betting, based on the spot, that a more seasoned wrestler with more awareness would have just avoided the spot when the positioning was wrong, but Jade went with it and got busted open. And, of course, these days whenever there's a head injury bad enough to cut you open the hard way, you've gotta worry about long term head injuries as well.

Ridiculous thing to have happen for such a vanilla spot.
 
I put that more on Cargill for not getting her hands up, but I haven't rewatched it to see if the positioning was off as you say. I think Nia's "I don't care I hurt someone" trolling on social media is just good heel work honestly.

Saw an interesting clip with referee Charles Robinson about how it isn't as easy as it seems for the ref to count to three if the wrestler doesn't kickout as expected (see the end of the match last night, where it is unclear if Nia should have kicked out, or Cargill was supposed to break up the pin, or Tiffy forgot to moonsault prior to her pin attempt as in wresting logic, Nia had just kicked out and Tiffy hadn't done anything else to Nia to make a pinfall likely). As he explained it, if the Ref knows there is going to be a kickout, then when they start to come down on three they are already primed to swipe and not hit the mat - given they aren't actually planning to count 3 or time it to see if the wrestler kicks out, what they are doing isn't really dependent on the action of the wrestler, who can raise the shoulder at any time after the 2. I mention this because a lot of talk seemed to be the ref should have kept counting, as if they were really counting and didn't plan to stop...
 
I watched this ending at least fifteen times and I'm not exaggerating. It gets worse after every viewing.
I've heard former wrestlers during their reviews say Nia pushes and pulls with too much force rather than lightly guiding or pantomiming the motion. They were saying this before Friday.
 
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fac said:
I put that more on Cargill for not getting her hands up, but I haven't rewatched it to see if the positioning was off as you say. I think Nia's "I don't care I hurt someone" trolling on social media is just good heel work honestly.
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There's 'go home' heat and there's 'heel heat.' She has 'go home' heat. No one wants to see her on their screen. Even if she is lying about being okay with hurting people, it's bad heel work because you're not being criticized as a 'bad guy,' when you're being criticized for being an unsafe worker. So embracing the idea that you actually, in real life, outside kayfabe, think it's funny that people actually get injured wrestling you, then you aren't playing a heel. You are just a fucking asshole. If she's TRYING to be a heel by embracing it, then she also is a fucking moron and doesn't understand the business any more than she understands how to wrestle.

As mrboshek pointed out, this isn't the first time, or even the second or third time, that Nia has been criticized specifically for not understanding how to 'throw' a person. And she's now racked up what.. 5-7 different legit injuries on her opponents? At what point do we stop making excuses for her?

You know how I feel about Jade. She's a terrible wrestler. But this was not her fault except in not being seasoned enough to ditch the spot if she even could have (hard to say for sure). Nia was throwing her way too hard, from way too close, and was kind of forcing her downward at the same time. There's no way Jade had enough time to get her hands up, and even if she did she might have broken a hand/wrist going that hard, from that close, into the steps.

Nia threw Vega out of the ring so hard she got a concussion on the floor. She also injured Baley's shoulder pretty severely by, once again, throwing her too hard out of the ring. She fucking threw Sane -into steel steps so hard she busted her head open and triggered concussion protocol-. That sounds familiar. She broke Baker's AND Lynch's noses.
It's the same dangerous bullshit over and over. She's unsafe and clearly doesn't care that she's unsafe because she demonstrates that she learns nothing from these incidents by repeating each one of them.

None of that even touches on her unprofessionalism in the ring (legit shoot fighting Charlotte) or her inability to actually protect her opponents when they're doing their own moves (Charlotte being notable, but there's a bunch of other times).

I'm not saying this as 'let's hate on Nia.' I'm saying this because someone is going to fucking die in that ring and it's 100% going to be her fault. And everyone is going to be all 'oh no, how could this happen! What a tragic accident.' It won't be an accident. It will be part of a pattern of misconduct from an asshole that should not be allowed anywhere near a wrestling ring, and certainly already wouldn't be if she weren't related to someone sitting on the TKO board of directors.



As for the refs... I think we really need to go back to the hard rule that the ref's job is to count to three. That's it. Don't tell them who is even supposed to win. They don't need to know most of the time anyway. Just count to three. As Stevie Richards says; it is the job of the wrestlers to kick out. If they don't, then all the backstage heat should be on them for fucking up the match, not on the ref for counting. It's really that simple. I can't think of a single time when a match was made better by a referee not counting correctly unless them not counting correctly was literally part of the story (screwjob stuff).
 
The refs have to know the ending, and I'll take Robinson's perspective that the refs are never really counting, they are fake counting as part of the act. If they were truly counting then the opposite would happen, someone would kick out at the last moment the the ref might hit the mat anyway.
 
fac said:
The refs have to know the ending, and I'll take Robinson's perspective that the refs are never really counting, they are fake counting as part of the act. If they were truly counting then the opposite would happen, someone would kick out at the last moment the the ref might hit the mat anyway.
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At various points both in WWE and WCW (and other promotions like AEW) refs have been instructed to call the three as they see it. If the wrestler doesn't get their shoulder up, then that's their fault and the office can deal with it. I'm not suggesting they do something they didn't do for years and years, and even haven't done recently. Refs being told to 'count the 3' was done in WWE as recently as the 2010s.
 
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