This weekend I watched:

This weekend I watched:

Freelance Wrestling’s Flash Gordon, which is the local company that runs in a bar 15 minutes from my house. It featured a wrestling cowboy choking out a wrestling clown before finding out (SWERVE) THEY’RE ACTUALLY BROTHERS, oh yeah and Chris Hero making a guest appearance.

NXT’s Takeover: Brooklyn, which I assume you all watched and may be the best single top-to-bottom wrestling event I’ve seen this year.

WWE’s Summerslam, which was four hours long and really not bad, all things considered.

Watching Freelance feels like the first 2 sessions of a new WWWRPG game, there’s a bunch of cool shit but it’s kind of coming from every direction and doesn’t really make much sense when you think about it, but fuck it it’s fun and hey, that’s wrestling for you.

Watching Takeover feels like the culmination of a long-running game, maybe after multiple seasons, when characters have settled into longer-term versions of themselves, there’s been Gimmick changes and some new wrestlers come in and out, and the threads of backstory running throughout the entire run are finally pulled together by people who are experienced at both the fictional and mechanical aspects of the game.

Watching Summerslam feels like a big convention game for a mix of new and experienced players, where you have a bunch of stuff to get to and you gotta trust everyone to handle their own business a little bit, it’s generally pretty good in the moment but there’s peaks and valleys depending on who’s in the scene and that one guy’s buddy plays the Guest Celebrity Host and that’s fine, whatever, it’s a one-off oh hey what is he doing.