u/uncannynerddad

I know the Sickos are gonna hit us with the “but he worked Korakuen Hall” defense, but man… this look is rough.

Wrestling is presentation. Aura matters. Presence matters. And Mason Rook doesn’t look intimidating, dangerous, athletic, or even remotely believable as a TV wrestling star.

You don’t need to look like Batista, but you should at least look like you’ve seen the inside of a gym voluntarily.

Maybe he can work. But first impressions matter, and this immediately takes me out of the product.

Am I alone here, Midcarders?

We are officially in a new era of WWE.

John Cena is retired. AJ Styles is retired. Brock Lesnar is retired. A lot of the established main event talent is either moving into special attraction roles or being shifted down the card to help build the next wave.

And that next wave is starting to look pretty loaded.

Oba Femi. Trick Williams. Jacy Jayne. Dirty Dom. Bron Breakker. Ethan Page. Blake Monroe. Tiffany Stratton. Giulia. Roxanne Perez. Je’Von Evans. Sol Ruca. The list keeps growing.

This feels like WWE’s “New Generation” reset. Not in the cheesy 1995 branding sense, but in the sense that WWE is clearly transitioning from one era of stars into another.

So here’s the question, Midcarders:

If WWE’s next decade had to be built around FOUR pillars, who are your picks?

Which four names do you think will define this “next generation” of WWE?

Welcome to the official r/midcarder live thread for WWE Backlash.

Tonight’s the night. Grab a beer, settle in, enjoy Danhausen’s weird little gremlin energy, and watch some fake fighting with your fellow Midcarders.

This thread will stay pinned/highlighted throughout the show so it’s easy to find during the event.

How To Watch
WWE Backlash streams tonight at 6PM ET on ESPN Unlimited through the ESPN app in the U.S., with the first hour simulcast on ESPN2.

Internationally, it streams on Netflix.

Full details and previews:
https://www.wwe.com/shows/backlash/wwe-backlash-match-card-how-to-watch-previews-start-time-and-more

Tonight’s Card
- Roman Reigns (c) vs. Jacob Fatu
Tribal warfare. Family drama. Samoan violence. This one feels like someone’s getting launched into the fifth row.

- Seth Rollins vs. Bron Breakker
The future of WWE trying to spear a hole directly through Seth Rollins’ ribcage.

- Trick Williams (c) vs. Sami Zayn
Trick has become one of WWE’s fastest rising stars while Sami continues his yearly tradition of being exhausted and morally conflicted.

- IYO SKY vs. Asuka
Two absolute killers finally colliding while the internet pretends this won’t rule.

- Danhausen & Mystery Partner vs. The Miz & Kit Wilson
Very nice. Very evil. Very likely to completely hijack the conversation tonight depending on who the partner is.

- John Cena appearance
Which will likely be a 17-minute infomercial for Club WWE and nostalgia merch bundles.

Use this thread for:
- Live reactions
- Match discussion
- Bad fantasy booking
- Overreactions after every near fall
- Beer/snack check-ins
- Danhausen conspiracy theories
- General Midcarder chaos

As always:
No Sicko behavior.
No basement-tier meltdowns.
No acting like this fake sport is a geopolitical crisis.

Enjoy the show, Midcarders.

Danhausen teased a mystery tag partner for tonight, so let’s hear the guesses before WWE inevitably reveals it and wrestling Twitter pretends they “called it.”

Do they go with another comedy act? Someone from NXT? A nostalgia pop? Or does Triple H fully lean into the weirdhausen energy and give him somebody completely unexpected?

My only request: please no fantasy booking involving Kota Ibushi teleporting through a forbidden door powered by Meltzer stars.

Who you got?

With the recent moderation and rule changes, we’re asking Midcarders to help us keep this place from turning into the basement 2.0.

A lot of the usual suspects are discovering this sub exists, and shockingly, some of them are struggling to process that not everyone wants to pretend every 600k ratings dip is actually “great for wrestling.”

If you see bad-faith posting, derailment, tribalist nonsense, misinformation, disinformation, or whatever malformed narrative the Sickos are workshopping this week, report it. Don’t waste your afternoon arguing with someone whose entire personality was built in a Discord server and reinforced by Meltzer star ratings and Bagel Bites.

We want r/midcarder to stay fair, balanced, funny, and rooted in actual discussion. Criticizing WWE is allowed. Criticizing AEW is allowed. Worshipping billionaires and treating wrestling companies like political parties is not.

And remember: this is a scripted fake sport where grown men and women play fight in their underwear for shiny belts. If someone is acting like they’re defending the honor of a medieval kingdom because you said Dynamite felt cold lately, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered a Sicko.

Report accordingly.

Recent rules/mod update here: https://www.reddit.com/r/midcarder/s/pG9d7jyDw2

275,000 viewers for NWA POWERRR on Comet is honestly a pretty encouraging number for a company many people assumed was dead a few years ago.

Free broadcast TV still matters, and there’s clearly an audience out there looking for wrestling outside the WWE/AEW bubble.

Have any Midcarders checked out the Comet run yet?

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

Watching Danhausen leave AEW and immediately become one of WWE’s featured stars and biggest merch movers has me thinking about how many talents Tony Khan has completely failed to maximize.

Cody Rhodes and CM Punk were already established stars before returning, but look at Penta, Jade Cargill, Ethan Page and Ricky Saints. All of them walked into WWE and instantly felt more important, more polished and more over than they ever did in AEW.

AEW has no shortage of talented people, but Tony Khan has a habit of collecting action figures and leaving them in arrested development instead of actually developing stars.

So which AEW talent do you think would instantly click in WWE if they debuted next week?

And who’s the biggest example of AEW fumbling someone’s full potential?

(Spoiler: It’s probably Danhausen.)

For any Midcarders looking for some old school studio wrestling vibes, Comet streams their broadcast channel live 24/7 on their website, which means you can watch NWA POWERRR completely free.

No account or subscription needed. No “cinema” discourse from wrestling fans who think every 28-minute heatless banger changed the industry.

Just throw it on and check it out.

Ted Turner has passed away at 87.

Whatever you think of WCW in the end, there’s no denying Ted Turner changed wrestling forever. Without Turner putting wrestling on national cable television through TBS and later TNT, the business doesn’t explode the way it did in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

WCW, Nitro, the Monday Night Wars, giving WWE real competition… none of it happens without Ted. Wrestling today looks very different without him.

RIP to one of the most influential figures the industry has ever had.

Every time something happens in wrestling, you can almost set your watch to it.

WWE does releases. It sucks. It always sucks. Nobody’s celebrating people losing jobs.

But then comes the performance.

The outrage posts. The pearl clutching. The “this is the most disgusting thing WWE has ever done” takes like Triple H personally pushed every single person out the door that morning. It’s so over the top it stops feeling real and starts feeling like cosplay outrage.

And let’s be honest about where most of it lives. The basement turns into a full blown grief theater production. Same people who were calling these talents “irrelevant” two weeks ago are suddenly acting like WWE just committed a war crime.

That kind of energy doesn’t help the wrestlers. It doesn’t help the conversation. If anything, it just builds resentment and pushes people away. And whether it’s fair or not, it ends up reflecting on AEW fans by association, because they’re usually the loudest doing it.

It’s exhausting.

You can feel bad for talent and still be grounded. You can criticize WWE without acting like the sky is falling every single time.

So what do you think, Midcarders…
is the performative side of wrestling fandom becoming the biggest problem? Or is this just part of the game now?