MoS

Christian is suffering by being booked for an interview right after an extended promo by Mox and King, the two best promo guys in wrestling today. Makes him look 2nd rate right off the bat

Mox, you're my man, but basically nobody loves the Good Brothers

Agreed on both parts. MJF definitely does what he does really well. Makes me think he is honestly one AEW young star who would have thrived in the WWE culture - their style seems tailormade for him. Spears is as bad as Tully is good. Watching Tully spike fools, I might just pick him over Spears as a wrestler as well

I like MJF but he feels very performative to me. Like, his insults are the exact opposite of the kind of insults his idol Roddy Piper or another young charismatic wrestler with a meteoric rise The Rock used to make: all his clever burns seem rehearsed. Like he asked a bunch of interns to come up with 5 great burns for Jericho. Tully as the modern-day JJ is great though

J.R saying "woman-handle" like he's the first one in history to ever think of that term, the idiot

Wasn't a fan of the match. It was way too "my turn your turn blow off all work to do your shit" for me. Plus, the finish was bad, with one of the weakest rollups this side of Owen-Austin

Really don't like Mox and King being paired with the Dork Bros. Feels like a significant step down for both Mox and Eddie. On the other hand, really looking forward to the main event. Dr. Baker is the biggest star of the division and your and my role model, and Thunder Rosa is extremely charismatic with star presence. It should be a great match

Taker between 2008-10 was actually fairly active, which probably helped him have such great wrestling conditioning in those epic matches

Roman is the biggest star, but he is locked in a deadweight WM feud with Edge - unless somehow Bryan gets inserted - and Sasha is suffering from WWE being terrible at booking faces. Lashley v. Drew is their best main event, for good or for bad. I also understand that the original plan was to give Drew a big title win in front of the fans that he was denied last year. However, circumstances have changed and Lashley is the big hot guy with all the momentum, and a very good worker to boot. I would absolutely book Lashley to win their WM match and retain.

To add to this, their first matches actually drew well on the house show loop. But since Flair was treated as just another guy, a fraud loudmouth, the program just didn't have legs. By November, Hogan was actively burying Flair on promos. Come Wrestlemania season, their feud had no drawing power. Plus, one of Vince's promise to Sid to get him to jump to WWF in the first place was a WM main event. Wasn't he released cuz he failed a drug test? This was around the time they had really serious drug testing.

Completely agreed and as I said earlier, it's thd booking equivalent of laying out a match as a spotfest with nothing but spots designed to pop the audience

If he's doing adderall, he was presumably also doing adderall this time last year, when the booking was much tighter and better than it is now. That's not really an adequate explanation

Co-signed with El-P and I would absolutely love both a 4 Pillars project or a Tenryu bio!

He was more than just a body definitely, but the body and his young boyish looks definitely had a big role in his drawing power, which was at its peak from about 1978-84. He wasn't really in any position to actually draw in WWF though, was he?

Meltzer's theory has always been that he stopped being a draw as he got older and stopped looking as good as he did. There's something to that; as good at selling as Steamboat was, his character was never Ricky Morton. I personally also think that the killer WWF 1980s schedule also broke down his body and stopped his physique from being as impressive as it used to be, in an era where that mattered more than ever.

I'm there as @MoS2518 https://twitter.com/MoS25518

It's become worse this year, which made them hotshot to a career-ender gimmick match in the first place. I think at least for a while, they need to stop worrying about anymore signings, give themselves 6 months and a specified number of guys and girls who they want to push and elevate to the next level, and then spend every minute from now until All Out to do exactly that.

I think Loss has said this about a hundred times, but those of us saying AEW is schizophrenic with no sense of identity are not pointing to the lights out thing like an indisputable piece of evidence, and I don't think the point was to compare and contrast every blackout in wrestling history. The point was that this was a tiny example emblematic of a booking philosophy that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to be. A complete sports-oriented build with cameras in locker rooms explained minutely? A proper melodramatic rassling product where everything is in service of popping the fans and starting new angles? A cinematic product which is firmly a 21st century thing? The tension showcased itself in the cinematic match at Revolution too, where they couldn't choose whether they wanted background music or live commentary, so they just decided to go with both

Yeah I think Tony definitely needs his Patt Patterson now.

Like the world's worst Vader-Inoki. Hell, the world's worst Vader-Monsoon

WCW was a buffet as far as in-ring styles are concerned; I am all for that. WCW's booking had an internal consistency and pattern from top to bottom, for good and for bad, during their peak years.

A friend of mine used a good analogy about AEW's booking: it's often like a good but not particularly memorable/logical modern match. It's a lot of spots designed to pop the crowd without necessarily having any logic or consistency to them. I think it's because much like how some wrestlers don't have a coherent gimmick true to themselves, AEW and therefore their booking don't have a coherent identity yet. Being a buffet was fine when they had to get a baseline audience. They have one now and it's time to figure out what they are.

I LOVE long Loss's posts. AEW when it started had a buffet approach where they said they had something for every kind of fan. That's okay when a new promotion is trying to establish a foothold, but 1.5 years later, they have established themselves, they have a core fanbase, and now they need a coherent sense of identity. It's one reason why I feel its booking has been really inconsistent throughout the last few months, since Mox's title reign ended, honestly. As Loss put it, pick a lane and stick to it.

I have never understood this. The worst of Steph is worse than the worst of Shane, but Steph's highs destroys his highs, and 2014-16 run aside, her work was much better as a chickenshit heel in the attitude era than Shane-o-Mac doing his stupid dance steps and going toe-to-toe with Rock

Their viewership was well below what it should have been on the fallout Dynamite from their biggest show ever. There's no denying that the damp squib hurt them. It's about rebuilding now, and they made a good first step yesterday night.