Tag: blets

2 Under 2: the girls’ first blets (#042)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Until my girls are old enough to make the choice themselves that they want to have their respective blets on their own walls, they will have a forever home on my office wall, alongside my existing collection.  It brings the total blets on the wall up to 20, but the reality is that I hope to someday relinquish these two blets to my daughters one day, and I will be the proudest dad in the world on the day I get to mount these onto the walls of their rooms.

I have to say that up until I received my replicas, I’ve always been kind of lukewarm on the design of the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship blets.  Seeing them on television, I wasn’t ecstatic about the design, but I knew that after I learned I was going to have a second daughter, that I was going to want replicas of them anyway, because two daughters are a natural tag team, and they need to be recognized as the champions they are inevitably going to be.

But upon receiving the replicas, I’m quite blown away by the quality of them.  I don’t know if the actual blets are like it, but the replicas’ straps are more of a cream color than straight up white as I figured they, and all the other women’s blets in the company were, but it’s such a subtle thing that I really like.  The plates are impeccably crafted, and I’m both sold and thrilled that I have a pair of them to bequeath to my girls when #2 officially arrives.

It’s so lame, it’s so expensive and it’s so frivolous, but I don’t care.  Collecting blets is something that I enjoy and I hope that one day my girls recognize such, and would be willing to indulge their old man and want to carry a piece of his hobbies, at least onto their own walls to maybe show that they love me too, even when they’ll inevitably hate their parents for being squares and out of touch.

2 Under 2: The continuation of the new father brogs (#40)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Seeing as how I’d been deliberating the fact that after a year, I don’t think I can really be called a “new” dad anymore, seeing as how I’ve gone through the initial minefield of trials and tribulations of sleep depravation, diaper blowouts and all sorts of things that are associated with bringing new life into the world.

And since the WWEShop was gracious enough to finally bring the cost of the women’s tag blets I had 100% intention of purchasing for my two daughters down to my target price point, I pulled the trigger, blets were received, this photo was taken, it seemed like now was as good of time as any to officially change over to a different category title for moving forward.

Most people who might be reading this (all zero of y’all) are probably aware that mythical wife is pregnant and that we’re on the path to bringing #2 into the world this summer, and that it is, another daughter.  I’d often had this feeling that I was destined to have at least one daughter, and I’d be lying if I didn’t have this suspicion that it seemed appropriate for someone like me to end up having a second, becoming a bonafide girl-dad twice over.

Regardless, mythical wife and I are on the timeline of having two children under the age of two, to which just about everyone has opined that we are definitely going to be parenting on hard-mode for the indeterminate future, which seems very obvious, but here we are. 

Despite the fact that it will undoubtedly be excruciatingly difficult at times, and I will probably have like 20 more dad brogs about how much life is hard, I’m sleep deprived, burned out and/or other moments of being stressed out, I still know that at the end of the day, I have loved being a dad to one child and I have all the expectations that I will continue to do so for two, no matter what challenges present themselves to mythical wife and I.

More importantly, since my first daughter will definitively have a natural tag-team-partner-for-life in a sister, it only seemed appropriate that the two of them would have their own blets to commemorate that lifetime partnership.  I imagine there will be plenty of times in which they will team up to the detriment of mythical wife and I, but if they’re working together with success in their mind, there’s only so much ire I could possibly have, and probably smile about the teamwork at a later time.

For now, the girls’ blets will remain in my office along with my collection, because mythical wife absolutely does not want wrestling belts hanging in their respective rooms that she has put a lot of thought into designing.  I acquiesced for the time being, on the condition that if the girls decide on their own that they want them in their rooms in the future, there will be no resistance.

If they are truly my flesh and blood, we all know how this is going to turn out.  But only time will tell on whether or not I’ll experience the next greatest day of my life in the future or not.

