Most people would start a site like this from the beginning.
Not me.
I’ve been watching Pro Wrestling for what has now been over half my life. During that time, like I’m sure many of you went through, I became dissuaded with what I was seeing on the biggest, most mainstream option, World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. This, however, started before the strongest modern alternative had.
Instead, I was just a teenager, looking for a way to preserve my love for something, something that was being crushed under the weight of corporate mediocrity. What I found, of all things, came to me through YouTube, in the form of a weekly series called Being The Elite.
This series immediately had me engaged, and also had me intrigued. I knew there was pro wrestling outside of WWE, but, beyond Impact and Lucha Underground, I had generally failed to explore it. The series made it impossible to ignore. Before long, I was looking forward to it more than I was to watching entire, actual pro wrestling shows!
Still, let’s jump ahead to the big one, the reason we ended up here, at Dynamite 200:
ALL IN.
When I heard of its announcement, I knew that I was going to stop at nothing to try and go. Chicago was quite the drive, but I knew it’d be worth it. My Dad (who you’ll hear a fair bit about throughout these posts, as he is just as big a fan as I am) and I went to both ALL IN and Starrcast, and had an amazing experience. The card had one thing WWE didn’t, above all else; Variety.
To me, AEW’s greatest strength is that it isn’t just one thing. WWE had, at the time, gotten more formulaic than ever, and seeing this show with the wild variety of styles and bouts had reinvigorated my love of Pro Wrestling.
Still, I had no idea that it would be the start of something far, far bigger.
I’ll be honest, I have never missed an episode of AEW Dynamite. It is something to look forward to each week, knowing that, whatever is weighing on me, I can just enjoy myself. Dynamite 200 was a celebration of that. The episode had that variety AEW has become so good at, ranging from comedy to drama, from high flying to hard hitting, and capping it all off with a feel good title change, the win for a deserving champ who had fought so hard in the pandemic era, Hikaru Shida. I could go into more detail, but, for today, I don’t think I need to. The show was Dynamite to a T, and, with that episode as a standard bearer, I can’t help but look forward to the next 200.