The rando wrestling post

Looking through my queue of random notes of things I wanted to write some words down about, I realized that there was the opportunity to occasionally consolidate some things into singular posts, to both artificially suppress my imaginary queue of important things to post about, as well as not to bore my zero readers with too much rambling about specific topics that really I’m the only one who cares too much about.

Naturally, my brog wouldn’t be the brog without there being random observations about professional wrestling, and although I’m having a tremendously difficult time keeping up with the business these days on account of having, no time at all, I sometimes try to keep up by either watching the top 10 clips that show up on YouTube, or by watching episodes of WWE or AEW, by fast forwarding through most of it.

Seriously, when I do that, I don’t even watch the wrestling itself; I usually fast forward until when I think the match could be potentially come to an end, and just try to watch the endings to the matches, just so I can see what post-match interactions there are.  Also, promos, because I like to see the progressions of stories and not the actual wrestling product itself, in comparison.

Watching one of the more recent episodes of NXT two-point-oh, it’s evident of what the directive of the product is, and I kind of do really understand that Triple H’s NXT was still anchored by a bunch of older performers, when NXT really was designed to be a training ground of young, up-and-coming talent, and not a place for outside stars to assimilate into the WWE machine.  I can’t say that I’m at all that impressed with the transition, nor its obnoxious ADD color schema, but I do understand the end game with the repackaging of NXT.

But there was an ending to the show where women’s champion Raquel Gonzalez was jumped by a new stable of women, and I couldn’t help but get flashbacks to Takeover: Brooklyn III, where Bobby Fish and Kyle O’Reilly jumped Drew McIntyre after he won the NXT championship, only to be joined by a debuting Adam Cole, and the three of them stood over the champion, signaling the arrival of a new faction.

When Gigi Dolin and Jayce Jane jumped Gonzalez and then were joined by a repackaged Mandy Rose, with the three of them standing over her prone body afterward, it basically felt precisely like the debut of the Undisputed Era, all the way to Rose grandstanding with the championship.  I mean, with the Era all but dead now, with two of them in AEW, why shouldn’t NXT just swap the genders and try the whole idea all over again?

Sure, Mandy Rose was never a stalwart in the ring, Jane is as green as ten Lex Lugers, and Priscilla Kelly Gigi Dolin will probably never let her whole arsenal be used, so I can’t help but bet that they’ll never reach the heights of the UE, but at least they had a cool debut and looked good in the process.

Moving onto the other company, I feel like I had a home run of an analogy of how the world of professional wrestling fandom kind of feels like these days:

AEW is basically like Sega, while the WWE is unmistakably Nintendo.

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“Ready to fight” doesn’t quite describe bringing MMA gloves to a courtroom

I don’t really have much to say about the situation in Taiwan, or have any inkling of an idea of how coronavirus response has been.  But when my friends showed me this story, the photo alone was most definitely worth a thousand words.

I guess there’s some nationalist party out in Taiwan who is less than satisfied with how the democratic party of the country has been handling the coronavirus, so they felt that their only appropriate course of action at this point, was to start a melee in the courtroom.

Sure, there’s all sorts of pacifist belief that violence doesn’t solve anything, and I could make all sorts of smarmy jokes about the level of civility that exists coming out of Taiwan, but let’s just skip to the part where one woman showed up to the courtroom, equipped in straight up MMA gloves.

Not only did she roll up to the courtroom ready to fight, she wanted optimal protection for her hands, so she could try and deliver haymakers without risking breaking any fingers or knuckles in the process.

It’s almost as if there might be belief that Taiwanese law might be like Final Fight, where defeating the opposing parties in hand-to-hand combat means your party takes over, no questions asked.  And those who show up ready to fight stand a better chance at possibly taking power, than those who didn’t come to work with their own MMA gloves.