aew wrestledream | FourofFiveWits

I want to use my local library, specifically, I want to walk to my local library, which is only about a ten-minute walk away, and write these on my laptop at the library. I had planned to work on it Monday through Friday, but one thing after another kept happening, so I ended up skipping a week. The theme of this one is in the title, as I’m rereading The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, released last April, I’m playing games that I played in the Xbox 360 era on my PC, and in AEW, a lot of the men’s feuds seem to be continuing to mixed results.

Books – The Incandescent Reread and Blood for the Unyding Throne Release

The urge to re-read The Incandescent by Emily Tesh from earlier this year took over me about a week ago, and I just finished it again. That may be my favorite book of the year, even more so than The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, who is one of my favorite authors. I don’t often describe a book as beautiful, but to me, that is a beautiful book. Particularly this time around I find Dr. Walden’s meeting with Nikki Conway just heartbreaking. A teenager, barely an adult, is thinking of turning down a great opportunity to be the support system to her friend, who, like her, has no support system in a world where money can determine everything you have in life. Through this conversation, Dr. Walden has to kind of reassess the privilege she has had, which the character of Laura Kenning pointed out before she lost her job. It’s honestly such a great take on the British magical boarding school; it’s going to end up being one of my favorite books ever.

The terminology of academia may seem like an obstructing wall of jargon—and sometimes, perhaps, it is—but far more often than that, it is a set of keys. You cannot understand the forces you are dealing with, still less wield them meaningfully yourself, unless you have the words to set around them. The language of power is the handle on the knife.
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

The hardcover for Blood of the Undying Throne came out this Tuesday and I didn’t want to say anything about it when it was on my advance reader copy but the official copy has a quote from my podcast No Page Unturned on the GeeklyInc podcast network. If you don’t know, often praise for the previous book of a series will be quoted on the next one from various sources who talk about it. I didn’t know this was happening and was quite shocked in a good way to see this. It means a lot.

Games – Xbox 360 Games Come Back Around and God of War (2018)

It seems, without realizing it, I’ve wandered back to my Xbox 360 era with the games I’m playing recently. I already mentioned Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in the last volume. Still, I’ve been crafting a private list on my Backlogged of my personal best 100 games of all time, and I came about to a discussion with my friend Hiro about how Batman: Arkham Asylum is essentially a Metroidvania. So that discussion has me playing it, to see where in 2025 it falls on my list, and it holds up amazingly well, especially the combat system, considering how many games have taken it and evolved it since then. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on my Steam Deck, but its sequel, Arkham City, does, so I’m also playing that on there bit by bit when I am lounging on the couch, taking a break from reading, or lying in bed in the morning. It’s also October, so I installed the Dead Space remake from last year onto my desktop. That’s another Xbox 360 era game I played a lot. Now that I think about it, weirdly, the last year has been filled with throwbacks to the 360 days.

Almost a year ago the first Red Dead Redemption came out on PC.
Sega put out that remake/remaster of Sonic Generations that added Shadow content.
Valve updated Half-Life 2 last November for the 20th Anniversary and put it out for free.
Dead Rising came out with that Deluxe Remaster last September.
Castle Crashers put out new DLC and updated all the art for that game.
Oblivion received a remaster earlier this year.
Gears of War Reloaded was released for the Playstation and PC.
A new version of Ninja Gaiden II was released called Ninja Gaiden II Black

All of this brings me to say, where the fuck is a new Peggle?! Also Capcom, make vanilla Street Fighter 4 on Steam playable again, thanks. Back to the subject of my 100 greatest games list, I don’t know where they fell on the list, but Batman: Arkham Asylum and God of War (2018) were, I believe, close together, so somehow playing Arkham Asylum led me to installing God of War and sinking my teeth into it once again, and deep.

Oh, wait, I remember now. I was listening to a gaming podcast where one cast membner said they haven’t replayed the new God of War games because they’re only fun when Kratos is fully kitted out, which I fundamentally disagree with. After playing twenty-two hours of the PC version, I vehemently disagree with this. It’s still amazing how good that axe feels in it, when you swing, when you throw, when you bring it back to your hand. The incredible feeling of it never goes away, even after seven years, three if you’re talking Ragnarok. When our family received money for our possessions in our house that were lost in the fire in 2017, I, on a whim, bought a PlayStation 4 Pro and God of War (2018). In a weird way, those two purchases for a time represented all the systems and games I lost in the fire, which was not a small amount, going back to my childhood.

Wrestling – AEW Forbidden Door to Full Gear.

AEW Wrestledream was great, but I think I missed my moment, personally, to write about it when I skipped writing about it last week. The only comment I will make is that I didn’t love the main event so much that Samoa Joe versus Hangman Page shouldn’t have been a main event, but I also am not Darby’s biggest fan. I’m sure what is coming out of it will be great, but I’m going to be perfectly honest, Samoa Joe v. Hangman and Darby Allin v. Jon Moxley really didn’t need to continue.

