AEW 2022: The year of the bloody bunny

oh wtf can you just not do separate paras in spoiler tags?! i checked that time! never really used them so apologies in advance to anyone who reads anything they don't want to before they've had a chance to watch the show, won't do it again

yeah Brandi is not great and her angles have always been pretty bad, hence the hostility, but all the fucking same. you'd have thought that fans of a medium which deals entirely in metaphor and semiotics would be able to see the bigger picture. otoh of course this is wrestling and old habits die hard

Ruby vs Nyla better than expected. Jake the Snake still rules on the mic. Hangman is good but maybe getting a bit cold. can we at least quarantine Lambert to one segment per show? (nb he probably still would be my vote for the best heel promo out there in spite of his bullshit, it's on TK imo to adopt an editorial stance at ths point). 45 mins or so for Punk vs MJF?! wtf i have no idea what im about to watch, are they actually gonna go super long? i guess they have to! anyway here ends this painful live-tweet thread until we hit the angle that is clearly (hopefully?!) coming up here, at which point i will undoubtedly live-tweet again

mjf/punk was a wall-to-wall classic afaict

feels weird to call myself a mjf fan but his in-ring work is special

Excited to watch this at the weekend. The Brandi thing sounds horrible. She has been bad time and time again so i understand the X PAC heat; throwing her in there with someone very skilled on the mic who seems quite misogynistic and entitled is a really bad call.

Very strong in-ring show all around capped off by a tremendous main with genuine intrigue

That Brandi-Lambert segment was as horrific as yous have said though my god, grim misogyny, awful focus-grouped work-shoot edgy zings leading to a pull-apart for no reason and an angle nobody wants to see, the worst of all worlds

The Lambert stuff is bad, yeah (we know it’s a work, we get that you’re really a fan, let’s try something else please?) but there’s a really mean-spirited slant to the reactions Brandi gets. It’s not strictly go-away heat; it’s something more like ‘it’s cool to pile on here, for some reason’ heat. And as much as Brandi might deserve valid criticism for this or that, I feel really iffy about it.

i also feel iffy about it, it feels gross for sure

the women's division angles are crisscrossing so much rn it's a spiderweb and i love it

who's walking through the forbidden door wednesday

I have no idea. Excited to see who though.

Fuck me this Brandi segment is brutal. Did they intentionally send out there to get the town wrong? What a horrible way to start it, of course this was gonna be a mess. I havent seen this kind of x-pac heat in a while.

This is a car crash. This is horrific.

Danhausen is watching to see if you are watching #AEWDynamite tonight on TBS at 8pm EST of some sort

(if you do not, you will be cursed etc etc yada yada yada) pic.twitter.com/JPs1V5IOr3

— Danhausen (@DanhausenAD) February 9, 2022

not looking forward to the continuation of the brandi/pvz beef (hope brandy gets jobbed and has to recover through a series of hopefully increasingly less horrible matches on dark elevation) but otherwise so so so stoked for atlantic city dynamite

ugh i think the TK promotional push has sold me on staying up late for this - if he burns me here I'll be fuming but he's selling tonight so hard I think I have to check it out. not entirely sure what he can possibly be selling to justify this level of hype (Jeff Hardy? Keith Lee? enh) but for tonight at least I'm buying

the hype is outrageous lol

Idk if there's anybody left they can sign that actually warrants this level of hype

Would pop p big for Kairi who I miss being on TV

it's Shane McMahon obv

goldberg

what's Bautista up to atm?

actually the thing i'm longing for is for Switchblade to show up and initiate a proper AEW/NJPW angle but i'm a stupid mark and there's no way that's happening

i don’t wanna spoil it but it’s been a very special night

this is the most overwhelming episode of dynamite

I’ve woken up in the middle of the night needing a wee, checking ilx on my phone as I can’t get back to sleep, seeing these posts, wondering whether I find some headphones and watch it? No, I must sleep, wrestling can wait till tomorrow. Must go to sleep, and def not look at twitter…

you would just be catching the beginning of the texas death match, good timing

i don’t even know what to do with myself after all that

Best start to a Dynamite ever.

“Influencer” Jericho is a really wack idea

I’ve never really seen spoilers before but this match against Isaiah Kassidy is one of the funnest matches I’ve ever seen.

What a joy.

How does anyone not love this tv show?

Dynamite is so great.

The finish to the TDM actually made me cheer out loud in my own home.

Yeah top to bottom that was excellent. The deathmatch, the tag, the jade match, the debut match, all of it. When kassidy got tossed across the ring I hollered but there were sick spots spread throughout the show in every match and the talking segments all ruled. The crowd is still so ready for Wardlow, that’ll happen on the ppv.

On the forbidden door stuff - I am a prophet. Cannot wait for whatever comes next.

