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| The Sambo Voltron's getting increasingly non-operational Photo Credit: WWE.com |
The temptation is strong. When you're frustrated with your lot in life, it usually is. There's that voice in the back of your head (sometimes dancing on the grave of Good You with maracas) that makes you want to give in, to say eff this and tell everybody what you really think of them, to tell them how sick you are of shucking and jiving for scraps of their attention, and how borderline comforting it would be to be unhinged. Nobody can ignore a monster, after all.
Brodus Clay is not there.
Yet.
But his slow-moving heel turn continued apace on WWEME, ironically enough on the very show where earlier in the year he'd formed Tons of Funk withTensai Sweet T. That same voice is saying how R-Truth pinning him with a jackknife rollup wasn't his fault. Hadn't he just head-and-arm suplexed that Dolomite wannabe Xavier Woods halfway back to Angel Grove? The only reason they were still around, after all, was that Brodus was just having too much vengeful glee giving into the green-eyed monster. Why not step on their ribs a couple times, give them a few legdrops and nerve holds? Throwing off R-Truth's tornado DDT attempt? That was cake. And maybe a second helping of cake. So Cameron and Naomi looked uncomfortable and noticeably subdued--have you seen Total Divas?
Sometimes they make it look like the Real Hoodrats of Stamford! Sweetness can only talk reason for so long. People who're monsters fall into two classes--those born, and those who conceal it only to unleash hell when they feel like it, the sort of automaton run amok epics and movies're made of that're more horrifying than their brethren. Monsters made still have a thin veneer of empathy to be tapped into--a cataclysm occured, the world brought to bear at a knifepoint between their eyes, and their narrative got overrun by events. Not good, of course, but these things happen in the world; it rains on the just and the unjust alike. Monsters with an on and off switch? Now that's horrifying, not only because the impetus goes from the mass to a dictatorship of 1, but because there's something about solipsistic violence that feels rawer and truer. And in the case of Brodus Clay, it appears the days of shuckin' and jivin' are whittling down, soon to be obliterated faster than you could dial up his parentage.
Speaking of ancestry lines, when it comes to the Divas division, none are better than Natalya's. And with the NattieKat getting her shot at the Lisa Frank Memorial Belt Sunday at CrazySexyCool, the only thing standing betwixt her and her rematch with AJ was Alicia Fox. Now, of course, the BCB has a soft spot for Alicia, who throws the best Northern Lights suplex in the business and has the looks to match. But fait accompli are fait accompli, and despite some nice headscissor work and a vicious-looking kick in the face, the former Women's Champ was ready with her modified Michinoku Driver, MURDERDISCUSSKILL lariat, and Sharpshooter. It wasn't as good as the Nat/Paige showdown down Full Sail way last week, but it was very, very close, and one of the few high points about Total Divas for me is that it's given Natalya a noticeable surge in popularity that she didn't have before the show aired. Whether she rides that (and/or the episode about Gizzy's passing, said the inner Brodus Clay about to turn inside some of us) to a title win against the resident Black Widow Sunday is another matter.
It feels like June was just yesterday, wasn't it? Now we're under a fortnight away from Kringle Day, which means under three weeks to 2014, and for some of us like Curtis Axel and Dolph Ziggler, this year which started off so promising and peaked in the summer cannot possibly end soon enough. For Axel, he went from the triumph of hoisting the Intercontinental Championship overhead on Father's Day to having to be the Punch to a cornfed meathead's Judy in a Main Event opener.
And for Ziggler? You're not the World Champion riding the momentum of a surging, overjoyed crowd who saw you cash in the briefcase to finally get a solid World Championship reign under your belt--you're the guy who loses to Punch. This isn't his fault, of course, but it didn't make it any less annoying to see him fall victim to an easily underthought trope of "attack the other guy's second when I'm about to win the match oh noes I walked into his finisher womp womp". Wouldn't you get the hypothetical winner's purse if your opponent was DQed? Ah, well. All that sturm und drang out of the way, they had an above cromulent display of the pro graps; what stood out was Axel's rapid development more time and attention the second half of the year's given him, even if the flash is uncorked in the offense of others. Dolph's a known commodity: we know he uncorks the best dropkick in the E, that he's liable to go Full Roll--erm, Ziggler on a miss to the corner and end up on the floor, and when he's to bend the knee in the script that sometimes he looks like a snow angel, so devastating does the offense look.
