AEW Five Fingers of Death 12/1 - 12/7 Part 2

ROH Final Battle 12/5/25

Athena vs Persephone

In so many ways, pro wrestling storytelling is about the creative and strategic demonstration of vulnerability. Both babyfaces and heels find their true strength in knowing when and how to deploy it.

This then was a story of three vulnerabilities.

Coming into the match, Persephone had Athena's number. Maybe Athena is a fallen goddess but Persephone is one at the height of her youthful power. She was able to keep up with her athletically to start, no small feat. Even when Athena got a temporary advantage, Persephone turned it back around. When she went to mind games, switching hands and dancing to mock Persephone (and maybe her superior strength) on the test of strength, Athena got clocked in the face for her trouble. 

The champion allowed the cracks to show, heading to the floor for a time out. She returned to the ring with another left-handed handshake (the first one refused by Persephone). This was a ploy for her can't miss magic forearm, but her younger opponent had her scouted and avoided it. Back on the floor, Athena tried to whip Persephone into the rail only to have it turned around on her. Nothing was working. Everything was failing. The walls were closing in already. 

That left her desperate, full of an emotional sort of vulnerability that she was confident enough to show. Diamante was out to second her, and she saved her boss from getting tossed into the stairs (generally Athena's own tactic). That allowed Athena to launch an ambush. She dove off of the stairs at Persephone knee-first, but Diamante's presence meant she couldn't hit a meteora but instead had to drop backwards into a code-breaker, taking the advantage but also badly harming her back.

She carried that second vulnerability with her for the rest of the match. It defined everything she did, every reaction, every bit of strategy, the possibilities at play. Selling isn't about holding your back after a move. It's not even about holding your back before a move. It shows consequence, yes, but it also defines the state of play for a character. Athena, far better than most, portrayed this pain throughout everything she did. It impacted how she moved across the ring, how she hefted Persephone up for a suplex, how she failed to heft her up for her more advanced signature offense. It made her a half step slow and a half step sloppy. It increased her desperation and doubled her paranoia. It created an underpinning of panic even as she tried to celebrate her advantage (and all but caused Athena's eyes to bug out as Persephone lifted her up out of the Koji Clutch down the stretch). 

And of course, it ultimately lead to Persephone not only being able to come back, but also able to put Athena's title at as much risk as it had ever been.

To defeat Athena, a wrestler has to not just be lucky, as Persephone was here (even if she had created her own luck) but also, as a character, be able to wrestle their very best match.

And that was the third vulnerability, Persephone's relative youth and overexuberance. 

Once she took back over from Athena and started doing damage, she repeatedly took her eyes off the prize. Right after taking over, she made a little pose as if the belt was around her waist. Her first real cover was lackadaisical. After slamming Athena into the announce table brutally, she went out of her way to say it had been for the commentary team and stuck her tongue out to either them or the crowd. 

And most of all, after finally hitting her Razor's Edge finisher, after Athena still managed to barely kick out, she completely lost her cool, pounding on Athena wildly and rushing up to the top rope to try to put her away. Athena followed her up, hit a killer German back into the ring, and then dropped her with the O-Face for a skin-of-her-teeth win.

Wrestling isn't math, of course, but a good match can often be defined by one good vulnerability. This one had three and it was the mix of the three, two character driven and one a situational result from one of the others, and the wrestlers' dedication and courage to show such weaknesses, that made this match sing.

Eddie Kingston vs Josh Woods

MD: Never in the history of pro wrestling has a tune-up match been more necessary.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure that a tune-up match has actually ever been necessary before this. Usually it's just a way to get a little more heat/momentum for a wrestler before a bigger match. That's not even true. Usually it's just a way to fill TV time and allow the announcers to hype the upcoming bigger match. Rarely does it make sense in practice. 

Here it absolutely did.

Look, I love Eddie Kingston. We all love Eddie Kingston here. And yeah, he's been interesting to write about, and I am absolutely looking forward to write about his match with Samoa Joe. While I'm going to be surprised by how it plays out, I've got the hook in my head already (not that Hook). 

