Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 11 – The Hands of the King

November 14, 2025November 14, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I pretty much know what my game, book, and wrestling match of the year are as far as number ones, it’s everything else underneath I’m not sure of. I’m working on an article/review for GeeklyInc.com on what I think is my favorite book of the year. The part of the end of the year, even though I only do this for fun, that I have a tough time balancing is finishing the last releases I haven’t finished yet, finding time and space for writing, and getting ready for the Holidays. Hence why I mentioned wanting to make more use of the library in previous volumes.

Books and Video Games – The Lord of the Rings and Metaphor ReFantazio

You might not know this, but the date the Fellowship of the Ring leaves Rivendell on the quest to destroy the ring is December 25th. Therefore, I tend to associate at least the first book of The Lord of the Rings with the beginning of November to the end of December season. It has been a while since I’ve read through this book, probably since 2017-2018. It’s one of the few books I insist on reading a physical copy despite owning it digitally in multiple places. I’ve read it all the way through six times, so I wonder if this time away, I’ll observe something new from it. I will say, to anyone reading it for the first time I think you can skip the Concerning Hobbits prologue chapter until at least finishing The Fellowship of the Ring. As much as I love it, it does feel like it slows down the pace immediately.

Credit to https://www.tumblr.com/katschneider

On my mind is the connection between finishing Blood for the Undying Throne, rereading The Lord of the Rings, and replaying Metaphor ReFantazio in the form of a quote from Tolkien’s book itself, “The hands of the king are the hands of the healer.” In College, with my thesis advisor, we’d discuss the connection between William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and how the kings, such as Macbeth, The Witch-King of Angmar, and Aragorn, affect the land positively and negatively. This obviously has biblical roots, which I am no expert on, so I won’t delve into it, nor the real political implications that monarchies believing themselves to be divine have had on our history. This is more the exploitation of the idea of the king in terms of mythology and fantasy. Major Metaphor ReFantazio endgame spoilers ahead.

In Metaphor, the king dies, and a contest is held to determine who will be the next king. In the game, there is a connection between the king, magic, anxiety, and the “humans,” who are abominations in the game based on artwork by Hieronymus Bosch. The magic that Euchornia has turned into an industry, called magla, turns out, towards the end of the game is revealed to be the physical manifestation of anxiety. If a person succumbs to their own anxiety, magla can actually turn them into a human. Louis, the main antagonist, wants to do this to everyone, and whoever can survive, aka overcome their anxieties, will be part of the new world with him as king. The protagonist you play ends up being the other character vying for the throne to improve the inequality in Euchronia. It’s all a cycle; you and the main character are trying to break it as there are multiple tribes of humanoids, and they don’t all get along. The game surmises the prejudice the different tribes feel towards each other is rooted in anxiety, thus creating more magla, thus creating more opportunity for people to turn into humans.

The death of the previous king and the absence of a replacement will lead to increased anxiety and tension between the tribes, thereby increasing the likelihood that people will succumb to their anxiety and transform into a human. Therefore, the protagonist becoming king will heal the land by healing the people’s anxieties. If the main character makes the serious changes in society the party and he intends to throughout the game as they meet more people and make more connections, this will ease the anxiety of the people. The connection between you and the protagonist is through the royal magic the previous king had cast, which is revealed at the end of the game, connecting you to the protagonist to guide them. Therefore, it is you, the player, who is also the king with the hands of a healer who heals the land by easing the anxiety of its people, including the main character you play and his party. This and many other reasons are why Metaphor ReFantazio was my game of 2024.

Wrestling – Blood and Guts 2025

Straight off the bat, while Blood and Guts is my preferred War Games style match, it has never been my favorite match stipulation. The need to do it every year doesn’t help at all, either, though I know it tends to be a ticket mover. With two different Blood and Guts this year, a Men’s and Women’s, they were always going to be compared, and while the Men’s Blood and Guts was good, the Women’s blew it out of the water.