I said the other day I kind of miss when AEW only had four pay-per-views, and that’s not completely true. The truth is, the spacing for Forbidden Door to All Out (or vice versa with All In mixed in) to WrestleDream to Full Gear to World’s End is kind of a mess as there are so few weeks in between those to build feuds. It doesn’t help that sometimes a Dynamite after a PPV can be the real end of the feud, with Dynamite acting as a sort of fallout for the final match of the feud on PPV. Neither do the specials like Blood & Guts, Ring of Honor PPVs, Grand Slam, Anniversary episodes thrown in the bunch there. It’s all kinda messy. I say this, when in fact I’m not unhappy, really, with AEW at all right now, but it does feel like the late summer to fall to winter lineup needs some sprucing up especially when you compare it to Revolution to All In.

Personally, I think World’s End is a cursed pay-per-view. The first one was not only boring but represented a lot of what was wrong with MJF’s first title reign and his vision for AEW. The second one, even with the Continental Classic finals, was tarnished by Jon Moxley’s terrible idea for a four-way with AEW top guys at the time, where the Death Riders just made them look like idiots, and then Adam Copeland returned to make them look even more like idiots. Throw it in the bin, put WrestleDream in that spot on the calendar, have the C2 finals there, and move Full Gear up by maybe a week or two to give space between it and WrestleDream. You can have whatever special TV episodes you want, like Blood & Guts, Grand Slam in NY, etc, between All Out and Full Gear when WrestleDream would originally take place. Forbidden Door would maybe benefit and be seen as more special if it were biennial. That’s one solution to the too-tight schedule that is AEW’s late August to December, but I’m sure Tony could come up with a different or better plan if he tried, perhaps.

This is the second week in a row that I’ve released this on Thursday instead of Wednesday, but unlike last week, I purposely delayed this one because I wanted to compare my original thoughts when I wrote this on Monday to what I thought after AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary episode. If you get the reference from the title, congratulations, you’re old like me.

Games – Hades II

Hollow Knight Silksong and Hades 2 are probably going to be talked about together a lot, despite being very different games. Metroidvanias and Roguelikes share some common ground in that they often have a high difficulty scale, they’re both sequels to successful games in the series, and they’re both developed by independent studios. After twenty hours of Hades II, I have to say I, as in me personally, find it more difficult than Hollow Knight Silksong. The thing about Silksong‘s difficulty, to me, is that it is the same level of difficulty as the first game and requires a skill I had to remember in the process of playing it: patience. Most of the time when I would lose to a boss, it was because of two reasons: first, I didn’t have all the information about the boss’s attacks, and second, I would grow impatient and get too greedy with attacks, hoping to end the fight. With Hades II, you get better at it the more you play it. You develop a muscle memory for the attacks, just like with Silksong, but it requires me a lot more luck, hence the fun of roguelike, and a lot more awareness, which I don’t seem to have. Sometimes I’ll take damage in Hades II, and I do not know why.

Let me back up, though, because I don’t want you to get the impression that I dislike this game. I absolutely love this game. Not once has a run made me feel like I’ve wasted my time. No matter how far I’ve gotten, there has always been something, some kind of resource, some kind of story beat, some kind of future unlockable that I didn’t have before. While I miss aspects of the first one, I am absolutely having a ball with the second one. Without any spoilers, I have had five successful runs so far, four going down and one going up (the first chance you get to go up, you should go up), and the weapon I’ve been most successful with is the Sister Blades, but goddamn do I love the Umbral Flames and the Moonstone Axe. I love all but one of the bosses, not because of any difficulty or anything, but I just find them kind of annoying and uninteresting. The stakes of this game are much higher than those of the first Hades, but it has enough callbacks to the first game that it’ll satisfy returning players. It feels like they both upped the ante of the first game while streamlining so much of it. The fact that doors will tell me if that is where I need to go to get the resources I need is a godsend. If this were any other year but the year Silksong came out, this would probably be my game of the year. Currently, I have it third after Donkey Kong Bananza, but I think it’ll quickly rise to second before too long.

This coming out so soon after Silksong has only one little ember of an idea growing in my mind: Supergiant needs to make a Metroidvania. That’s how I know Silksong is my game of the year, because when I’m playing other games that are also great, whether it’s Hades II, Trails of the Sky 1st Chapter remake, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or whatever else, I’m still thinking about how I want to play more Silksong.

I’ve been removing and redownloading TikTok on my phone a lot this year. Mostly because I will open, and my time blindness will activate, and I’ll lose hours to scrolling videos. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I have to say I feel quite envious of the people who love this game. It could be with some of these content creators that they’re being entirely performative but from the ones I’ve seen, I doubt it. I just don’t love the story, especially now that I’m in Act 3, where it feels like, without spoilers, too much Clair Obscur and not enough Expedition 33. It feels to me like two stories duct-taped together in a way that isn’t quite working for me, but I still find the battles so amazing. It just doesn’t move me in that way, but then I realized at work what hits me similarly that I can compare it to. What they’re feeling is what I feel in the climax of the Pacifist Run of Undertale and, more specifically, this year’s Chapter 4 of Deltarune. The story, the music, the characters all hit me right in the gut, where I keep my feelings, and I can say I may not feel the same way about E33, but I understand that feeling.