But he has been trudging through mud. He came back from injury and through design or simple reality (pretty sure it's design), he's been slugging it out, one step after another, dragging the weight of all that he is behind him. It's going to seem counter-intuitive to some people, but that's compelling. The best match is not necessarily the one that moves the fastest and hits the cleanest. It's not the one with the most stuff. When you come across a match or a story where you actually have to invest time, effort, focus, patience, almost always, the payoff there, so long as there is payoff, can mean even more. Anyone can invest in an Ospreay match, right? It's candy. It's fluff. It's special effects. This is a journey. And it's a risk too. You know Ospreay's going to get you where you're going, even if you're a baby strapped into a car seat and going around the block to make you stop crying. 

You can trudge through the wasteland watching Eddie Kingston and who knows if you have any idea if you're going to actually get there. Maybe, in 2023 you did. We're in 2025 now, almost 2026, and who the hell knows? 

But you know what? I think this match took us one step closer. 

It reminded me of Roderick Strong vs Erick Stevens that I wrote-up recently. 

Much like Stevens in that match, Eddie knew he needed something from Woods. What made this a tune-up is that you could squint and see Woods in the Ops. He's got that same sort of dogged skill. It's exactly what Eddie needed to throw himself up against.

And I think he worked the match like someone who knew he had to pick up speed, dragging all that weight behind.

They shook at the beginning (it's ROH after all) and Eddie got him right in the corner, and he didn't chop. Why not? Because chopping then and there wouldn't help him. It wouldn't give him what he needed. Now, later on, after Woods had wrenched at his arm, had tossed him around a bit, had charged at him from three different corners. When Eddie chopped later on? Well, then it mattered, it showed that he had it in him, that he could slug, that he could fight. It reminded a body that's still waking up from a year+ out of the ring what it's like to fire back. But he needed something to fire back against first. When Eddie hefted him up to top rope and slung both of them off with a superplex? That's not something you see Eddie do all that much, but he needed that impact, he needed to jar his bones and his spirit, to realign his spine so it could be one with the ring. And when he dropped the strap and started tossing Woods around? Well, that just felt right, didn't it? In a way things hadn't felt right for a long time. When he had dropped the strap against Shibata recently, he got a cheapshot for his trouble. This though? This was one step back towards the light, one step towards the promised land. And then, when he shouted Samoa Joe's name before hitting the DDT and picking up the win? Well, you ask me, that shout wasn't for Joe and that shout wasn't for us, but that shout was for Eddie, because he still needs to feel it, because maybe, probably, unfortunately, tune-up match or no, he's not quite there yet.

But here's the thing. All that weight Eddie's dragging? It's emotional weight. And if you let go and invest and have patience, he'll end up dragging you along with it and you'll get where he's going and it may not be where you thought you wanted to be, but it's where you needed to be. And honestly? That's a hell of a thing for pro wrestling to accomplish. Let's see how far he can take us on Wednesday Night. 

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D3AN~!!! Day 6: MORIARTY~! WOODS~! TAYLOR~! FOX~! GYPSY JOE~?

DEAN~!!! 3 9/6/25

Lee Moriarty vs. Josh Woods

MD: Look, this is the D3AN review and I really enjoyed the match, especially on the rewatch, so I'll promise to only spend one paragraph on the rope breaks.

Let me talk about Pure Rules matches in general first. It's a singular gimmick. There's nothing else like it. Every other gimmick match relaxes one rule or another. For Pure Rules, though, the gimmick is that the conventional norms and rules of pro wrestling matter more and not less. You get one punch. You get three rope breaks. Interference is nullified. There is a time limit and judging as opposed to just draws. Etc. It leans into the rules and puts more weight on them. It enhances certain aspects of pro wrestling and creates a more vivid and distinct box. In doing so, different stories can be told and the limitations can actually create narrative possibilities and inspire creativity. I've seen people say that Lee Moriarty isn't as technical as they might want and while I don't necessarily see that, I'd argue that he's strategic instead and that in strategy, more than just technique in and of itself, you find more explicit storytelling. His Pure Rules matches are full of those.

