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Last week, Eddie Kingston challenged Cody Rhodes for the TNT Championship, and that’s pretty much the best thing that’s happened in American wrestling this summer. You can read Martin’s recap from last week, listen to LB and Danielle talk about it on the Fanfyte podcast, and take a brief detour with me to see…
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Look. We’re far enough into the reality of this pandemic that the idea of “essential workers” and “front lines” have become part of everyday speech. We don’t flinch at them, though we should—when we talk about essential workers like cashiers and janitors as “being on the front lines,” we’re talking about sending people into…
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Week to week, it’s kind of difficult to figure out a way to contextualize an episode of AEW Dynamite. We’re long past the point where there’s something novel about there being another wrestling show on a major broadcast network, and everyone has decided to push the potential consequences of wrestling during a pandemic where…
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It is hard to know where to begin this review of AEW Dynamite. Fanfyte took last month off of regular coverage of televised wrestling as a means of responding to WWE and AEW’s decisions to shoot live shows during a pandemic. That pandemic is still a going concern, and watching wrestling under these circumstances…
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Welcome to Let’s Pretend It’s Any Year Other Than 2020, where the Fanfyte crew talks about wrestling from May in other, better years. There’s been a lot of Atsushi Onita coverage on Fanfyte lately. I wrote about his exploding ring death match against Terry Funk as an example of the tenderness I’d like to…
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You may not know this from Fanfyte VCR or any of the non-COVID-19 related wrestling coverage I’ve done during These Uncertain Times, but I feel like my enjoyment of professional wrestling—current American professional wrestling at least—is at an inflection point. WWE isn’t just bad—they’re an active blight on American culture. AEW is dealing with…
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Previously: WrestleMania 36 Part One At last, wrestling can sleep. It won’t, of course—as a long-running metaphor for the strength and endurance of America(n capitalism), there’s more Raw, NXT, SmackDown, and AEW to come—but it could. And if it did, what strange new territory it’d have to explore upon waking. AJ Styles is canonically dead.…
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WrestleMania shouldn’t have happened this year, but it did. Pre-taped in the WWE Performance center from the hours of 11:00pm to 5:00am and with a card heavily altered due either to talent being ill in an undisclosed fashion or being immunocompromised, WrestleMania defied logic and safety, practically spit in God’s eye, and happened. Beyond…
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With Blood & Guts postponed on account of pandemic, AEW Dynamite this week was a hodgepodge of matches and ideas that weren’t part of the show’s narrative plan. This being the second week of Dynamite in an empty football practice facility, it’s pretty notable as to how far scaled back the production was this…
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During this week’s AEW Dynamite, WWE announced that it was cancelling this Friday’s SmackDown in Detroit and moving it to the WWE Performance Center, where NXT emanated from due to a scheduling conflict at Full Sail University. The NBA suspended its season after the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert tested positive for Coronavirus. With this…