It comes down to urgency and hatred. The participants in the Women’s B&G showed they had an urgent desire to get their hands on each other with real hatred. The build to this Blood and Guts was odd, but it had the roots of several feuds, giving it heightened tension. Like a spider-web, there is a line of connection each team member had with the other team throughout the year, and continuing past Blood and Guts into the Women’s World Tag Team Championship Tournament. I think AEW did its due diligence towards the event with matches between the two sides, but it definitely needed some more time and promos. Can Jamie trust Toni Storm, given their history? Have Willow and Kris buried the hatchet with the help of Harley Cameron? How did they talk Mercedes into joining the team? Questions that should have been asked and answered but it did not affect the quality of the match.

It had proper violence between Kris and Mercedes. It shortly ended at Willow and Kris communicating before the heels ruined it. Harley Cameron got to display both her silliness with the Mercedes puppet and equal violence in the match. Marina Shafir, whose wrestling matches I have never been impressed with, absolutely showed out. The key to all this is the speed at which they did this. A lot of these Blood and Guts matches have moments where they stall the action to set up a spot, but this one didn’t feel like that at all to me. The ending I thought was the best heel ending to a Blood and Guts yet, with the heel team forcing a lot of the big guns out of the cage and the Triangle of Madness forcing Toni Storm to surrender to save Mina Shirakawa. This will surely come up again in the tag team tournament.

For the Men’s Blood and Guts, all I have to say is never sleep on Kyle O’Reilly again. I will say, though, I think I loved the Hangman Page vs. Powerhouse Hobbs Fall Count Anywhere match better than either of these two Blood and Guts matches, and am of the belief Hobbs should have been Hangman’s Full Gear opponent instead of Samoa Joe, but I think I’m in the minority on this.

https://www.tumblr.com/allelitewrestlings/800064297134948352?source=share Gif by allelitewrestlings.tumblr.com

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 9 – Everything Old is New Again

October 30, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

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.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 8 – Orange You Glad For The Memories?

October 15, 2025October 15, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

In this week’s volume, I talk about Orange Cassidy becoming AEW Men’s World Champion one day, share my progress and a review of Blood for the Undying Throne, and talk about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Team Cherry’s Samus Aran, and the worst order to play the Yakuza / Like a Dragon games.

Wrestling – Orange Cassidy as AEW World Champion: Important to AEW’s legacy

In the main event of AEW All Out 2023 Orange Cassidy defended the AEW International Championship against Jon Moxley and lost after 326 days, in one of the best matches in AEW history. I already believed he could be before this, but in this reign, Orange proved himself as a main eventer, a regular TV wrestler, a member of your roster you can count on, and get behind. Since he lost the International Championship the first time, his booking has been kind of stop-and-go due to injuries and, to be honest, not capitalizing on the hype of this run. After the match with Moxley, though, Orange stood in the ring with Best Friend members Chuck Taylor, Trent Beretta, and Kris Statlander as the crowd gave him a standing ovation and thanked Orange for this incredible run. The Best Friends are no longer together as a faction, but this photo of them at the end of All Out will live on forever.

Someone posted this photo in a Best Friends channel in a Discord I’m in, and said, “Honestly, this reunion will be so sweet though when OC wins the Men’s World Championship. That had me really thinking about it. AEW has a lot of amazing talent that would make great world champions, but I’ve never been of the belief that every one of them needs to be a world champion, except Orange. There is a list of people who will definitely be the men’s world champion or repeat champion. A lot of them are inevitable.

These three will be the men’s world champion multiple times.

I think Orange needs to be the men’s world champion sooner rather than later. It feels important to All Elite Wrestling‘s legacy to say yes, the man who weighs whatever from whenever should be the guy, no matter how long a reign he has. By mainstream wrestling standards, before AEW was founded, Orange as a top guy would be unconventional, but with his International Championship run, he proved he could be that guy who carried the company on his back to everyone that mattered, and even some who disagreed. Orange Cassidy is a foundational piece of All Elite Wrestling, and to have him in the lineage of one of your top titles is, in my opinion, essential.