Which brings us to the rope breaks. Shortly after Woods opened up the match by targeting Moriarty's midsection, he trapped him in the ropes, and yanked on multiple limbs at once. Mike Posey, the ref often noted on commentary as a "Pure Rules" expert, called this a legitimate rope break. Later on, Moriarty, who had started to target the arm, did something similar by bringing Woods to the ropes and yanking on the arm. Dylan and Mose did a good job covering on commentary, but I'm going to cry foul. Again, it's about the rules meaning more. Sure, that means that if someone can sneak in a punch without the ref seeing, they can get big heat from that. Likewise if a rope break is somehow missed by the ref, but this was blatant and obvious. You can't get charged a rope break on a hold that is intrinsically illegal. It's on the ref to break it. If you were to outright choke someone and they went to the rope on the five count, there's no way that would count on a rope break because it's an illegal hold. I have no problem with Moriarty trying to make use of the approach after losing one break, because then the ref had already weighed in on it, but it has to be nipped in the bud now or else it'll become a slippery slope that will destroy the strategic elements of Pure Rules matches moving forward. And that's all I'll say about that.

That said, the match was a lot of fun. Woods brought a certain level of Steve Williams-esque intensity and bestial strength to go along with his technique, hefting Lee this way or that. Lee, on the other hand, had a lot of slickness and precision, kicking limbs away, getting in a counter that snap targeted the arm, etc. That's not to say Woods couldn't bring that to the table too, like when he locked in a lightning fast Navarro-style lock out of nowhere. 

When the match did open up, the duel "limb"work was interesting because Woods was working with one arm and Moriarty's midsection was what was targeted, leading to some unique and consistent selling. Between his strength and skill, Woods came off as a unique challenge, losing only because of Moriarty's superior experience with the rules. In this, you can argue from a story perspective that Woods himself was thrown by the rule disruption. He got his third ropebreak, but instead of honing in on the body, he went to the ankle, and instead of letting Moriarty crawl to the ropes and maybe even make use of them himself, he chose to drag Moriarty back to the center of the ring, setting up the roll up reversals. Muscle memory and an inability to think on the fly and maximize his advantages cost him the match, which is a very solid and compelling sort of story for a Pure Rules match. 

But yeah, I have some heat with Posey here.

AR Fox vs. Shane Taylor

MD: To me, the comparison point to Fox is RVD. It's not a one to one, but stylistically, he should be so different from everyone else in wrestling just as RVD was. The way he moves, the creativity, the dubious physics, the effort. The problem is we're in a world where a lot of wrestling actually looks like what Fox does. Imagine if everyone moved like RVD in the late 90s-early 00s. Even if he was the absolute most of what he was, he wouldn't stand out nearly as much. Things that you'd accept and laud in him would frustrated instead because familiarity would breed a level of contempt. That said, I tend to forgive some of the more ridiculous stuff and see it more as a feature than a bug or at least as an exception. 

It helps when he's working real contrast instead of something similar, and he had that here with Taylor. I liked how impromptu and free flowing this felt. Yes, it was a DEAN show, but it was also at the 2300. Taylor was a brick wall and Fox had to use every trick to chip away at him. Some of Taylor's matter-of-fact blocks as shots were coming at him from every angle were great. 

And Fox had to defy gravity, shoved off the apron and landing on the guardrail to finally hit the flurry that managed to get Taylor off his feet, a true moral victory. Unfortunately, he had to continue to escalate the risks to try to put him down for good and all it took was one miss for Taylor to throw the punch that ended it. This was a great way to feature two very different wrestlers in a short sprinty impromptu match.

Gypsy Joe Invitational

MD: Little disclaimer here once again. What I'm about to say is just me talking. I've got nothing to do with the running of this show. I write on the blog. I love writing on the blog. Phil and Eric are friends and creative collaborators, but this is their baby with the other Matt and TK and the coaches and wrestlers involved with the show. This is just me talking as me. 

We're not getting this thing. It's lost media. I don't even know who won it. I don't know who was in it. I've seen one photo of Slade and one photo of a flying VCR.

So obviously, something went wrong or it went off the rails or who knows, right?

But that's the DVDVR spirit, isn't it? Read the road reports. Read the DVDVR reviews. Look at what's been archived from the old board. Sometimes wrestling is messy. Sometimes indie wrestling is especially messy. That's part of the beauty of it. It's live and raw and real and passionate.

There's a perfectly polished company with glossy, pre-planned everything, which has sacrificed creative freedom for total control. 

