Jumpin said:
I didn’t find Punk’s promo whiny at all. It was a good promo. Your post on the other hand? It looks like a lot of projection. And seriously? Complaining about drama and feuds? In pro-wrestling? Come on! You’re acting like the line “The only thing softer than you are the wrestlers you like” really got to you. It’s wrestling! Don’t take it personally. Calm down :D
I watched Collision, and I watched a good portion of RAW—more than half? Collision was better booked, better paced, had better matches, and without all the bloat. RAW had its moments: Tomasso Ciampa’s match was great! A nice quick match to kick off the show - and the Balor beat down was cool too. Then after like another hour, the most interesting thing to happen is to see Dunne save a segment that started off half-decent with Logan Paul, but I felt ran a little long for what it was trying to achieve. My big problem was the bloat and the mini-matches. I think a fast one to kick off the show is a nice teaser for the night, but to make ALL the matches 1-3 minutes? I felt a sharp pang of disappointment when Shelton Benjamin and Cedric Alexander were stomped (but that opening knee was killer)—I guess they’re jobbers now. I’m sure the main event was a little longer, but I quit before I got there. There was so much brand self-promotion fluffing up the show that I’m wondering if some of the UFC guys have crossed over to WWE production staff? The show seemed promising at first, then floundered. It had the huge spark of potential, though, so I’ll try again next week to see if it picks up. Collision was a far more solid show. Well booked, well paced, and lean. The crowd was a lot more explosive than the WWE crowd. And while it’s not saying much, but AEW’s matches and promos were all superior to the matches and promos on WWE. AEW has fixed one things that’s been problematic for me when I watched it last year and the year before. In the past, the show was often incoherent and the “main event” didn’t feel like the main event because of a complete lack of driving anticipation; often the “this is what I’ve been waiting for” moment of the show was MJF cutting a promo, or a match much earlier in the show, or nothing at all. Collision felt like a proper show, the opening promo did its job driving the show and firing up the crowd, making the show feel exciting, and the main event actually felt like the main event. I’ll be watching AEW again this week. |
I agree with a lot of the criticism on Raw but what I would say is that pretty much every match tied into an ongoing story. So, while I certainly wouldn't claim Alpha Academy vs the Viking Raiders was a better match than Andrade vs Buddy Matthews, the former did tie in to an ongoing story and push it forward a bit, while the latter was just a match between two guys for no real reason. Of course, they seemed to have something on the end to build on it, so we'll see how that goes. Generally though, I appreciate how, especially since H "took over" the booking, pretty much every match or segment is part of some ongoing story. Not all great stories, but at least there's something.
But yeah, there are a lot of matches that seem short and kind of pointless as matches. It's a general pattern, but it tends to be especially problematic when WWE has something like Money in the Bank coming up because they wind up doing a lot of qualifier matches, and those tend to be short because of how many have to be done.
I would say honestly that it's kind of pointless to watch Raw if you don't plan on watching WWE's PPVs. The weekly TV shows really do serve mainly to build up to those, where the big matches happen. Not saying there's never good matches on Raw, but you should generally just expect 2 or 3 of them per show. I tend to like this booking model (although they sometimes take it way too far as was the case this week), but definitely not for everyone. If you're going to watch only one WWE show right now, I'd definitely say Smackdown is stronger. It's still a really story heavy show, but the main story right not is just a lot better.
Jumpin said:
NXT was more or less my favourite wrestling show in the last 20 years, before it moved to two hours. Great matches were part of it, but I can understand that it’s not everyone’s taste. I really like good promos too, I love CM Punks and MJFs, some of the best of all time has come from them. I’m going to give NXT another go once I figure out a good place to start. |
I'm obviously not saying I'm opposed to great matches, but I really need to be following the story to fully appreciate them. If you're an anime fan, just imagine watching a fight scene from a show without having watched the episodes leading up to it. It's probably still going to be cool to watch, but it won't have the same resonance. So, watching wrestling sporadically would be like just watching all the fight scenes of an anime which won't quite do it for me. I'm really only going to follow a show if I could do it regularly, and just don't have enough time in the week to do that for NXT.
I agree on CM Punk, but I really don't quite get it with MJF. It's a lot of classic heel schtick and he does it really well, but I don't see anything that would put him on the level of someone like Punk in terms of mic skills.