Kenny Omega: The Blet Collector(?)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much as I clown on AEW, I have to say that one of the things they’re doing that actually has me pretty fascinated is the way they’re booking Kenny Omega.  Which shouldn’t really be surprise that he’s got a compelling storyline, seeing as how he’s one of the VPs of AEW as well as one of the foundation blocks in which the promotion was built on.  But with his cross-promotional victory over Rich Swann of TNA/Impact, Omega adds two more blets to his expanding collection of championships, adding the TNA and Impact unified world titles to the AEW championship as well as the AAA (Mexico) championship, which basically says he is the top guy for three different promotions.

I’ve always been fascinated by belt collector storylines, because historically it’s so rarely done, primarily because more often than not, it requires a degree of cross-promotion, which is a lot like asking a Klansman to partner up with a Black Panther to save the planet.  It’s been attempted within a single promotion a handful of times, with Lance Storm coming to mind with his torrid 2000 run collecting the WCW United States, Cruiserweight and Hardcore titles in quick succession.  And as much as I liked the Miz’s run in 2010 where he was toting around three blets, the tags were unified and kind of count as one.

TNA tried to kind of run a blet collector in like 2015 when they had Kurt Angle win every single blet within the company as well as the IWGP World Championship, but so often times is the case with TNA, nobody noticed, nobody cared, and it fell flat pretty quickly when he started rapidly shedding blets, and New Japan doesn’t officially recognize the reign with the IWGP championship because of one of the many spats they had with Antonio Inoki over it.

One of the most famous blet collectors of all time was Ultimo Dragon, who once held a mind-blowing ten blets at one time, thanks to the infamous J-Crown tournament in 1996, where it was a tournament held in Japan where all participants were respective champions from varying promotions, where every blet was on the line and as participants advanced through the tournament, they would collect the championships of everyone they defeated.  In the end, the Great Sasuke would win the tournament, collecting eight blets in the process, but in a return match against Ultimo, who went in as the WCW Cruiserweight and NWA Middleweight champion, would lose, giving him ten blets in total.

In more recent years, Austin Aries became a blet collector, in a more traditional way, in the sense that throughout 2018, he actually did bounce around the indies and beat champions and eventually made his way to Impact, where he collected two blets from them, meaning as big league as TNA/Impact thinks they might be, their titles have on multiple occasions, been gathered by guys outside of their promotion.  But at the peak, Aries collected a total of six blets, and as is often the case with Aries’ career, he took himself too seriously, and kind of sabotaged his own career.

Needless to say, the blet collector doesn’t happen often, and when it does, it typically tends to sour pretty quickly and to disastrous result.  However in spite of the history of the gimmick, AEW is taking a stab at it with Kenny Omega, but in spite of my oft-criticisms of the promotion, I actually wonder if they might be able to do better with it than all preceding attempts?

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The new IWGP blet makes me go IWTF

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite my general admiration for New Japan Pro Wrestling, I don’t really follow them beyond the snippets of news that pass through my Apple News feed, or whenever a wrestling fan bigger than me brings it up on social media.  But if there is always one thing that is relevant to my interests, it’s whenever blets are brought up, regardless of what fed or promotion they might be for.

So one of the more prevalent storylines throughout NJPW over the last few months has been double champion Kota Ibushi striving to unify the IWGP World and IWGP Intercontinental championships.  I actually give NJPW some credit for taking this and making it into a storyline, instead of just merging them, as it created yet another solid matchup between Ibushi and Tetsuya Naito, with Naito trying to “rescue” the Intercontinental championship from unification, only to fall short in his efforts to strip it away from Ibushi.

With Naito vanquished, the path to unification was clear, and the above blet is the ensuing result.

I’ve definitely seen worse blet designs in my life, but my first impression when I saw the new, unified IWGP World Championship blet, was definitely, a WTF face.   The center plate basically looks like a Phoenix emblem from X-Men comics, and as a belt, it just looks really imbalanced.  I’d hate to feel what wearing that blet would be like, since the top part of the plate juts out at angles, and any sort of abdominal contracting would have them digging into your ribs.  But I guess if you’ve got the action figure-physique that someone like Kota Ibushi has, he can probably just no sell it all the same.

