Commissions return again, this one coming from Stink Time. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
This was for Rollins’ fictional title.
It’s fine, honestly.
Really.
Seth Rollins has a bad back and Nakamura attacks it. That’s it. There’s nothing really egregious to complain about. No kickout spot upset me. The match isn’t irrationally long like some other WWE pay-per-view main events recently. Seth Rollins’ selling was even pretty decent. Not great, but there were a few moments where he remembered or did some small minor movements that someone with an actual hurt back in real life may have done. I thought it generally escalated well, and while not every transition was perfect (the way they get to the ending stomp is especially abrupt feeling), it gets a lot more right than I think I expected, or maybe that you maybe would expect had you not seen the match. It’s also not a match that has, to my knowledge, been met with a ton of comically overblown fanfare by pervert WWE fans, so there’s not even a conversation about it that would annoy me.
It’s not a bad match and it can’t hurt anybody.
It’s just kind of boring.
Rollins is one of the least sympathetic or likeable guys on the roster, so playing an under-the-gun babyface was always going to be something that never worked for me, and while there are things that are objectively good or fine here, it also never really comes together as more than that. It’s an odd thing to write about, a match I didn’t love, but also have no real negative feelings about, and I suppose for Nakamura at this point and for Seth Rollins as a solo act in general, it’s a wild overachievement and, at least relative to my expectations, a success.
Good for them, having an alright match.
The comment that came with the commission for this match (as well as Moxley vs. Orange Cassidy the next night) asked if there was any sort of parallel here or a relationship between the two matches. I assumed that meant just Shield boys main eventing pay-per-views in matches for theoretical secondary titles and succeeding, but the relationship lies elsewhere, or at least the connection between them. Compared to a match the next night with a wrestler who very silly and/or stupid people have called some kind of cosplay wrestler, its Seth Rollins who, yet again, does the actual tribute acts, not only as a beat up older pretty boy being constantly trucked by Nakamura, but as one with a bad back too.
Given what a huge fan Rollins obviously is of both far better Nakamura opponents, I’m happy for him that he got to have his little fantasy camp.
HANDWERK 