Hi, Scott! I was thinking about some of the wild spots in wrestling that used to be god-tier and have since become mid-match offense, and I was realizing that some moves just haven't suffered as much. Oddly, it's the ones that DON'T have the big “Holy Shit!” factor of the big slams or avalanche moves that are retaining their credibility, possibly because there's few ways to one-up them.
For example, the past few months of AEW TV have featured things like an avalanche death valley driver being hit 10 minutes into Hangman/Mox, and it not even featuring into the match, which goes another ten. Similarly, last Dynamite saw a double-spike piledriver on the floor to Stu Grayson, and that was just our “and to the commercial break” move and it was just some random thing. These would have made the internet shit a brick during the 1990s (where the regular dvd was a reliable finisher ever since Etsuko Mita invented it in joshi), but now mean nothing.
Now that ain't news, exactly- “MOVEZ~~!” has been a thing for a while and old finishes now mean squat… but look at the finishers that ARE credible. Jericho's spinning back elbow, Hangman's somersault lariat, Brian's running knee… and a bunch of submission stuff, as Mox's chokes are all treated as actual TKOs with ref-stops, Brian has the LeBell lock, etc. All of these are bigger than stuff like Mox's high-angle butterfly suplex or almost any of the big “pick up and slam” moves of the past decade.
So do you think the in-ring stuff is transitioning to the point where just slamming or head-dropping a guy isn't a credible finish anymore? Because it seems like the only stuff people are bothering to protect are these submissions & strikes. Is that the Japan influence or something else?