Aside from the design, I’ve heard that the decision to unify the blets has been mostly unpopular, due to the general history that the IWGP Intercontinental championship has carried throughout the years.  Even in the shorter time that I’ve followed NJPW, guys like Shinsuke Nakamura, El Sombra (Andrade), Tetsuya Naito and Chris Jericho were notable carriers of the belt, and much like the WWE’s IC blet, it’s one very much given to workhorse types.

But the reality is that at this current juncture in time, with coronavirus having rampaged the world much less rosters of all professional wrestling promotions, NJPW just has too many blets for as diminished of a roster that they have.  Aside from their unified title which encapsulates two blets now, they’ve still got the NEVER championship, the IWGP US championship, heavyweight and a jr. heavyweight sets of tag team championships, and a jr. heavyweight championship. 

Frankly, they practically have enough blets for most everyone on their entire roster to have one at this point, so shelving the intercontinental championship isn’t a bad idea, because most anyone with a brain should know that the blet will be back in the future when the pandemic is behind us, the rosters start expanding, and then they’ll have the perfect opportunity to do what NJPW does best, which is have some massive tournament, where a brand new IWGP Intercontinental champion will be crowned.

Back to the main point though, I’m not impressed with the new design of the IWGP championship.  Bootlegs as they may be, I’m glad that I have replicas of the former World and Intercontinental championships, and I most definitely wouldn’t plunk down $2,400 for a replica of this new blet.

Maybe in the future, when the IWGP Intercontinental championship comes back, it’ll have a design worth paying for a Pakistani bootleg, but until that day comes, RIP IWGP Intercontinental championship.

**EDIT: it figures Kota Ibushi loses the championship in his first substantial defense after getting the new blet.  Given the fact that it changed hands to gaijin Will Ospreay, I wouldn’t have put it past New Japan to have make it some microaggression, symbolically made sure the old, prestigious blet wouldn’t be held by someone not Japanese or some weeb lifer like Kenny Omega or Scott Norton.

Moar AEW observations

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As my schoolwork has begun loosening up a little bit, I began trying to play catchup on all of the wrestling that I’d missed throughout the last month.  Naturally, this would include TNAEWCW, and I got many a great chuckle out of the unimpressive fireworks display they constituted as an exploding ring at their last pay-per-view event that also makes me wonder how their PPV buyrates are in a day where so many people are now used to basically getting PPVs for free through the WWE Network.

Anyway that said, I blew through four episodes of Dynamite just because I wanted to see how a couple of things that I’d heard happened, happened, and as much as I clown on AEW for being TNAEWCW, I still like some of the things that they’re doing, and always do hope that things will eventually get better . . . someday.

A couple of things really stood out when watching a whole bunch of TNAEWCW at one time, and I will disclaim that I fast forward through a whole bunch of the matches themselves, because for a smark like me, the matches themselves don’t always matter so much as I like to see how storylines progress, guys cutting promos, and general flow of segments.

First: AEW really does operate like two separate promotions under the same umbrella.  You have one chunk of the roster all in this weird sub-promotion within AEW that revolves around the TNT Championship, and then you have another chunk of the roster that’s entirely focused around Kenny Omega, the Young Bucks, the Elite, and any and all remnants of any sort of Bullet Club/New Japan talents, even if they are Impact guys like Carl Anderson and Luke Gallows, and whomever they’re feuding with at the time, which appears to be Jon Moxley, Christian and for some reason, Eddie Kingston. 

There practically no crossover between the two sub-promotions, and the show might as well swap out ropes and mats between segments, they’re so diametrically different from each other.  The nepotism that AEW fought in year one is clearly no longer being held back, and now that the inmates run the asylum, they’re letting all their fantasy ideas come to fruition, even if it means lots of actual AEW talents are getting their TV time usurped by guys from other promotions.