And then there's a competitor brand. And sometimes that brand is going to be a little rough around the edges, and that doesn't mean it's not professional. It means it's professional wrestling. Sometimes you go to a wrestling show to see someone hit their head on a ceiling that's too low. 

DEAN is all about diversity, about finding love in all sorts of wrestling, about just how weird and outlandish and messy pro wrestling can be. Sometimes it's going to be the absolute serene. Sometimes it's going to be the Anticristo promo. And sometimes it's going to be Survival Tobita vs Ken the Box. 

I have no idea what happened here. I have no idea what I would have found good and what I would have found bad in this.

But I sure as hell know that Dean Rasmussen would have squeezed every bit of joy out of it and created his own where it was missing. He would have called out the mess but he would have embraced it too. 

So yeah, look, I don't think we're getting this. And that's fine. I'm so glad we got to see any of this show, that it existed at all. We're in a world where the maestro match happened at the 2300 and was up for us to see. That's a beautiful world. That's a world that wouldn't exist without people that care so much about pro wrestling. 

But...

Some of you were there. Some of you witnessed this. 

Come on over to the Board. It's there. It's working better than it's been working in a couple of years. You can actually scroll between pages now. Modern technology at its best. Hit the thread. Do a mini road report. Write about the match. Document the thing. The good, the bad, especially the ugly. Throw in some ~'s. Have fun with it. It'll be off in a corner of the internet not too many people will see, somewhere that won't cause any trouble for anyone. but it'll be where some of the people that care the most will be able to see it.

This show is an amazing, mind blowing, almost impossible to imagine way to honor the spirit of the DVDVR and the big guy at the heart of it, but so is writing about what you saw and what you feel.  

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DEAN~!!! 2 Day 3: JD Drake vs. Josh Woods

DEAN~!!! 2 5/24/25

JD Drake (w/Anthony Henry) vs. Josh Woods (w/Tom Lawlor)

MD: The chaotic and mutable spirit of indie wrestling lives here as this was initially supposed to be Woods vs Lawlor, but ended up with Lawlor seconding Woods. Thankfully, this time around (as opposed to DEAN~!!! 1) Filthy Tom had time to carefully prepare his sartorial style and he came in looking like the caddie-ist of corner men. It actually matched Woods' turquoise wave gear well. Henry, on the other hand, has been training hard in his absence and felt it important to let everyone know that by coming down to second JD without a shirt.

I missed the Workhorsemen and this was a great venue to see them both back together again (even if it wasn't a tag, though I'd like to see this tag, but that's beside the point). They're the ultimate utility players. You can plug them in to any role and they'll get the job done. You could debut them as Ricochet's new crew next week (as opposed to CRU or whoever) and people would gawk (not a bad thing given they're trying to get heat and dissonance drives heat) but they'd be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing the right way every single time that they'd need to be and it would work. You could have them call out FTR and do a short program, could have them try to survive the Hurt Syndicate for ten minutes on TV, could have them challenge Dustin and Sammy on ROH, could have them menace Top Flight (not sure anyone works better with Dante than Drake), and they'd get the job done. Drake's instantly credible between his size, how he moves, how he carries himself and Henry has that snap precision execution and throws himself into everything he does. 

Woods, given his background, is instantly credible, and he definitely threw himself into everything here. This was just his second match this year (with a VIP match earlier in May). He got the better of Drake early on with takeovers, holds, and some nasty knee strikes on the floor. You don't want to be on the floor with JD Drake though because he's got the best transition move in all of wrestling, his press up against the ropes into a big meaty shot. I liked Dylan's call explaining that you're hurt not just by the strike but by the pressure of the ropes going the wrong way at the wrong angle or what not. After that, Henry made his presence felt and it made sense that he'd be a little more impactful than Lawlor out there (a perfectly fine encouraging cheerleader, mind you), given the tag team stylings of Henry and Drake. That included a beautiful neck twist on the apron with big follow through as Drake was distracting the ref. 