Books – The Blood for the Undying Throne Review from Christina

I’m still working my way through The Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur. I haven’t made much progress, but it is the main book I’m reading this week, and by the time next week’s edition of BGW comes out, I will likely have finished the book. In the meantime, you should read my podcast co-host Christina’s review of the book. I haven’t read it yet, just in case of spoilers, but Christina’s reviews on GeeklyInc are always smart, thoughtful, and entertaining. She edited my reviews for a long time, and when we were done they were always better than my earlier drafts.

Blood for the Undying Throne Review: Empire of Death and Death of Empire

Games – Paragon Path, Hollow Knight 3, and the Worst Like A Dragon Order.

A friend got me talking about Mass Effect because he started playing the Legacy Edition, and somehow I’ve been sucked into playing it again, and rather than continuing where I left off in Mass Effect 2 from 2021, I started a brand-new Shepard in Mass Effect 1, and I am already into the same Shepard in Mass Effect 2.

Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Street Fighter 4, those were my all-timer Xbox 360 games for a long time. Back then, I thought Mass Effect 2 was a perfect sequel, adding new elements that improved the game and taking away a lot of unnecessary elements from the first. Now, maybe it’s because I’ve played so much more RPGs since the early 2010s, I see it a little differently. I wish some of those elements weren’t so stripped away, the different weapon attachments that change your ammo type, the different armors, and weapons. I miss all of them now in Mass Effect 2. The way they do powers in the second game, either the biotics or the tech powers, is much improved.

Back then, there was this code at the bottom of the 1st game for your custom Shepard that I wrote down because I didn’t quite like how my Shepard looked in Mass Effect 2 when I transported it over, so I kept a .txt file that I used to do this. I still have that .txt, so the Shepard I had back then is the Shepard I’m using now, over fifteen years later. That’s kind of amazing to me.

I’ve never played Mass Effect 3 since I finished it for the first time the year it came out. To be honest, I don’t remember how I feel about the ending, but I do know that I played through Mass Effect 2 all the way through at least 7 or 8 times before ME3 came out, and after finishing the third game, I never played any of them again. I don’t think I was angry or disappointed by the ending. I just kind of felt empty about it. I remember thinking the father telling the story of “the Shepard” to his son, which meant to show how the story of Commander Shepard became a timeline myth, was just corny and poorly done. My point is, I think this time I will play Mass Effect 3 again, this time with all the DLC I missed the first time, and see how I feel about it. I’m sure I’ll write about it.

I was thinking about this. A lot of people have been making fan art of what could be the next Hollow Knight protagonist, and it had me thinking if there was another Hollow Knight game, Team Cherry should just make Hornet their Samus Aran. Hollow Knight as a series doesn’t need a new main character; they’ve already got the best one. In Silksong, Hornet felt like both an established character and developed throughout that game at the same time. In fact, she reminds me a lot of Samus. Hornet speaks with a dignified air of someone who is long-lived and is compassionate to those in Pharloom who deserve it, and shows her prideful warrior side to those who deserve that. So, like Samus visiting new planets, Hornet can go to new kingdoms, gain new powers, and continue on in as many Hollow Knight games as they like to make.

One of my favorite gaming podcasts, Into the Aether did a special episode all about Yakuza 0. One of the co-hosts Brendon Bigley has said and maintains on this podcast that the best order for three of the Like a Dragon games that star Kiryu is Yakuza Kiwami 1 to Yakuza 0 to Yakuza Kiwami 2, and I agree! Kiwami 1 is much more of a breezy introduction to the series than 0 which is a fine introduction to Kiryu and the world of Like a Dragon doesn’t exemplify exactly what you’ll be getting out of most of the Kiryu games or what Kiryu is like as a character. 0 is amazing, but Kiwami 1 is a better introduction.