Second: Rey Fenix and Britt Baker are the MVPs of AEW, hands down.  I’ve been high on both of these talents pretty early on, because it was pretty prevalent that the two of them, regardless of their actual win-loss records or active storylines, are the top male and female talents on the roster, in terms of consistency, workrate and screen impact.

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Women’s Tag Team Championships: WWE vs. NXT

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of my favorite mechanics in the WWE is the idea of floating champions.  Champions who aren’t limited to just RAW or Smackdown, and can really go anywhere within the company.  Throughout the years, the company has dabbled in floating championships, like when they consolidated all belts down to one world championship, women’s and tag team champions, and only those who held the belts could float between RAW and Smackdown.

When business was good rosters got big, old blets were re-established, and championships gained exclusivity to a particular brand.  Eventually, when creativity began stagnating, champions began jumping onto other shows for shock value purposes, and to randomly fulfill intriguing champion vs. champion scenarios, or when feuds between-show talents emerged and needed to be fulfilled.

Ultimately, it brings us to today where we’re kind of back to an age of all shows having exclusive titles, but there is one floating championship (that isn’t the farce of the 24/7 championship): the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship.  It was decreed that the Women’s Tag Team champions could not only hop around from RAW to Smackdown, but it was heavily implied that they could also appear and be defended, on NXT.  That concept alone, whet my whistle, because I’m a huge mark for NXT, and I love the creative idea of an NXT team capturing some main roster gold, and the creative possibilities that could emerge from that.

To date, Creative actually came through with this mechanism, and on three occasions, the WWE Women’s Tag Team titles have been defended on NXT: Dakota Kai & Tegan Nox vs. Asuka & Kairi Sane, Tegan Nox & Shotzi Blackheart vs. Bayley & Sasha Banks, and most recently, Dakota Kai & Raquel Gonzalez vs. Shayna Baszler & Nia Jax.  Despite the fact that NXT has taken the L in all three instances, it has created intriguing television that main roster superstars have appeared in NXT, and had some fun matchups.

However recently, in storyline, there was a controversial finish to the latter matchup between Kai/Gonzalez vs. Baszler/Jax, where main roster stooge Adam Pierce interjected a main roster referee to call the match when the NXT ref was knocked out.  This prompted NXT general manager William Regal, to get upset and make a monumental decision, which ultimately ended up being the introduction of the brand new, NXT Women’s Tag Team Championship, and awarded them to Dakota Kai & Raquel Gonzalez, for winning the first edition of the Dusty Rhodes Women’s Tag Team Cup.

And just like that, the WWE Women’s Tag Team championship has most likely ceased its ability to float on down to NXT from here on out, with the exception maybe being Survivor Series, if they ever try to add NXT to the cross-brand competition.

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A catch-up post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve felt the inner need to do one of these, but at the same time, it’s been a while since I last posted too.  Not a day goes by when I don’t notice when I post, but between my job entering our busy season, the general busy-ness of raising an infant daughter, night classes, and I do mean night classes seeing as how they’re 9-11 pm, taking up two nights a week with often other nights of the week doing homework for said night classes, as I’ve stated a gabillion times at this point, I simply just don’t have any time.

And with what free time I do have, I’m either usually too gassed and fried in the brain to want to sit down and try and gather my thoughts and write about things especially when feeling unmotivated in the first place, and so I usually end up fast-forwarding through the week’s wrestling programs and when I have them available, catching up on TLC programming like My 600 lb. Life and 90 Day Fiancé.  And as much as I hate to constantly lean on wrestling and TLC to find things to about write about, I can’t remember the last time I had leisurely time to just casually surf the internet for local happenings to rap on, and often times general news around the rest of the world is usually sad and infuriating in the first place and I don’t want to feed into negativity that I can simply avoid.

One day, maybe, I’ll have more free time to write again in the future.  For the sake of my own sanity and gratification, I certainly hope so.

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