Tag: wwe

The zero-sum gain of jobbing Asuka

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because I was out of town during Wrestlemania, I didn’t get home until the show was pretty much over.  Miraculously, I was able to stay away from the shitshow cancer of social media and somehow avoid all of the shitty live posting that people I know tend to do, but at mythical gf’s advice, I decided to watch some of the matches that I really wanted to see and not get spoiled to, instead of going to bed immediately after getting home.  There wouldn’t have really been any way to have avoided spoilers the following day, considering aside from the wasteland of social media commentating on everything, mainstream outlets like ESPN now like to cover wrestling as well these days.

Needless to say, among the two matches I was most intrigued about going into Wrestlemania, one was the AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura match, and the other was Charlotte vs. Asuka.  Those were the only two matches I bothered watching immediately when I got home; and although I am glad to have gotten through both of the matches without getting spoiled, when the night was over I was disappointed in both, for slightly differing reasons.

Styles and Nakamura completely failed to capture the magic of Wrestle Kingdom 10 in Japan from just two years ago, leading to a fairly uninspired and lackluster match that makes me feel like both have aged past their primes and it was painfully apparent and/or the fact that WWE has the miraculous ability to hinder and suppress the talents of even the most capable wrestlers on the planet.

But obviously, the bigger objection I had from the entire show was the [spoiler alert] decision to have Charlotte defeat Asuka, thus ending her undefeated streak, the single most valuable commodity that the WWE as a whole had left.  As silly as it sounds to be willing to wager on a fake sport with predetermined outcomes, I would have wagered money that Asuka was going to defeat Charlotte, take the blue Women’s Championship, and then held the belt for at least another year, before her streak would have come to an end.  Along the way, they would do some shitty technicalities like having her lose in a tag team match, lose via countout or disqualification, before she would eventually have the last bastion of claiming that she had never been pinned or forced to tap out, preferably sometime in 2019, where she would eventually lose to someone completely deserving or qualified.

However, WWE seemed to have different plans in mind, and just like that, Asuka’s streak is over, and she’s now just another member of the women’s roster with nothing special except superior workrate, deep arsenal and international flair.

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The NXT North American Championship seems like a waste

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much of a wrestling smark as I can sometimes be, I’m not going to pretend like I knew much about Adam Cole prior to his arrival in NXT.  I knew of his name, and that he was a guy that was pretty big in Ring of Honor, but frankly I didn’t even know what he looked like.  When he showed up in NXT and superkicked Drew McIntyre, my knee-jerk reactions was that he was kind of a Shawn Michaels clone, in look, ring presence and the fact that he whipped out a superkick as the very first thing on screen.

Over the following weeks, I watched Cole with interest and naturally read up on his career up to date on Wikipedia, but I had this suspicion that he was probably going to be an entertaining guy to watch.  Between all the matches he had jobbing to Aleister Black, War Games and his other sporadic appearances, it’s safe to say that I felt that he was a really good talent, and was among the guys I looked forward to seeing the most on episodes of NXT.

When NXT announced the creation of the NXT North American Championship, and that the inaugural champion would be crowned during a six-man ladder match, I kind of cringed when I saw that Adam Cole was tabbed as one of the contenders for the new belt.  But at the same time, I had a sinking suspicion that he was the one most likely to win the belt, because the whole Undisputed Era stable seemed like one of the things going to be relied upon to carry the brand over the next calendar year, and there would be no more serious way to bolster them than to have Adam Cole himself getting his hands on some hardware.

And true to prophecy, Adam Cole did win the North American Championship, and I was a combination of happy to see a guy I enjoyed watching win a title, unsurprised because I kind of figured this was going to happen, but at the same time a little bit disappointed that Cole won it.

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You know what fucking sucks?  Live tweeting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was Sunday, April 9th, 2018.  I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting for my flight from Orlando to Atlanta to start boarding so we could begin our journey back home.  Mythical gf and I had just spent a lovely weekend at Disney World where we couldn’t possibly have gotten any better weather than we did.  We dined on a lobster bake at Disney Springs, imbibed in refreshing beverages at the Hangar Bar.  We leisurely ate around the floral world at Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival, and I caught a Heracross in Pikachu Game, the South American exclusive while there.  And due to some strategic planning on account of some typical Florida rain, we managed to ride the Avatar ride that typically has anywhere from a 3-4 hour wait with regularity, in under an hour.

It was a lovely trip.

