How would you change (FIX) the women's division of AEW?
How would you change (FIX) the women's division of AEW?
If you watched Dynamite last week you saw the sign, even the camera man knows what's up so my question to all of you is how would you fix it.
TK gives you the reigns and says he wants a women's division that could headline next year's All Out.
You can sign any free agents, use ROH talent, book anymatch or angle you want, but you have to have a great division in one years time.
(I'll post my own thoughts later today)
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What needs done
- Obviously give more time to the women.
- Build some fucking structure in the division. Take a page out of Stardom (or hell, NJPW, or even AEW itself) and build actual factions with goals, and ethics they abide by. The only one they have right now is the Outcasts and I'll be very honest: it sucks. It's Bargain Bin Bullet Club with a weaker presentation and less compelling characters and promos.
- Enough with the cheating heel champion bullshit. Toni with the Outcasts is literally the same shit as when Britt was on top and she'd cheat in every fucking match. Have a competent heel at the top. Deeb should have been it when she was feuding with Shida, but they fucked that up beyond salvation unfortunately.
- Give them time to build actual storylines and feuds. The closest they got was Julia Hart vs Anna JAy and the unfortunate reality is that Anna's promo for that match was both probably her best promo and embarrassingly basic when put next to Julia's now MAlakai Black enhanced promo work.
- Have someone be the face of a group and stick to it. To build upon the factions thing, this is a great way to hide people like Anna who can't do promos yet. The Shield had this with Mox, not everyone in a faction needs to be a talker, so build factions around a specific theme, pick a good frontwoman for them and make her be the face as the others learn what the faction is about and how to work that into their characters and promos. They are arguably doing that with Saraya somewhat unnecessarily since everyone in the Outcasts could be equally good or better.
How I would do it
- Have characters snap out of this amnesiac state where everyone seemingly forgot that Britt is a piece of shit heel who cheated her way through her entire title reign.
- Keep the Outcasts, and build the following factions (no idea about the names, feel free to insert/suggest):
- Shida, Riho, Willow, Skye Blue, possibly Statlander: Turbo babyface workhorses. Kick ass, take names, look out for eachother, neutralise the numbers game with ruthless efficiency. Literally no match of theirs should have a successful interference. Key concept is that they'll be honorable but will not be stupid. This is a division full of cheaters and it needs to be set straight.
- Britt, Hayter, Anna and Tay Melo: Anna and Tay are natural fits, they're already meangirl-ing their asses off, might as well go all in on the gimmick, plus they are decent at tagging and this will give them something better than being stuck in the Jericho vortex™
- Athena, Bunny, Penelope Ford, Abadon and/or Leyla Hirsch: The heel-but-not-pussies faction. They can fight, they will do hardcore shit, they will absolutely not be fucked with but they don't need to cheat to win, so they don't. Keep the belt on Athena, build the group around her, give them a strong style vibe. Lean into the fact that Athena got shat on for being too "unsafe" in the ring despite doing shit 1/5th as hard as people like Mox or Danielson.
The first big storyline would be the babyface faction coming together and cleaning house. Only title they don't get is the RoH one. They explicitly start playing the number games against the outcasts and such, and wreck their shit, but never interfere in matches, just ruthlessly prevent any and all interference. I want to see Willow powerbomb Ruby through a table to stop her interfering and say something like "you were my friend" on the way out.
Then when Hayter and Britt come over trying to buddy buddy with them the reaction should be something along the lines of "excuse me do you think we forgot you've done nothing but cheat and condescend everyone for like a year?" and bring that into a big faction warfare feud. Bring it to something like the first women's Blood and Guts, hopefully Tay will be back in action by next year. Faces faction goes over.
Meanwhile you have Athena start gathering cohorts because she's already paranoid and megalomaniacal enough. Call them something like "the acolytes" or something. have her pick a fight with the Outcasts, maybe she wants Ruby to join them, who knows, build this to a RoH title match, Athena vs Saraya, whoever wins gets the title and Ruby, Athena retains but Ruby tells them both to fuck off and strikes out on her own as a tweener as she always should have been. Make this the emotional core of the babyface group cause Willow likes Ruby and wants to be friends again.
The last big storyline is Athena's faction vs the faces, build it to something like Anarchy in the Arena or Stadium Stampede, something big, bombastic, silly. Heels go over, cement the new vibe that you need to actually be good at shit instead of relying on cheating 100% of the time, establish them as the new measuring stick, and use this defeat to cement that the face group is not just an alliance of convenience but it has true staying power and a strong bond even in defeat. Make them the Queen's Quest of AEW.
Add Nyla and remove Statlander I think she needs to stand on her own in a feud with Taya until Jade shows back up triple threat match for all in.
Sure, that works, my logic was that I'd want the faces to have all the gold except the RoH title, so I'd rather add her in than take it off her.
The idea isn't to start this tomorrow or anything so the current feuds were not something i took into account too much.
I wouldn't add Nyla though, she hasn't redeemed herself at all so far, she's literally just been less prominent. If she needs to join the faces she needs to show character development first.
Could be a nice angle for her, to go babyface once she realises that she's becoming a laughing stock as the gatekeeper of the division and can't seem to win the big one since her title reign, aligning with the good guys and having a match with Shafir to close off their partnership. The usual "heel turns on partner because they're going soft" routine but done well. I do believe they could pull off a nice short-ish angle to round off the numbers to 5v5 in the hypothetical blood and guts.
Also, I just found out a spoiler for Dynamite 200: >!Shida won her match against Storm so that's a step in the right direction, now let her be dominant and not incapable of basic rational decisions.!<
Love the ideas. Do you mind editing your original post, though? The bullet point starting with "Have someone be the face of a group and stick to it," didn't render properly (on Kbin, at least) and it's stretched the thread out east-west, making it hard to read. A quick formatting should fix that.
And if you can swap out the 'R' word for something else that'd be cool too. The last thing I want to do is delete your comments. They're mostly solid, just a few tweaks and we're good.
I have genuinely no idea how to format this differently, but I'll have a look, it looks fine on lemmy.world.
As for the language, could the guidelines be posted in the sidebar section, so there would be no misunderstandings about the expected standards?
I'm ESL and I have frankly no idea what the mod team finds objectionable but I'm pretty sure the standards are tighter than I'm used to given this request.
No problem with abiding by them, when in Rome and all that, but I'd like them to be explicit.
Also for the life of me I can't find the point where I used "retarded", is that what I'm supposed to be looking for?
(Feel free to remove this comment once you reply if this is indeed the offending word.)
ETA: does the formatting look correct now?
You fucking nailed it. Formatting's perfect. Thanks a lot.
And as for words, swearing (fuck, shit, etc.) is cool but we try to keep away from 'slurs.' Basically, a word that could be hurtful to a minority. In this case, disabled people. A preferred word might be "stupid" because the majority of people are definitely stupid lol
And it's the last word of the comment I replied to originally. And I'll speak to the other mods about clearing up those rules.
Oh lol, it was behind the spoiler tag that's why I didn't see it.
Fixed, and thanks for the clarification.
I think Nyla has shown she can be amazing if they let her. She would be very useful in helping talent come out of their shells and turn their knobs up to 11. Someone like Skye needs to be partnered with someone who can show them how to be a bigger than life version of themselves and I feel Nyla is the perfect person for that.
Oh definitely, I'm just talking from a storyline perspective. Nyla is great, she just needs to have an actual transition to face before she becomes one, unlike Britt.