Woods came back with quicker, more high-impact, high-motion offense than you might expect and they rolled into a stretch where Drake hit his cannonball but missed the moonsault allowing Woods to hit a pretty impressive corner twisting suplex. Just good wrestling executed well. I don't think it chipped into the same sort of unique space that Woods vs Lawlor might have but it helped ground and round out the card.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 8/5 - 8/11 Part 2

Ring of Honor TV 8/8/24

Dustin Rhodes/Sammy Guevara vs Alex Reynolds/John Silver

MD: I'm tempted to wax poetic for a paragraph about the Problem of Sammy. Let's do it. He's been Lugered/Big Showed, in part due to the Jericho Vortex, and in part due to his own personal situations, and even just the inertia of being a featured guy for five years. It means that maybe he hasn't kept pace with Darby and MJF and even Perry. They kind of tried out the Cole/MJF story with him leading up to the four-way last year but Cole was the one to benefit from him. I don't know if he turns on Dustin or wins the tag titles with him (Dustin holding a bunch of ROH titles and challenging Lee Moriarty in a pure rules match would be amazing but that's beside the point) or what, but coming back as a babyface with a topknot doesn't feel like it's going to work. What would? I have no idea. An excursion? Feud him with Atlantis, Jr. in both settings. Maybe give him the TV Title and instead of having him complain about not getting five star matches backstage, have him defend it week in and week out and give him the sort of "list" that Cassidy in 2022-2023. Regardless, I'm glad it's not a problem I have to solve, because it does feel like a problem.

I praise Reynolds and Silver a lot; a good reason for that, as I've mentioned, is that they're able to somehow instill order upon the "everything breaks down way too early" style of tag team wrestling we've gotten for the last ten+ years in a way almost no one else can. They're also very adaptable. They've been monster heel henchmen, lovable loser underdog babyfaces, pre-show comedy act staples, and now sort of a dangerous mid-card heel act. They don't always do exactly what I'd want them to do, but they are very good at what they do.

I'd call this a studio show main event. Lots of comedy to start with Dustin and Sammy both doing the dive tease/breakdancing/pose. Dustin's comedic timing is great, of course. It was interesting how protected he was as a star when it came to the knee. He was beat down last week; he hurt it again on his own bulldog (he drove the action and reaped the consequence); he then fought off the Dark Order on the floor; Caprice mentions that if he's able to stand up on the apron, then he's ok, and he does; at that very moment, Uno comes in with the chair. Since he was going to take a beating for a while, it was fine, but that's not haphazard. It's calculated and has an effect, conscious or otherwise on the audience. Very canny. When Dustin does get the hot tag, it's entirely based on redirecting Reynolds' own momentum, first over the top and then into the power slam where he really just falls away and turns him. Again, that matters. He's not standing tall and firing back; he's showing the weight of the leg damage and finding another way, as hope does. Sammy was fine here; he works well with Reynolds/Silver, but he's definitely a Problem to be Solved.

Rampage 8/9/24

Darby Allin vs The Butcher

MD: TK's keeping me busy, huh? It's a good problem to have. I'm not sure how to tell you anything you wouldn't already know about this coming in. It was a remarkable match, a remarkable Butcher performance, a remarkable Darby performance. You should watch it if you haven't already. My brain is always going when I watch wrestling. That doesn't mean I'm not connected. That doesn't mean I'm not drawn in. It's part of why I value immersion and suspension of disbelief so much. Here's what I was thinking early on in this one:

Back in the day, old timers used to talk about how the fans knew wrestling was worked but that they wanted to be the one match on the card that made them doubt it. A "Yeah, most of it's fake, but that match maybe wasn't." sort of deal. A modern version of that might be... "Yeah, they work out all the spots in the back, but things went so crazy there that they had to be adapting on the fly!" Something like that. One thing I love about Darby is that he (like an unlikely comparison point, Nick Bockwinkel), as a character, always wants to control the start of his matches; he usually comes in with a bang. Here, he charged right in and got nailed by Butcher's foot. And his mouth started to bleed. Butcher went from slamming him leg first into the ropes to starting to work over that jaw. Darby responded in kind by spitting blood in his face. Savage? Maybe, but I was smiling big at that, drawn in. And yeah part of that is because it felt like an adaptation in the moment, and that, compared to a lot of picture perfect precision counter wrestling, felt more real. It just did. And damn it if that doesn't draw the eye and rouse the heart.