However, Sunday, April 9th 2018 was also the same day that Wrestlemania 34 was scheduled.  Obviously, seldom am I ever going to prioritize a wrestling show over mythical gf, and I didn’t even bother crosschecking when WM was going to be when we planned our trip, not that it would have impacted anything in the least bit.  But the fact of the matter was that I still wanted to watch the show when I got back home and had a good 3-6 hours of free time because when taking into account of TakeOver and the pre-show and all the promos, who really knows how much time the ‘rasslin is going to account for.

This is often how I keep up with wrestling these days, watching things after they’ve aired, so that I can really flesh out the main storylines and plots without having to sit through all the commercials and extraneous fluff.  Obviously, I run the risk of encountering spoilers on a regular basis, but seeing as how WWE programming runs every single week, and multiple times a week, and the fact that personally I don’t know a tremendous amount of people that are really still into wrestling, it’s typically never really a problem to indulge in wrestling the way I do.

Except, when it comes to the big pay-per-view shows; like Summer Slam, the Royal Rumble, or, Wrestlemania.

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Asuka’s streak is the most valuable commodity in WWE

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whether it’s coincidental or not, I feel like every Wrestlemania Season™ I always find some excuse to contemplate and write about the value of all of the WWE championships.  Maybe it’s because Wrestlemania is the culmination of the year’s stories and scripts, and it’s theoretically where everything comes to a boil, and the chips are all put on the table so that things can be settled, and things can be sown for the year after, but the bottom line is that everything is on the line, and the paths into the future become clearer for all the important players.

The thing is, the WWE has done a lot of things and integrated some plot devices that have taken their own shapes, and manifested into tangible things that are on par with championships, if not competitive in value with the coveted belts that superstars wish to hold.  Be them briefcases, winning streaks, or the ironically self-aware rights to face certain superstars or even simply get to point at signs, there are things that exist in the WWE Universe™ that have become as valuable, if not more, than the litany of belts available in the company today.

And above all of the belts, briefcases and signs stands a streak, the one currently ongoing with Asuka, who hasn’t lost a single match since arriving with the company in 2015.  Sure, wrestling is scripted and the finishes all predetermined, but it still takes a tremendous amount of work to get people to like and care about you to where a promoter sees the value of keeping that character completely undefeated for ongoing three years straight.

It goes without saying that Asuka’s streak is the most valuable commodity in the WWE today.  I know they’re really trying to make it look like she’s going to run into some massive resistance at Wrestlemania when she takes on Charlotte Flair in a proverbial Championship vs. Streak match, but I would wager money that Asuka wins regardless, and then the streak has a belt as well, increasing its overall value further.

And Asuka has worked her ass off over the last three years and making the streak mean something, first by dominating NXT, and missing out on the first wave of superstar callups, solely based on the fact that she was carrying the developmental league and couldn’t be promoted without a suitable cache of replacements in place, before showing up to the main roster and continuing her stellar work rate with a wider variety of female opponents.

Furthermore, streaks in general are things that require a lot of time and patience to culture, and in an industry where patience is scant and knee-jerk reactions are commonplace, successfully developing one and keeping the company’s faith to maintain it are extremely rare things.  Consider the fact that Goldberg’s 162-0 streak was snapped nearly 20 years ago, and up until now hasn’t seen anything remotely close in storyline to remember the importance of an undefeated streak; and many former guys in the industry even regret breaking it then, because there’s no limit to how valuable a streak can get, because the longer it goes unbroken, the more meaning it has when it actually does.

Ironically, my biggest concern is that the WWE will eventually hit a wall of what they could possibly do with Asuka, and eventually run out of competitors.  Women’s wrestling has been growing rapidly, but it’s still staggering behind the men’s side, and there will come a point where viable challengers to break the streak will either be girls Asuka has already defeated time and time again already, or worse off, it’s going to go to some tourist like Ronda Rousey.  If the streak becomes too grandiose, it stops being a matter of trying to execute a suitable end to it, but the difficulty of building up a woman worthy of doing it.

But let’s cross that bridge when the time comes.  Frankly, I hope the streak doesn’t ever end, even if it means that the blue women’s championship becomes worthless in the sense that there’s almost never any chance Asuka drops it, because if there’s just one thing that I still enjoy in a fake sport geared to kids, it’s Asuka’s streak.

And the rest of the rankings:

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Like for WWE’s Mixed Match Challenge

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Full disclosure: at first blush, I thought the Mixed Match Challenge was going to be stupid.  A weak college try for the WWE to experiment with social media live broadcasting, and a blatant attempt at trying to garner web views and social squawking as if they actually could be translated into tangible revenue.