But here, Axel mixed a potion of basics crisply done with a few streaks and innovations--his grandfather's falling axe of a forearm off the second rope echoed silently but brilliantly by taking Dolph off of the second rope with a Perfectplex, the first time I can remember seeing such a maneuver, even if it didn't win the match (it totally should've, since that finisher is awkward at best and incomprehensible at worst). But, hey, it's off to the Rhodes Dynasty and a shot at the big pennies for AxelBack since you matriarch fornicators don't know how to act, and for Dolph, Fandango awaits in the pregame show.
From the big gold belt to curtain jerking the curtain jerker in under six months.
Kind of makes your inner monster want to flip a switch, don't it?
Brodus Clay is not there.
Yet.
But his slow-moving heel turn continued apace on WWEME, ironically enough on the very show where earlier in the year he'd formed Tons of Funk with
Sometimes they make it look like the Real Hoodrats of Stamford! Sweetness can only talk reason for so long. People who're monsters fall into two classes--those born, and those who conceal it only to unleash hell when they feel like it, the sort of automaton run amok epics and movies're made of that're more horrifying than their brethren. Monsters made still have a thin veneer of empathy to be tapped into--a cataclysm occured, the world brought to bear at a knifepoint between their eyes, and their narrative got overrun by events. Not good, of course, but these things happen in the world; it rains on the just and the unjust alike. Monsters with an on and off switch? Now that's horrifying, not only because the impetus goes from the mass to a dictatorship of 1, but because there's something about solipsistic violence that feels rawer and truer. And in the case of Brodus Clay, it appears the days of shuckin' and jivin' are whittling down, soon to be obliterated faster than you could dial up his parentage.
Speaking of ancestry lines, when it comes to the Divas division, none are better than Natalya's. And with the NattieKat getting her shot at the Lisa Frank Memorial Belt Sunday at CrazySexyCool, the only thing standing betwixt her and her rematch with AJ was Alicia Fox. Now, of course, the BCB has a soft spot for Alicia, who throws the best Northern Lights suplex in the business and has the looks to match. But fait accompli are fait accompli, and despite some nice headscissor work and a vicious-looking kick in the face, the former Women's Champ was ready with her modified Michinoku Driver, MURDERDISCUSSKILL lariat, and Sharpshooter. It wasn't as good as the Nat/Paige showdown down Full Sail way last week, but it was very, very close, and one of the few high points about Total Divas for me is that it's given Natalya a noticeable surge in popularity that she didn't have before the show aired. Whether she rides that (and/or the episode about Gizzy's passing, said the inner Brodus Clay about to turn inside some of us) to a title win against the resident Black Widow Sunday is another matter.
It feels like June was just yesterday, wasn't it? Now we're under a fortnight away from Kringle Day, which means under three weeks to 2014, and for some of us like Curtis Axel and Dolph Ziggler, this year which started off so promising and peaked in the summer cannot possibly end soon enough. For Axel, he went from the triumph of hoisting the Intercontinental Championship overhead on Father's Day to having to be the Punch to a cornfed meathead's Judy in a Main Event opener.
And for Ziggler? You're not the World Champion riding the momentum of a surging, overjoyed crowd who saw you cash in the briefcase to finally get a solid World Championship reign under your belt--you're the guy who loses to Punch. This isn't his fault, of course, but it didn't make it any less annoying to see him fall victim to an easily underthought trope of "attack the other guy's second when I'm about to win the match oh noes I walked into his finisher womp womp". Wouldn't you get the hypothetical winner's purse if your opponent was DQed? Ah, well. All that sturm und drang out of the way, they had an above cromulent display of the pro graps; what stood out was Axel's rapid development more time and attention the second half of the year's given him, even if the flash is uncorked in the offense of others. Dolph's a known commodity: we know he uncorks the best dropkick in the E, that he's liable to go Full Roll--erm, Ziggler on a miss to the corner and end up on the floor, and when he's to bend the knee in the script that sometimes he looks like a snow angel, so devastating does the offense look.
But here, Axel mixed a potion of basics crisply done with a few streaks and innovations--his grandfather's falling axe of a forearm off the second rope echoed silently but brilliantly by taking Dolph off of the second rope with a Perfectplex, the first time I can remember seeing such a maneuver, even if it didn't win the match (it totally should've, since that finisher is awkward at best and incomprehensible at worst). But, hey, it's off to the Rhodes Dynasty and a shot at the big pennies for AxelBack since you matriarch fornicators don't know how to act, and for Dolph, Fandango awaits in the pregame show.
From the big gold belt to curtain jerking the curtain jerker in under six months.
Kind of makes your inner monster want to flip a switch, don't it?