Wrestling – Hangman’s WrestleDream Opponent before and after AEW Dynamite’s 6th Anniversary

Today, Hangman Adam Page is teaming up with two members of the Opps, Samoa Joe and Powerhouse Hobbs, to take on the Death Riders after Daniel Garcia took out Katsuyori Shibata. I imagine Hangman’s championship defense will develop out of this, and I am worried it’ll be a turning heel Samoa Joe. A lot of the people available to be top heels in AEW are either out injured or have already faced Hangman. Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion, Samoa Joe versus Hangman Adam Page will be a fantastic match, but the setup for Joe’s turn feels like shit, we’ve got no one else right now, rather than organic in any way. What reason does he have to turn besides wanting the Men’s World Championship and being Samoa Joe? I’d much prefer Joe just be like “You know, Hangman, you’re right, I did help you win that belt at All In so do me the favor of facing me at WrestleDream.” I hope they make it work either way.

However, while not as high profile, I’d much rather it be someone else. I don’t like fantasy booking, really, because if it doesn’t happen, people tend to be disappointed when an event that was never going to happen doesn’t happen. Still, I’m going to do it here. The Bastard PAC returned to AEW at All Out to the Death Riders with a fresh, shortened haircut and a shirt on his back, unusual for him, but PAC and Hangman were one of the original feuds in AEW, both of them wanting to be the first person to be All Elite Wrestling’s Men’s World Champion. Today’s episode of Dynamite is the 6th Anniversary, so why not run it back? PAC may not be the top guy we wanted him to be when AEW started due to injuries and the pandemic hampering his momentum, but he’s still an extraordinary wrestler, and Hangman, who was already a great wrestler, has only improved since AEW started. That is what I’d like to see at WrestleDream: The Bastard PAC vs. Hangman Adam Page for the Men’s World Championship. It’s probably not going to happen, so I write it here just to get it out of my head. I will not set myself up for disappointment but find joy in what they’ll actually give me.

So, this is me, post-Dynamite, and I have to say I did like the setup for Hangman vs. Joe at WrestleDream. The setup for this was slightly silly, but to be honest, it was completely realistic in how some people act. A more senior employee feels like they’ve been disrespected by their younger colleague, who maybe has been given a bit more, and suddenly they go off the deep end and completely overreact because deep down they’re envious that the younger colleague has something they want. Essentially, and don’t take this as a comment on Joe because Joe rules, but in this specific scenario, he’s got boomer energy going on. So in a way, I found this quite funny, but I’ve also been on short-form video platforms enough to know people can act like this and be harboring this negative energy that they’ll unleash real quick. Safe to say, I thought AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary was awesome, and WrestleDream is turning out to be a must-see PPV, and so quickly after All Out? FUCK.

Credit to JJ Williams for this photograph.

Anyway, this is starting to get wordy, but having Hangman Page and Kris Statlander as my AEW World Champions, two of my favorite wrestlers, is amazing. I love Kris’s new gear, which she debuted tonight. The one bummer of the show was how many times ICE was advertised on HBO Max, and I’m not the only one unhappy with it. I left my feedback asking for them to no longer show these advertisements, and you can too in the link below in Hangman’s Bluesky post.

Books – Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan and Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

I’m seventy percent of the way through Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and I can already see in my head where the story is going, and I’m excited to see how Ryan subverts those ideas by doing something completely different or going in a direction I didn’t expect. The character Ruhlin is in such an interesting spot as someone who never thought of himself as a leader and has been forced to be one. In fact, now that I think about it, all the point-of-view characters are in that position to some extent. I can see the thread of plot that will lead these individual storylines to interweave where they are forced into an alliance against a common foe, just like in John Gwynne’s The Bloodsworn Saga, another high fantasy series from the past few years that I love.

After getting those fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s The Green Bone Saga, I have the itch to delve back into that series with a highlighter and a pencil for a close reading of my previous copies. I love both a close reading and a reread, which is probably why I like doing my podcast so much.

I’ve also been reading Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, and the way it plays with grief, magic, and the kind of academia I wanted to be a part of at one time is really hitting me in a good way. It has been a while since I’ve lost time to reading this year, probably since Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent or Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils in the spring.

Speaking of books, the latest episode of the book podcast I’m on, No Page Unturned, is out now. We’re currently covering The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, up to the second book, Harrow the Ninth but we’ve also done all our A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons, which you can go back to and listen to.

Also check out my co-host Christina Ladd’s review of Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan.