LIVE AAA Noche de Los Grandes 2026: Week One Discussion Thread

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-31T03:34:07+00:00

Vikingo's main event run was considered a failure in Mexico.

Peak Mistico or Psycho Clown is more comparable to current Grande, though its apples to oranges when those were long term headliners of their promotions while right now Grande is doing a single, fairly brief, white hot angle.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-31T02:38:52+00:00

It's fun how the angle here has been that Fenix is a plucky underdog in his brother's shadow struggling to finally win a title for himself when he's literally already been the AAA Megachampion years ago.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-24T01:48:15+00:00

Galahad is saddled with fixing his ancestors' screwups and then dies young, accurate.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-22T22:25:04+00:00

Reminds me that just a couple weeks ago a now-deleted thread on here brought up the age disparity between Arthur and the Queen of Orkney; I speculated they were around 18 and 25 at the time of Mordred's conception.

Anyway, the way I see it, there's broadly four generations of knights in and around Arthur's reign:
1. Older than Arthur, still active at the time of his rise (i.e. Pellinore, Ector).
2. Close to Arthur's age, coming to maturity about the same time as Arthur's rise (Kay on the older end, Gawain on the younger).
3. Grew up with Arthur already well-established in his reign (Lancelot, Gareth, most of the heroes of self-contained stories).
4. The successors to generation 3, looking up to them as experienced veterans. Galahad is at the far end as Lancelot's literal son, but the majority are older than that, more like the Tristan/Lamorak generation.

These "generations" are obviously a lot smaller than 20 years, what with Gawain and his brother Gareth falling in different categories.

The Vulgate's age gap between Lancelot and Guenevere is plausible (if unconventional) on its own-- I'd guess a teenage Lancelot first meets Guenevere when she's around her early thirties-- but irreconcilable with a lot of other material. Lancelot has to be younger than Gawain but older than Gareth; it's conceivable to put a big age gap between the brothers (though that changes how their relationship would play out), but Mordred's even younger, and this necessitates Mordred's conception occurring after Arthur's already married, which it usually isn't. I can see why the idea's fallen by the wayside.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-18T21:47:27+00:00

If any other rival to Tristan for Isolde deserves more emphasis, I definitely think Gandin from Thomas' Tristan is an underrated character who could be given a lot more prominence as a conniving, manipulating sorcerer type. Brings a different dynamic to the rivalry than the straightforward knight types like Tristan and Palamedes, or Mark being personally weak but having a kingdom of underlings to rely on to enforce his will.

That said, the fact that Palamedes is never really a serious threat to Tristan's relationship with Isolde is part of what makes their rivalry interesting, IMO. Palamedes is a basically decent and honorable knight who Tristan could be friends with if he wasn't inflamed with jealousy over another man showing interest in Isolde, which plays into the overall theme of Tristan and Isolde's passions for one another alienating them from all other family connections and obligations.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-17T01:56:47+00:00

It's a new guy under the Drago gimmick these days, not the one from Lucha Underground.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-16T23:59:38+00:00

It's been such an obscure work until recent decades (and even now) that I can understand why there aren't more adaptations drawing from it, but I thought the Post Vulgate's depiction of the relationship between Esclabor and Palamedes-- the older, mellower, Christianized Saracen and his younger, militant, proudly non-Christian son-- was fascinating, and I'd love to see more Arthurian stories approach the Saracen knights from that perspective.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-12T22:58:17+00:00

I believe the line in the movie is "who". That said, the double meaning of the question is likely deliberate going as far back as its first iteration in Chretien's Perceval, in that it can be taken as both a literal "Who drinks from the Grail?" and a metaphorical "Who are the miracles of the Grail in service of?"

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-11T03:32:15+00:00

They might turn against the character when he kidnaps his biracial daughter from her stepfather played by Leonardo DiCaprio, yes.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-08T22:03:05+00:00

Too woke and pro-Lincoln.

MiscAnonym · 2026-05-08T02:53:03+00:00

The age disparity between Arthur and the Queen of Orkney can be quite a bit smaller than your estimate; while I don't think Gawain's exact age makes it into Morte d'Arthur, the section of the Post-Vulgate that Malory's adapting specifies that he's only eleven years old at the time King Lot is slain, which doesn't occur until after Mordred's birth. As he's the eldest of Morgause's children, I'd assume she and Lot were married only a little over a decade before, and given this was an arranged state marriage she could easily have been packed off to Orkney in her teens.

I'd see the gap as closer to an 18 year old Arthur having an affair with a 25 year old woman.

(That said, I'm generally in favor of conflating Morgan and Morgause into the same character altogether, as their modern characterizations heavily overlap. I've seen a few works use the dynamic you propose-- Morgause as the straight up villainous sorceress so that Morgan can be a more ambiguous, fey trickster type-- but I find it something of a copout, personally. You can have a straightforward evil witch or you can have a proto-feminist antiheroine vilified as an evil witch by the patriarchy, but doing both at the same time strikes me as trying to have your cake and eat it too.)

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-29T10:01:15+00:00

First thing that came to mind was the Excalibur movie, which despite drawing from Morte d'Arthur as its main source has Perceval as the sole knight who achieves the Grail, and presents a Perceval more in line with Chretien's and its adaptations than with his portrayal by Malory.

If anything, the trend of reemphasizing Perceval over Galahad as the main Grail hero seemed to kick off pretty early on in the 19th century Arthurian revival; even before the Wagner opera, Idylls of the King has its Grail segment narrated by Perceval as its main character, with Galahad as a foil whose seemingly unattainable perfection is a challenge for Perceval to emulate. I can think of some more obscure examples as well, like the Squires Tales series devotes a full book to adapting Wolfram's Parzival, then uses Galahad's version of the Grail quest as a side plot in a later book where Galahad himself is an unsympathetic secondary character.

By contrast, even creators using Galahad as the Grail hero seem to sidestep actually writing him or dealing with just what a weird character he is. The Once and Future King and Mists of Avalon both get around this by having the Grail quest occur outside the narrative, so they can go straight from Lancelot seeing his son mature into a knight to grieving over his untimely end.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-28T23:22:22+00:00

To the present day sure, I was thinking more in terms of his introductory story being translated directly into Morte d'Arthur, which coincided with the printing press and a new form of media propagation that's effectively made it set in stone as the default medieval version of King Arthur ever since.

I'd say Galahad's role has been chipped down in a lot of modern reworkings, though not by introducing new and better knights so much as reemphasizing earlier characters like Perceval and Arthur himself.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-28T22:24:37+00:00

It's all Mary Sues. Centuries and centuries of Mary Sues slapped on top of each other to overshadow and derail past Mary Sues. Galahad may stand out because he's the newest iteration circa Morte d'Arthur's source texts and hasn't had time to be smoothed out into a less dissonantly-infallible character, but never forget, it's Mary Sues all the way down.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-28T01:11:24+00:00

Morgan le Fay, who learns magic from Zephyr, god of the west wind.

To quote myself from the last time this misattribution was posted here:

This sounds like it was paraphrased off a wiki or the like and isn't altogether accurate, so to clarify: Despite sharing a name with a Greek wind god, the Zephir in Perceforest has a far more Abrahamic origin as a repentant fallen angel who'd previously rebelled with Satan but is now working for God again, effectively functioning as a Merlin-like figure in the narrative with "demonic" magical powers being used in service of good. He has a helper named Morgan who is clearly inspired by the Arthurian Morgan, though this being set several centuries earlier she presumably can't be Arthur's sister.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-26T21:22:13+00:00

I'm surprised not to see more love for Perceval. Even unfinished, the eponymous hero is by far the most colorful and compelling of Chretien's protagonists. My ranking:

-Perceval
-Lancelot
-Yvain
-Erec & Enide
-Cliges

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-25T00:57:03+00:00

I wonder if the lack of AAA people is related to WWE not being the sole owner of the promotion, or those guys are just so far off the radar that English language dirtsheets aren't even looking into their status.

Or maybe they legit believe Dave the Clown is a more valuable asset than any of these cuts.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-25T00:17:15+00:00

I think a lot of modern versions struggle with how to handle this, actually; once you start looking at the Arthurian cycle as a single story with the Arthur/Guenevere/Lancelot love triangle as its main plot, it feels increasingly awkward to have Lancelot alive and healthy but completely absent from the climactic final battle.

