John Moxley is currently doing some of the best character work of his entire wrestling career,

and it's time to give the man his flowers. Let's talk about it, and we should probably begin

by contextualizing the entire DeafRiders experience in AEW. This stable certainly started with a bang,

with the choking of Brian Danielson with a plastic bag.

From there, things tapered off a little bit, I think it's quite fair to say.

We entered into this story, the idea of which was that John Moxley and his recruited team

were not happy with the direction that AEW had taken.

They were not happy with the people that they perceived to be responsible for taking it in that direction,

and they were going to take it out on them.

They were going to rebuild the promotion essentially in John Moxley or the Deaf Rider's image.

The issue was early on that this message was very inconsistent in

how it was communicated and the way it played out on television, well, it wasn't to everybody's

liking and I include myself in that group. The messaging was too vague at times and the forces

of people that were lined up to oppose the debt riders

initially weren't quite of the caliber that you would hope the size of name that you would hope to see

rising up straightaways nothing against the wrestlers who were lined up in that infamous scene

in the parking lot some of them are my personal favorites. However, when you look at

the entirety of AW, if you're trying to communicate that this evil force is taken over, you kind of need

to have a few more big names in there, at least early on. So they were quickly established as this

kind of authoritarian stable, this ruling ominous

force if you will, casting its shadow over all of a W.

This dissolved after a while, the messaging kind of, the repairing it in my own image

...