The rest of the match was an absolute mauling. Darby would throw himself at Butcher to try to get an advantage. More often than not, he bounced off. Have you ever played one of those little stick figure physics engines sort of games? It might just be picking up and dropping the figure. It might be sending them on a catapult. That was this match, eyes glued to the screen as Darby's body crashes and burns from every angle and every direction in the most sickening ways possible. A beautiful trainwreck. What was the purpose? I don't know. It made Darby look all the more like a star for winning definitively (yet believably!). It made Butcher look like a force. Maybe they can sneak him onto the All Out card? Maybe he'll be there for the Casino Gauntlet and this will get enough word of mouth that people will check it out. The joy of Darby is that while I still overthink it, he's got me overthinking it in all sorts of different and fun ways. Go track this one down.

Collision 8/10/24

Darby Allin/Hologram vs Tony Nese/Josh Woods

MD: I'm three matches in of Part 2 this week, so let's talk about Hologram. TK's alluded that the specific name/character has been in his head for a long time. Allow me to take a couple of liberties here. My guess is that this guy lived in TK's notebook for decades. Hologram is very much the sort of character that someone would come up with while doodling on the side of a notebook in school. He's the sort of guy who could wrestle alongside Mr. JL or Ciclope or Super Calo. It's a rabbit hole and best to just peek down it a little, but I don't think you can understand AEW without thinking about that notebook. It's sort of the "Rosebud" in this equation to some degree, right? And I am not at all unsympathetic. I'm not far off in age and had my own notebooks with my own very rough character drawings in the corner and lists of people who could be in various imaginary factions (be it a New Dangerous Alliance or different reshuffled X-Men teams). Here, it's especially a boon though, because the character is something pure, and true, and genuine, something that should appeal to kids because maybe, just maybe (I could be wrong!), once upon a time, a kid came up with it. It's anecdotal, and you'd want to follow someone who talks about the business and not just breaks down matches, but I get a sense a lot of WWE's recent success with a younger audience is due to the accessibility and ease of Peacock, the fact that they can just find the footage on their own with a few clicks of their remote. If AEW has some streaming solution upcoming, then similar kids discovering the product are going to find a welcome avatar in Hologram waiting for them.

And as for the rest of us? I liken him to Blitzkrieg in WCW. When he showed up in WCW in 99, it absolutely blew people's minds. It's not that he was doing things that much more spectacular than everyone else (though he was doing things that were just enough different to stand out). No, the bigger thing was that he came out of the blue. We were all smarks on the internet following six news sites, reading Al Issacs and waiting for Yokozuna to join the Hart Foundation (that was a couple of years earlier, but you get the idea). We thought we knew everyone and everything, and if we didn't, then we knew someone who did. We had a network of people following everything out of Mexico and every sleazy indy Japanese promotion. And here was this guy that we couldn't place doing amazing things. The fact that he was unknown to us (teenagers and young adults who felt like we knew everything) was half the appeal. Hologram is a bit of the same. It's not that we weren't aware of Aramis here, or that we didn't have some inkling of his contract issues over the years, but he wasn't on our radar or on the the public radars of the people who we trust when it comes to lucha to come in to AEW with a new character and make a mark. The vignette aired. We got word who he was. He debuted. Sometimes it's just nice to be taken by surprise, even for us, especially for us. 

As for the match itself, it was another great showcase that really gave Hologram an extra bit of rub. Despite being a star (and one with a rocket strapped to him maybe), Darby played face-in-peril and let Hologram be the hero, both coming in to clear house after the hot tag and by getting the cradle win on Woods. Before that, they had a great shine where Darby's quick shots got to pair with Hologram's slick shots and they somehow became even more than the sum of their parts. Just great, great basing by Woods and Nese here (and Sterling/Daivari on the Coffin Drop by Darby to set up the finish). They were everything and everything looked great. Just like Reynolds/Silver, Nese is a guy who never shoots for fame or fortune. He's the opposite of getting his shit in. He's an absolute professional, a total mechanic, willing to stooge and get clowned for the sake of his opponent and the match. He's the least cool heel in the world and so much more valuable for it. And Woods is someone that every time I see him, I wish I'd be able to see him more. This did exactly what it set out to do and the Hologram train rolls on. The trick now is to keep him featured so he's on people's minds every week. 

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