Do you know what order you shouldn’t play these games in? The order that I played in them, which was pure chaos. Here is the order in which I played the games. In 2018, I played Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6, you know, the prequel game and what was going to be the finale of Kiryu’s story. To this day, I don’t know why I did this. I think I might have picked two I had the money for at the time during a sale, and was like Oh, surely these two will be a good introduction to the series. What was I thinking? You might say, Josh, you knew about Yakuza: Like a Dragon coming out in 2020 with a new protagonist? No, I did not, but that was the game I played next. Then, when they announced Infinite Wealth would have both Kiryu and Ichiban as dual protagonists, I played Yakuza Kiwami 1 and The Man Who Erased His Name. Infinite Wealth basically took up the last quarter of 2024 because it is that damn good. This year, I played Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, followed by Yakuza Kiwami 2. So here is my Like a Dragon order in all its chaos

Yakuza 6
Yakuza 0
Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Yakuza 7)
Yakuza Kiwami 1
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Yakuza Kiwami 2

A list of pure chaos, but I had fun nonetheless. The thing about Like a Dragon is, whether you know the story or not, you just have to buy in, and even if you don’t know the details, you’ll get what is at the heart of the stories, no matter which one you start at.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 4 – Blood, Silk, and Builds

September 17, 2025September 17, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Books – Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-Il Kim, translated by Anton Hur

Now that I’ve gotten the Silksong obsession out of my system, I am going to spend the time between now and the end of September catching up on some books I’ve been meaning to finish, including ones mentioned here, and starting the sequel to last year’s Blood of the Old Kings (which the first book is out on paperback now if you want to pick it up yourself). I have my copy of Blood for the Undying Throne, but I haven’t started yet. I’m literally planning to sit down and start it as soon as I finish this book, but what I expect is more of the mystery of how the Empire in the book got its iron grip over this world, and more resistance against it. The Bleeding Empire series so far somehow feels like a throwback to the late eighties – early nineties style of fantasy books, and also a breath of fresh air. One of my cohosts of No Page Unturned, our book podcast, said they can’t wait for me to read this book, as the new country they go to will remind me of Jorat in The Name of All Things by Jenn Lyons, which is one of my favorite books.

Just a little plug, we did do an interview with the author and the translator, who were both a joy to talk to, and I learned a lot about translations and other subjects from them. If you want to check it out.

Games – More Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2 1.0 announced.

I have been positively obsessed with Hollow Knight: Silksong. As of writing this, I have done everything to do in the base game one hundred percent, except for one optional boss I missed in the middle part of the game, which I didn’t know was available. I have every mask, every skill, every tool, every crest, and beat the final boss literally like thirty minutes ago. This is definitely one of my top Metroidvanias of all time, and might be one of my favorite games ever. There was only one boss that I became frustrated with after completing Act I, but it always felt like it was on my part rather than the design of the boss itself. I don’t know if others are the same or different, but the patterns of bosses often take me multiple times to catch up, I think perhaps due to my not-so-great eyesight. Like, first try, I’ll see oh this attack causes this attack to pop out, oh I can pogo that I didn’t know that, or I can deflect this attack and get under them, and so forth. The last last boss definitely tested me a lot, and it took quite some time for me to finally beat them, and even then, I think I just barely squeaked by. When I beat them, I didn’t go, “Oh, I’m so glad it’s over.” I wanted to try again and see if I could do it better with different tools and different crests. No such luck so far, but like I said, I just beat it not that long ago.

I don’t want to go into detail about the story or the ending, but I do think I love the story and the characters more than the first game. Hornet’s dialogue is so good, and her interaction with the characters nails what I think her character’s voice and personality based on what we knew of her from the first game. Without spoiling the ending, I do think Team Cherry isn’t done with this franchise or Hornet, and I am looking forward to what they do next. The story of difficulty continues to be a discussion, and I’m firmly in the camp of, just like the FromSoftware games, that difficulty options should be in the games, especially accessibility options. Easier modes should be an option, but if you are able to, normal mode should at least be tried, even if you go through the game on easy mode first. That being said, I am forty now and definitely have had to take breaks from Silksong to rest my hands so they didn’t hurt later, and anyone with accessibility issues should be able to enjoy a game like this with the options available.

