It makes me a hypocrite when I say that AEW is crazy fun and ridiculous. Trying to compare AEW and WWE is pointless and a bit too cynical, I have said on more than one occasion. Even if they are in the same industry, they are two different things. You can help it, because if WWE was everything that it could be, there wouldn't be an AEW. I end up back here no matter how hard I try.
I was worried that AEW was overstuffing things on their quarterly big shows and wondered where it would go from there. Revolution, which was so many things, including overstuffed, I don't care. Fuck it. Tony Khan needs to put as much as he can in these. Who cares if he puts as much as he can in these? No one will lose if they are entertaining, good, and memorable.
It's hard to ignore the juxtaposition of this being AEW's final show before the biggest show in the industry, and still the industry's biggest week. While Khan and the rest of the AEW crew wouldn't admit to having anything to do with how AEW goes about their business, you couldn't watch Revolution last night and not sense that this is what Mania should look like, whether that feeling was intentional or accidental.
It can get you into a lot of trouble if you watch WWE, but it should be the culmination of everything that is wrestling. Huge title matches that might attract the casual eye, big surprises, ridiculous bombast and panache to the point of camp, a calling back to history of the industry, and moments that will live on forever, however they come. It is supposed to be all of that in one night, but it is now being two nights.
Revolution did all of that. The title matches were the low points of the night, and they were pretty much the best of the night. Hangman Page and Adam Cole brought the house down with a textbook title match at the end of the show. Jade looked like the future star of the industry in her title defense. The three-way tag match was crazy. It was always difficult to follow CM-Punk and MJF because they were the only ones that left people a little flat. It was not bad.
The conclusions or continuations of stories below or separate from the titles were executed masterfully. There is still nothing better on TV than this chapter of the Punk-MJF allegory. It called back to CM Punk's Ring of Honor days with his entrance and his gear, not just the previous match between the two or the beats in the story that led to it. They were mentioned in the go- home show. The match hit a lot of beats.
Jon Moxley and Bryan Danielson were both brilliant in how they put clashing styles together to tell a story. It was a reference to history to move a company forward, and to sign it off with the entrance of William Regal, which hadn't even been whispered, was another reference. This is a great comedy.
Another surprise gem was the signing of Swerve Strickland. Chris Jericho and Eddie Kingston kicked off the show as a referendum on Kingston's entire career and the way it differs from him, and his desperation to cross that bridge fueled the story of the match.
Multiple tombstone piledrivers being used across several matches, so who or what exactly is showing up soon? I hear people dropping coins.
If you want style and flair, I will present you with Jade and Thunder Rosa.
Now, compare that with what the WWE is serving up. There is a huge match of Brock and Roman that has been going on for a long time. One of them is a part-timer.
Two celebrity matches have been thrown together. They have only had one previous singles match and one Mania match previously, where the main story was Becky Lynch. This isn't built on much.
It only gets worse. There is no match for the tag title set up. There's a Drew McIntyre-Happy Corbin thing that's shakily built on an unscathed streak of Corbin, and no one knew anything about it. The historical callback is to bring Steve Austin out of retirement and hope his knees and neck don't hurt.
Pat is getting a match that no one asked for. Naomi was given a tag match against two wrestlers who were nowhere close to her level. We're getting Edge and AJ Styles, which should be great, except that they're both upright at the moment, and that doesn't seem to be much more reason than that.
The only match with two full-time performers with an actual build and story over time is Becky Lynch and Bianca Belair, and even that is still plagued by Lynch's unnecessary heel standing these days.
The point of Mania is that it is overstuffed. It is, of course, wrestling as a whole. This is overstuffed for the sake of it. It is putting ill-fitting things into it so that it attains the proper size and scale.
The cake was baked naturally and correctly, and even though it ended up with so much, none of it felt out of place. Sting was thrown off the concourse entrance through 12 tables by the popcorn, six man tornado tag that acted as a cool down before the main event. It was too much of a good thing if it was too much. Stories ended, took on a new direction, or began something new.
We know that every match will be run again a month later at the latest, leaving everything in the mud where it started.
The fight between the two companies and their fans is exhausting. It's nearly impossible to define the two companies without including what they aren't, especially since what they aren't is on display in the other one.
It is possible that AEW did not mean to show what Mania used to be. It will be impossible to ignore on April 2 and 3.
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