wednesday night war
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Wednesday Night War Week 13: Here’s Some Money, Go See a Star War
Wrestling and Christmas—they go together like legs and feet. Holidays are kind to wrestling in general. They’re days when American families eat heavy meals at 2:00 in the afternoon and stagger out into the bleak grey afternoon looking for something to do. Movie theaters are open on Christmas. Companies like WWE run a loop of…
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Wednesday Wrestling Week 12: Coming to you in glorious picture-in-picture
At the risk of repeating myself, I want to talk a little about commercial breaks and their function in wrestling in an era where advertisers are so desperate to be seen that they’re willing to share space with what they used to interrupt. NXT made a big deal about running Finn Bálor and Adam Cole…
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Wednesday Night War Week 11: When “fine” is enough
Sometimes a wrestling show is just a wrestling show. Given the need to make everything meaningful and worth the time one is asked to invest in it, it sometimes works to the advantage of a reviewer to find significance where there isn’t any, to make an ordinary night seem like the greatest night in history,…
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Wednesday Night War Week 10: Cults, Cults, and More Cults
Two hours is a long time. I know that the last seven years of three hour Raws and six hour supershows have changed the perception of how time works within the boundaries of a wrestling event, but a lot can happen in 120 minutes, and between NXT and AEW, Wednesday night tends to be when…
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Wednesday Night War Week Eight: Non-stop Bangers
Y’all ever stop to think about how good professional wrestling is? I mean, sure it’s a terrible cesspool of weird boomer energy, a medium of entertainment that thrives on manufacturing and disavowing controversy on a minute-to-minute basis, but beyond the crushing despair of constant exposure to the flaws of humanity there is this: few things…
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Wednesday Night War Week 7: The Curse of Full Sail University’s Parking Lot
I have a confession to make. I am one of the mythical lapsed fans AEW is always going on about capturing the attention of. Before the debut of Dynamite (and this column), the last major American wrestling event I watched live was WrestleMania 35. Before that, it was an NXT house show in Atlanta. I’ve…
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Wednesday Night War Week 6: A Dialogue!
This week we decided to experiment with a different format: LB Hunktears and Colette Arrand typing paragraphs at each other in Google Docs. It’s kind of like a podcast, but for your eyes. You could get a computer to read it to you, if you want. We hope you like it! Hunktears: Hey Colette, we…
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Wednesday Night War Week 5: Asuka & Kairi Beat Rick & Morty Every Time
It’s been a busy week for professional wrestling. As I type this, WWE is cashing a gigantic novelty check written by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, recoiling from a 15% dip in their stock valuation, and doing their level best to spin NXT star Albert “Jordan Myles” Hardie Jr.’s public, painful, and ongoing discussion of…
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Wednesday Night War Week 4: Finn is mean now 🙁
We’re roughly a month into the eternal war between WWE NXT and All Elite Wrestling, and something of a familiar pattern has emerged: AEW seems fresh by virtue of being new and different, and NXT is solid because it’s been solid for a very long time. It’s easy to hand wins to AEW. Given enough…
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Wednesday Night War Week 2: AEW sk8s to victory
Last week, FanFyte editor Hunktears declared the first round of the Wednesday Night War a win for both sides, bringing some much-needed objectivity to an argument that is usually pretty pointless. Whether you’re Team NXT or Team AEW or Team How Am I Supposed to Watch Four Hours of Wrestling Every Wednesday, there is a…