Most stacked roster in wrestling history at this stage

to see keith lee debut and immediately fight a match that played to every single one of his strengths made me overwhelmingly happy

also... gotta love how they set up a match in the opening and then had it happen later in the night. this is the most wrestling has ever felt like a normal episode of television to me, we kept returning to the same characters, picking up threads that had been dropped earlier in the hour

yeah that whole thing was so good, it felt in the 1st promo like they were setting up Wardlow to be the mystery partner on a later show (this would also have ruled, because in A-E-Dub there's always multiple cool ways that to book this shit) but Mox was such an amazing choice for a second in the context of doing the whole shebang in one night.

it worked on every level - Punk and Mox have history going back to the early months of the Shield, it was a delightful twist on Danielson offering an alliance to a hesitant Mox last week (particularly given all that talk about Punk and Danielson teaming together) and most of all because it makes so much sense that Punk goes into the back after that first face-off and asks "hey does anyone wanna come out for a punch-up with these two goons?" and Mox is just like "oh, a fight?! yes please!"

Moxley looks fucking incredible now too, so so happy for him

loooool so apparently TK had to pull out a few stops at the last minute to get Switchblade in because apparently he panicked when he used the phrase "Forbidden Door" in hyping the show and then realised that all of the hardcores were expecting a New Japan crossover as a result and he didn't want to let anyone down. doesn't suggest a long term booking plan but you can count on the Elite guys to have a good idea of where they want this to go. seriously, wrestling has never seen a promoter like this. he is simply the best

the idea that not only would you not dismiss your fanbase as a bunch of rubes to be cheated and condescended to at every opportunity but rather paying customers whose tastes should be catered to if at all possible, it's revolutionary stuff

It’s fantastic. Love Tony.

Mox was the perfect partner but I was secretly hoping for Cabana.

When I have some free time, I need to find some knife pervert highlights. NJ people fucking adore him.

AQA is All Elite! So psyched.

BESTIES REUNITED pic.twitter.com/KqGJdMoazJ

— chris kreider respecter (@jonmoxIeys) February 10, 2022

we're the ass boys
billy ass and the ass boys

cody and brandi officially left aew

Lmao at wrestling news today. Also includes bringing Austin back to squash owens at wrestlemania that isn’t selling well.

Also supposedly you can get 2 for 1 msg and WM tickets. Austin is 57! I know Sting is older but he also didn’t require 20 years ago.

Cody: WWE star is gonna be pretty dumb. Such a shame Hunter can’t have another WM match for the first throne on a pole match. And the likes of Charlotte having to take Brandi seriously? On the other hand, they desperately need something to shake it up.

The only perk I can imagine WWE could offer Cody that would bring him back is if they sign over the rights to the Rhodes name and maybe gave him a WM match. Also curious if they would bring back Brandi as Brandi or if they would go back to her being Eden Stiles.

Honestly, I'm hoping that they're taking this time off to focus on their little one. Maybe Cody can build up The Nightmare Factory more? I don't really want to see how self-congratulatory WWE will be if they actually take one of the founders of AEW. Especially the only one who had a run in WWE before.

Honestly the increasingly deranged tone of the little pocket universe Cody and Brandi were inexplicably permitted to book themselves in was getting so jarring I'm kind of relieved if he is gone

My instinct is all the people talking through all the permutations of how this is a work must get their wallets inspected a lot, but then what could be more Cody than doing a big unnecessarily elaborate worked-shoot "I'm leaving town forever" storyline then using it to come back and try and get cheered for the exact same "Cena but not even pretending to not be insane" character he's been doing for the past year without it even being a heel turn

Honestly the increasingly deranged tone of the little pocket universe Cody and Brandi were inexplicably permitted to book themselves in was getting so jarring I'm kind of relieved if he is gone

i would be a little less mean about it (cody's last promo was the good kind of unhinged pocket universe-making) but yeah

feeling genuinely sad for the wrestlers he's leaving behind tho

Yeah I have posted extensively about the bits of Cody’s acts I enjoy and why I think he really was very important in the early days but frankly if anyone is gonna jump I’m glad it’s him. They’re so stacked now that the show won’t suffer at all

Hope he soaks WWE for every penny and gets himself a title run out of it tho lol

this is very off-topic but i bought the warrior wrestling 19 ppv the other day because i really needed to see thunder rosa vs. athena, but the whole show is very good, particularly santana vs. speedball!!!! can't tell if i should start a thread for it

Start the indies thread, Brad. I tried last year and was the only person who ever posted in it.

Cody booked himself into a weird corner when he declared so early on that if he lost the title match, he would never challenge for the title again. The TNT title became so synonymous with Cody to the point where it really felt like it was made for him. I've always been a little on the fence with Cody, because you can tell that he really knows the business and how to do the character work to get the face pop or the heel heat, but sometimes I don't understand the choices he makes.

That being said, any fan interaction I've had with Cody has been super pleasant, and he's always seemed genuinely happy to meet with fans and give them a little bit of his time. I'm with you, Windsor. I hope that he gets that huge payday from WWE if he wants, and gets the Rhodes name back.

I pretty much agree with everyone.

I really don’t think it is a work but if it is, I hope it is something mental. Like pure wrestlecrap.

Also I forgot to mention how excited I was during this weeks shows (Dynamite?) that they had a teaser for old school crazy Penta. One of my favourite characters in wrestling history during that Lucha Underground run, and with Fenix out, I hope they let him run wild.