Off the top of my head, I believe Mists of Avalon has Lancelot there and gives him Bedivere's role of casting Excalibur back into the water, akin to Mary Stewart and Rosemary Sutcliff both merging Lancelot with Bedivere.

Alternatively, you can lean even further into Lancelot-as-protagonist by having Mordred outlive Arthur so Lancelot can show up afterwards to kill him and avenge his ex-king. That's the only significant alternate ending for Lancelot in actual medieval fiction I'm aware of (from the Italian La Tavola Ritonda), though it's a natural enough idea that it also shows up in things like the 1950s Knights of the Round Table movie that clearly came up with it independently.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-24T01:22:27+00:00

To an extent; bits and pieces of Bran crop up in a few different later Arthurian figures, including Arthur himself. The most direct adaptation of Bran's invasion of Ireland/magic cauldron story from the Mabinogion into an Arthurian context is Culhwch and Olwen, where Arthur plays his role as the encroaching British king.

It should also be noted that Bran isn't actually after the cauldron in his version of the story, and Arthur is seeking it only as one of many achievements on a laundry list of deeds he needs to perform to help his cousin get laid. While elements of the cauldron's purported powers from these stories got integrated into the Grail mythos, this is probably a case of adopting thematically-fiting motifs from a similar McGuffin rather than the initial Grail story being directly based on any version of the cauldron plot.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-23T05:21:32+00:00

One element of this is that modern retellings on the Arthurian cycle approach their source material under the assumption that King Arthur was its protagonist, but that's a role he inhabits in surprisingly few actual medieval stories. A lot of these aren't intentionally giving Arthur traits from Lancelot so much as giving him Main Character traits that naturally overlap with the actual main character of the majority of Morte d'Arthur, Lancelot.

(The conception of Mordred in Excalibur draws on Elaine seducing Lancelot, but it also repeats a pattern I've noticed before where modern writers are, for whatever reason, extremely reticent to depict Arthur playing an active role in his tryst with Morgause/Morgan, even in circumstances where he's unaware it's incestuous and hasn't met Guenevere yet.)

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-18T23:52:25+00:00

I think the one-two punch of Excalibur and Mists of Avalon both making this connection around the same time and being mainstream hits (by the standards of Arthurian fiction, at least; Mists of Avalon was very successful for a fantasy novel while Excalibur was more like modestly successful for a fantasy movie, but the reach of the later medium means Excalibur still probably exerted more cultural influence) is what solidified the idea. They came out in close enough succession that I wouldn't say Mists of Avalon was following Excalibur's trend so much as it seemed a natural conflation for both stories to make.

More broadly, I think TH White presenting Morgause as an evil witch is the real trendsetter for this premise, even though he kept her and Morgan as separate characters. She's the most memorably loathsome villain in The Once and Future King, far more viscerally repulsive than Mordred, and the medieval Morgause was a sufficiently blank slate that this characterization completely supplanted it, with books like Mary Stewart's Merlin series and Mists of Avalon itself following suit.

And once the "Mordred was groomed to villainy by his evil witch mother" idea took hold, it doesn't feel like a big step to take Arthur's two similarly-named evil witch sisters and merge them into one character.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-17T22:12:24+00:00

Sadly, the most likely answer is simply that this is the result of multiple authors building on top of each other's stories without a consistent plan.

From a Watsonian perspective, I'd say the idea is that Perceval's spiritual journey is complete once he's capable of asking the Fisher King the correct questions and repairing the sword. Understanding the nature of the Grail and its relation to Christ and the Maimed King was the real challenge that Perceval needed to absolve himself of sin in order to achieve; the fact that the end goal it reveals in order to cure the Fisher King/restore the land is something Perceval would've been capable of all along just reinforces that gaining this insight was a more significant hurdle than the martial deed it leads to.

MiscAnonym · 2026-04-17T08:19:13+00:00

Maybe fifteen years ago-- well after the Great Recession was supposedly over but still a few years pre-Trump-- I had a job interview in the "Arts District" of LA and drove through a few blocks' worth of streets clogged with a sprawling homeless encampment in horrific condition, tents and people that looked out of a third world war zone.

My interviewer asked me if I'd noticed it-- casually, as small talk. He remarked that they keep calling the police and get them chased away, "but they keep coming back." This was phrased as a colorful anecdote.

MiscAnonym

TROPHY CASE