I’ll also be honest that I haven’t been watching the MMC over Facebook, because the last thing I want to see when I’m watching wrestling is to see a million comments flying by in an illegible stream, and a bunch of reaction icons floating across like a fart in the wind.  I’ve been watching them as they’ve been made available on the WWE Network instead, like a staunch hipster.

Regardless of the fact that I’m watching it in the manner not intended, I still have to say that I’ve found the MMC to be really enjoyable over the last four weeks.  Sure, it’s very evident in the way its executed that they’re definitely making great efforts to try and appeal to casuals and tenuous viewers, but in doing so, they’re unintentionally breaking all the tropes and memes that exist about the wrestling industry that most smarky fans like myself are innately aware of, and therefore making it refreshing and interesting in the process.

For example, despite the fact that WWE programming is televised at least five hours every week, if your name isn’t John Cena, Roman Reigns, Brock Lesnar, Ronda Rousey, Shane McMahon or AJ Styles, it’s not very likely that a wrestler is going to get much screen time.  The rosters are large, and there’s simply not enough time for everyone to get a piece of the spotlight.  The MMC has been running basically a 30 minute format, but featuring just two men and two women at a time, and suddenly there’s a generous slice of spotlight for all participants to be in a main event, even if it’s just for just a singular web broadcast.  It’s allowing superstars not necessarily main eventers to get a lot of attention, and in a monopolized industry where we’re spoonfed formulaic wrestling storylines meant to maximize revenue and sell merchandise, it’s a refreshing reprieve form the norm.

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A free weekend of wrestling

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t happen that often, but it turned out that I had an entire weekend free to watch all of the wrestling available for the Royal Rumble weekend.  Weather derailed my hopes of breaking in my new grill with its maiden meats, and all I really wanted to do alternatively was absolutely jack shit other than watching NXT Takeover: Philadelphia and the Royal Rumble.

Surprising no longtime fan or wrestling smark, NXT Takeover was the true gem of the weekend, as just about every single match on the card was pretty good, and I can’t help but wonder what goes through the mind of Vince McMahon sometimes knowing that both his daughter and his son-in-law are basically openly declaring war on his own product with their own personal projects in the women’s evolution and NXT.

Since NXT developed and turned into the officially televised developmental product and started putting on shows since Arrival, they have pretty routinely outperformed the main roster, and just about every single Takeover event has outshined the primary shows that they’re supposed to be the lowly undercard for.

Superstars are given the time and leeway to properly build up their characters, let feuds develop, and are given the latitude and clock in matches to put on actual good matches.  This was no more prevalent than at the last Takeover, where just about every single match on the card had some degree of development behind it, and wasn’t just some fly-by-booking where opponents are pitted against one another without reason.

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Is Puffy eight years old?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: I just wanted to acknowledge that this was the 2,000th post to my brog. The thought crossed my mind after I had back-filled all of the original brog’s posts, which was roughly 1,620~ posts, so given the fact that I had nearly five years of posts to retroactively post, I knew that eventually I was going to hit the 2,000 post mark.

Naturally, if I were posting in real time, I’d probably have made a dedicated post to the milestone, but instead I thought it’d be entertaining to see where on the roulette wheel 2,000 would end up.

Figures it would be on a fluff post like this one, lol.

That’s actually a rhetorical question; we all know he’s got the social intelligence that of an eight-year old, and the “uhhh i was just kidding guys” excuse is pretty much a prime example of such.

Kidding my ass.  Didds saw the backlash from his dumb little publicity stunt, and from the real Brother Love himself, and immediately backed the fuck off.  I’m really hoping Prichard and/or the WWE had a legal lock on the Brother Love name, and threatened legal action unless he backed off immediately; but knowing the way the WWE works today, I like to believe that Triple H or someone up in the company gave him the opportunity to keep the legal part hush-hush, and in exchange, Puffs will owe the WWE something in the future.

Let’s just say, it won’t be at all surprising if we see Puffy on WWE television in near to distant future, and we’ll probably know why it’s the case.

Either way, Puffs got what he wanted, which was attention, and hopefully now that he’s gotten his fix, he can get back to lording over and producing over those much more talented than him to make decent hip hop.  Hopefully he’ll know in the future not to fuck with the real Brother Love, and at least cross-reference the internet for two seconds before he decides to change his name to something stupid in like five years.

But let the record show that Puff Daddy jobbed to a non-wrestler, in Brother Love.  This is kind of better than Jay-Z jobbing to Diamond Dallas Page.