Anyway, I had to open my big mouth. I believe I mentioned it here, but as soon as I said Silksong was going to be my game of the year, a Nintendo Direct aired shortly afterward and announced that Supergiant’s Hades 2 was coming out of early access and into 1.0 on September 25th. That’s just next Thursday already, after Silksong has just come out on the 4th! That’s absolutely crazy, but I don’t think personally it’s going to topple Silksong or Donkey Kong Bananza from my top 2 games simply because, quite frankly, I don’t really care for roguelike games in general. There are only two I’ve liked, Hades and Dead Cells, and Hades 2 is about to become the third, most likely. Meanwhile, Metroidvanias and 3D Platformers are some of my all-time favorite genres, but my heart is open to Hades 2 being number one.

I meant to mention this last year, but some games had to get their releases out of the way when Silksong came out, and to be honest, some of them I had not heard of before it was reported about their delays. The one that stood out to me was called Demonschool, sort of Persona 1–2 meets Fire Emblem kind of deal. I think it looks really cool and just wanted to give it some love since they had to delay til November.

Wrestling – AEW All Out 2025

AEW’s All Out is this weekend, and I am excited, as 95% of the time, AEW pay-per-views are outstanding, with the occasional, but I won’t deny the build for some of the show has been a little wonky. I feel bad for Wardlow who was injured on his return and was penned in to get the AEW Men’s World Heavyweight Championship match against Hangman on the PPV, but as someone who was down on Wardlow after Double or Nothing 2022 the guy is a TV defense at beast. I much prefer the idea of TNT Champion Kyle Fletcher challenging Hangman as a fun parallel to last year’s Jack Perry (TNT) vs. Bryan Danielson (World) match. Not only that, but I’ve liked that they played with the history of Hangman at All Out by bringing up his championship match against Chris Jericho at the first All Out. Honestly, it only occurred to me this week, but the list of top heels available right now to challenge Hangman seems kind of thin, almost to a point I understand why they didn’t pull the plug on MJF’s contract for a world title match, but it doesn’t change how I feel about how dogshit that angle was before Forbidden Door.

Likewise, the build to this four-way for Toni Storm’s AEW Women’s World Heavyweight Championship has been kinda thin, especially for Toni Storm. However, women’s fourways in AEW have a long history of overdelivering, and it is another parallel to how Toni Storm won the title for the first time at All Out 2022, which also included Jamie Hayter. I’m always rooting for my girl and Long Island’s own Kris Statlander, but I am not quite sure if this is how I want her to win, nor am I too keen on her turning heel again and joining the Death Riders. Her face turn last year was badly done, but it felt like she was gaining momentum as a face after facing Mercedes Mone twice for the TBS Title in some outstanding matches from both of them, then they spent months of Kris trying to find some resolution with Willow Nightingale that never went anywhere. So, it’s not like the heel turn wouldn’t turn out well, it’s more like I feel like they’ve wasted the potential of what they were building with her as a face the past year, after an unnecessary face turn. I’d almost be more excited if it turned out Jamie Hayter was the one turning heel and joining the Death Riders, as she is hard-hitting and has a lot of history with Toni Storm. Just in general, I’d like them to do more with Statlander and Willow for the next year.

I’ll have more on All Out in next week’s post, but I will tell you that I have absolutely not given a shit about this Cope and Christian reunion against FTR. Christian is the only person in this match that I care for. Cope has been so uninteresting since his return at last year’s World’s End, and while much more entertaining as heels FTR still only does so much for me. If this match is the main, I’m going to be annoyed as either of the world champions are much more deserving, although I do prefer it being Hangman vs. Fletcher, we’ll see what happens.