reignofevil posted:

Camerawork:wise AEW is miles ahead because they aren't insecure in their product. They know that regardless of how many smarks are in their audience that the feats of athleticism on display are damned impressive and that if everybody is wrestling on their A game the moves won't need any help to impress. This is in contrast to WWE's camera work which I doubt I even really need to explain in great detail here in the WWE thread.

But something I wanna talk at length about regarding the contrast in presentation actually has more to do with the in ring agenting and the commentary of AEW. Again this is all my gut here from consuming a ton of the product so take it for the grain of salt it's worth but it's pretty clear to me that the most important thing about the AEW product is that it is 100% entirely informed by Cody Rhodes personal wrestling philosophies and more often than not AEW is completely dominated by the rules of storytelling that Cody had picked up or invented whole cloth from his unique position in the wrestling world. Moments where JR is going into detail regarding what precisely makes for a sloppy pin versus a tight pin. Little touches like when commentary tosses in that arguably the smaller wrestlers have the advantage in the test of strength spot due to a lower center of gravity. The radical decision that wrestlers in the AEW kayfabe should be explicitly billed based on how many years they had been an independent wrestler and that the spots they get assigned within the match should from time to time reflect the kind of strategic differences and experience gulfs that you'd expect to see between different wrestlers at different stages of their career. None of these things exist in WWE because they are all ways in which the booking is intentionally limiting itself and it's a way of carefully curating the product which doesn't allow for temperamental decision-making or on the spot changeups of the card. Because WWE had been the de-facto of american wrestling for so long it also meant these ideas were basically dead in north america until AEW revived them.

So in my opinion the single greatest factor that influences why the product AEW presents is different (and considerably better) than what WWE is presenting is that at some point Cody Rhodes came to some strongly held beliefs on how the logic of pro wrestling is supposed to actually work and Tony Khan basically gave him carte blanche to expand on his ideas and to try them out in front of a national audience for the first time since I'm guessing the 1980's. With this latitude I imagine Cody has gotten basically all of the people actually on the ground agenting matches on the same page regarding his solidified ideas for match structure and selling.

This all percolates down to matches on dynamite and dark where between the wrestlers attempting to sell the story and the strategy that's been given to them by the agents the gaps where a spot's purpose might be initially unclear or not easily deduced by those watching will then be filled in by commentary when cody pipes up in their ear exactly what the gently caress he had in mind*. For me the system is working even though sometimes I'll see spots on dark where I think Cody might be overthinking things a bit and as my final opinion for the night if Pro Wrestling ever becomes popular with general audiences or it experiences even a half decent revival it's gonna be because Cody decided professional wrestling needed to have an underlying logic if the audience was ever going to give a poo poo about it again and grow and I think he was 100% right. By giving wrestlers an underlying ruleset for them to fake-fight with he also massively widened the possibilities for audiences to relate to the characters on the show because we can make our own assessments and projections for what might happen in future episodes of AEW Dynamite based on how we know the universe works and how we know the character tries to overcome hardship. This philosophy is the skeleton and the individual wrestlers having input on storyline direction and freedom to react on the live product or to just make suggestions to the agents based on their own understanding of this philosophy is the meat.

*In fact often the only time I'll listen to an entire match and not hear anything that sounds exactly like something Cody would say is when he's out in the ring wrestling. Just because I'm fairly sure I can hear his distinct writer's voice being echoed on commentary isn't actually a bad thing though. Stories and especially ones that are a collaboration with this many people need to have someone with a solid idea of what should make sense and what doesn't make sense. I'm still not crazy about his matches but as the guy trying to create a consistent set of wrestling laws-of-physics he is an indispensable part of the AEW recipe.

Jerusalem posted:

NXT Results 12/2:

• Shotzi Blackheart defeated Raquel Gonzalez in a ladder match to get the team advantage at War Games. So the face team is going to get the numbers advantage in a War Games match?
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Evil_(film) posted:

New Year's Evil is a 1980 American slasher film written and directed by Emmett Alston, co-written by Leonard Neubauer, and starring Kip Niven, Roz Kelly, and Chris Wallace. The plot follows a Los Angeles punk rock and new wave show host who receives a series of phone calls during a televised New Year's Eve bash from a killer warning of impending murders that he plans to exact as the New Year dawns on each time zone.

MassRafTer posted:

NXT basically fell apart when it let the flood of TNA wrestlers and production people in.

JUNGLE BOY posted:

ShallNoiseUpon posted:

Not from the top rope, but he did it from the top of the WarGames cage in 2018. He stopped doing it well before he was with WWE because the Young Bucks yelled at him so he wouldn't die.

1glitch0 posted:

He will be revealed to be a B+ booker.

Rarity posted:

No one's ever forgetting HiaC 2019

Pope Corky the IX posted:

Which Hell in a Cell was it where Dean Ambrose was defeated by a ghost in the main event and then R-truth did the gently caress You dance?

CobiWann posted:

How often does NXT end with an overrun? I find it funny that WWE would be even THAT petty to schedule an overrun to Cole/Dream just to mess with even a late starting Dynamite.

CopywrightMMXI posted:

WWE NXT or Star Wars character?

Owen Lars

CopywrightMMXI posted:

Ponda Baba

CopywrightMMXI posted:

Ben Solo

CopywrightMMXI posted:

Ketsu Onyu

CopywrightMMXI posted:

Bodhi Rook

CopywrightMMXI posted:

Saw Gererra

CopywrightMMXI posted:

Morgan Elsbeth