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Monday, December 09, 2024

AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 12/2 - 12/8

AEW Dynamite 12/4/24


Darby Allin vs Komander

MD: Full disclosure. I want to talk about Kyle Fletcher and Daniel Garcia, even briefly, and I'll do that down below in something of a C2 roundup. I don't want to shortchange this match though. Even within AEW where we have all sorts of match-ups on a weekly basis, the C2 is unique. I'd argue that this year's is even more unique than last year's. Last year you had RUSH in there, sure, but he's a little more conventional, a lucha brawler. Likewise Andrade who had worked a more conventional US style for years. This year, the C2 really shows the diversity of the roster. Styles make fights and all that, and it's true to a degree with wrestling as well. Komander seems like the poster child for this notion. His match vs Ricochet was like vs like to a degree, even if it was different flavors of like and even if Ricochet had some extra fun with it during the break. He'll be up against a deity of basing in Claudio and an absolute monster in Brody. They're all going to be very different matches and of course wildly different matches than what we would have gotten if Juice had been in there still. It's a great opportunity for Komander and for AEW to elevate him, even as a guy likely in there to eat falls. On some level, even with the loss of the Lucha Bros, it's exciting to think that there'll be an almost more dynamic tecnico engine of Hologram, Komander, and Bandido soon. That feels especially important with Texas looming.

Maybe what was most interesting with this match specifically was how Darby got to stretch. If you forced me to define him in a bucket, I'd almost call him a Cruiserweight Bully here. He was able to jam Komander at the beginning with a technical prowess that he can only ever show mere flashes of and he jammed him at the end out of nowhere in a beautiful sort of boy-scout knot tying. In the middle, he did his best to match Komander's speed and high risk daring and paid for it more often than not, each time more spectacularly than the last. In some ways it reminded me of the escalation in the Darby vs Jeff Hardy match but here there were more defined roles. Here, the This is Awesome chant was appropriate and fit the match perfectly. At some point, you got the sense that Darby realized it and that he wasn't going to be able to beat Komander how he wanted to, by playing Komander's game (one that more often than not is at least parallel to Darby's usual one), and he shifted gears, scratching at the back and then finally putting him away without pageantry or daring, no matter how badly you knew that Darby wanted to find a way to leap off a high object just one more time. It was a star coming to grips with the reality of the situation and making the mature decision and the sort of random complexity that you're only going to find in the C2. 

Fletcher/Garcia: 

I'm not writing a full blown essay here but I am noting what is plainly clear to see. Kyle Fletcher is wrestling fearlessly as a heel. The match with Shelton may be one of my favorite AEW matches ever. Ever. Some of that was due to a game crowd. Some of it was due to Shelton being willing to lean into it. So much of it was Fletcher though. I've seen comparison with Tully, but to me, the comparison point is young Gino, someone so fearless and confident that he's able to get under the skin of everyone in the crowd and get them to react accordingly, react the way that makes wrestling different than any other performance art out there. He's taking his time. He's interacting with the crowd, the ref, his opponent. He's inhabiting every moment and taking up all the air in the best way. It becomes a loop. They feed him. He feeds them. He gives them something to react to. They give him something to react to. It's all better than the sum of the parts or the sum of any carefully constructed spotfest. He's giving them noting positive to latch on to and he's cheating to win. The end of the Okada match where they eschewed a finishing stretch in general and went with the low blow and Brainbuster instead felt like a heelish repudiation of the very notion of fighting spirit. In some ways it's the purest, most distilled pro wrestling that I've seen in years. It's a beautiful thing and it needs to be protected and fostered. It's like the first sprout of a plant growing in an arid, barren wasteland. That's not to say there aren't industrial towers a hundred stories tall, impressive marvels of modern architecture and technology in the wasteland. But this is different. This is green. This is life. And I thought maybe it was gone forever.

And on the other side, you have Garcia doing his very best to create an earnest, positive relationship with the crowd, one that doesn't rely on him being cooler than what's going on, but that instead has him embracing it. He's slapping hands, slamming the mat, reaching out while in pain, holding the hands of kids to draw upon their power. He shined against Okada. Against Mortos it was tricker, because that's not a match that would normally be booked at this point. It was like 89 Steamboat vs Muta. That wouldn't have been fair to Steamboat, but people seemed to like it nonetheless. Then he turned around vs Briscoe, someone who would be more over than almost any babyface in the world, and played up his aggression, brought back the dance for the first time in ages (which felt like Danielson using the Yes Chants for the first time in ages in the first Okada match after he got hurt because he realized he needed an extra bit of connection with the crowd). He was put in a difficult position twice in one week and held steady while finding ways to adapt to the moment. 

Sometime in the next two weeks, maybe even this week, we're going to get Fletcher vs Garcia. There's a world where this is the Steamboat vs Flair or Cena vs Orton of the next ten years. They're tapping into something almost no one is even trying to do (Max is Max and I acknowledge what he accomplished at Full Gear; different pros, different cons; these can complement each other). And I'm not going to lie, I feel more hope for the future of pro wrestling this last week than I have for a long, long time.

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