AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 7/25 - 7/31

 AEW Dynamite 7/27

Bryan Danielson vs. Daniel Garcia

MD: There are things to talk about here certainly. If I had to knock it down to three, it'd be (1) the early beating by Danielson as he launched himself at Garcia even before the bell and then just layed it in to get his revenge for the injury; (2) Danielson's sell throughout the middle of the match after knocking himself loopy on the missile dropkick and the way that they worked that in organically where you'd expect it but in other places as well, like Danielson just collapsing off the ropes which took you aback as a viewer; and (3) the really hot extended finishing stretch, where they were hitting a ton of stuff but there was still weight and resonance behind everything and it wasn't just popping up and moving on to the next thing. You could feel the crowd boil over with excitement there and it was more than warranted. 

I want to talk about Garcia instead though. I've seen him get some pushback online and Eric even pushed back against the pushback this week on Twitter. Eric's argument, summed up, is that of all the young "future of wrestling" guys, who are said to be smooth, Garcia's the only one who carries that promise forward so that the smoothness pays off as tangible simulated violence. I'd argue in 2022, after they had run through the hammer and anvil of guys like Danielson and Moxley, wrestlers like Yuta and Moriarty are starting to close the gap a little in ways that are very much appreciated, but I'm not sure if Phil and Eric would take that journey with me. Regardless, I agree that Garcia is smooth and that he's also believably violent. 

To me, though, it's about character. He commits so fully to every motion. He wears his emotions on his face but also in his movements. He reacts to everything that happens and acts with purpose and presence and meaning. This is not a guy who's just hitting spots. The spots are the means and not the end and the end is driven by what the character of Red Death Daniel Garcia is feeling at the time. I've only been watching Garcia for about a year but when the kids picked up COVID from school last October, I watched a bunch of his 2021 stuff on IWTV. What stood out to me was how thoroughly he embodied a sort of entitled youthful petulance in the ring. It reminded me of certain dealings with 20 year olds I knew, the sense that they've inherited a world that they didn't make, that had been laid waste to by those who came before them, that there's a sort of existential hopelessness and you can either lean into a thousand memes about how depressed you are or lash out against everyone and everything around you. 

Garcia, in ring, lashes out. He hangs on like a pitbull, he seizes opportunities, he creates the potential for future violence. In this match, you could see it when Danielson was trying to head back in the ring after a dive and he immediately launched shots at him. It ended with him mounted but you never see someone just latch on like that. You saw it when he pulled back the mat on the outside even though he wasn't yet in a position to do anything with it. And yeah, you saw it all through the commercial break as he jammed his fingers into the wound, as he outright took a bite out of Danielson's head even as Jericho was touting him as a future champion. He wrestles like he has something to prove. When I say that, I don't mean that the storyline of his matches, the narrative tissue, is that he has something to prove, though sometimes it is. I mean that it's underpinning every thing he does. It's always there. It's always in the DNA of every punch, every hold, every bump, every grimace. He's internalized it so well that you don't necessarily see the strings. I've seen the argument that he's not charismatic, but I don't get how anyone can really watch his matches and not see that seething, roiling energy churning through everything he does and not be fascinated to see how he's going to act and react. If you can't find the charisma in that, you've got a narrow, artificial idea of what charisma is. I can't wait to see what he becomes over the next few years as he has to rearrange that chip on his shoulder into something else entirely. For now, though, I want to see him crash it up against the Danielsons and Kingstons and Moxleys of the world again and again and again.