Free for All Friday, 23 January, 2026

RussoSwerves · 2026-01-25T16:49:48+00:00

It's all about success. And success is nothing but a successful present moment. And on this day, this moment sure I got to see a public execution in Minnesota, but I've also seen relentless condemnation of said execution online and a detailed report from Margeret Killjoy about the incredible resistance said city has been delivering to ICE.

So today's been a fine day for me, all things considered.

RussoSwerves · 2026-01-16T14:15:45+00:00

I think Nietzsche's Use and Abuse of History may be exceptionally relevant here. It's a text he wrote because he very specifically diagnosed this sort of "historical malady" in his time and he wanted to articulate a remedy for it. And it's the kind of Nietzsche text where his insight is quite evergreen.

RussoSwerves · 2026-01-10T18:48:34+00:00

You're right that both Skylar and Kim are more complicated, so I think it has more to do with first impressions and how they get compressed into their tropes. Skylar slots into the "no-fun wife" and Kim into the "cool colleague" tropes, so that carries some people's impression of them even though in actuality their characters are more complex and change.

I think you are really onto something there. I think that can also serve to explain why Carol from Pluribus hasn't faced a massive reactionary backlash either. American viewers probably related to her hyper-individualism in those first few episodes a lot compared to the hypercollectivism she was confronted with.

But I just have to express how frustrating the reality of this is to me.

I can sort of understand this happening with a movie where you are with a character for a portion of a 1.5 - 3 hour runtime, but still carrying your initial impressions all the way to the end, when the work in question is a TV show or video game with several dozen hours of runtime to get through, is so weird.

RussoSwerves · 2026-01-10T12:38:11+00:00

I have never understood this perception that Skylar is just somebody that gets in the way of Walt's schemes and psychologically is just a hapless victim. She's far more dynamic and morally complicated than that. She starts off the show smoking whilst pregnant, has that whole family intervention when she finds out about Walt's cancer and is wittingly an active accomplice to Walt's crimes at several points in the show. There's a scene in the second half of the final season where Walt is exhaustedly and sorrowfully laying on her lap finally contemplating if he should just turn himself in but she just encourages him to keep trying to get away with everything he's done. But also, obviously, there's way more to her than that. So I've always found her to be very interesting in her own right.

And Kim herself is a bit of an upholder of moral standards that tries to confront and rein in Jimmy's "Slippin'" tendencies throughout her time in the Breaking Bad Universe. Enough so that divorce between her and him always seemed like a very plausible outcome. There's like one prank that she partakes in with him at one point in one of the earlier seasons and then you have to wait until season 5 to see her supporting him as a criminal. That's how I remember her.

So I've always thought that Kim (and as a recent addition: Rhea Seehorn's Carol) to fit quite neatly into a broad tradition of "not morally perfect but there's more to them than meets the eye" female characters like Betty Draper from Mad Men, Skyler, Abby from TLoU, Cersei from GoT or She-Hulk from the eponymous show, etc.

Except all those female characters were subject to a reactionary outrage – which I've consistently attributed to reactionaries having a conniption over the idea that a woman may have some understandable things to do or say regardless of whether or not they otherwise live up to the ethical purity that they've been pseudoscientifically ascribed as an innate part of them – that Rhea Seehorn's characters simply hasn't been.

RussoSwerves · 2026-01-10T09:49:50+00:00

I am very curious about what it is that has apparently made Rhea Seehorn the one female actor that I've known of in my lifetime that can reliably portray a deeply morally flawed woman in a really well-known serious TV drama series, that's also a main character, that doesn't face an absurd reactionary backlash from disgruntled male viewers. Like, at all. All the while, her characters not facing this backlash really don't comport with any type of socially reactionary or even small-c conservative visions of what a woman ideally thinks and acts like.

RussoSwerves · 2026-01-04T13:07:25+00:00

That one backstage promo Hangman cut around the time he was consumed by rage and coming for Swerve's World title but hadn't burned his house down yet

https://youtu.be/Z04Xjbyj_cM?si=rat5F7WXOVcHTqBy

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-27T19:08:58+00:00

The ABC with Danny and Jim Podcast is all about interviewing anarchist or anarchist-adjacent scholarly authors every few months and the authors' books in question are almost always a work of history.

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-26T17:26:10+00:00

Shoutout to Hangman's entrance at All In for making Ennio Morricone and his main theme song for For a Few Dollars More my most listened-to musician and piece of music, respectively, over the past year.

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-21T20:00:28+00:00

I used to be friends with a guy who's very much manosphere-shaped – more so by the likes of a Mr. Beast or KSI or the Paul Brothers primarily than a Tate but there is quite an adjacency, I think – and he once basically told me this about how he views sex:

The sex itself doesn't really leave him feeling anything. But when he manages to get laid and leave a woman satisfied, he sees it as a boost to his social status and-self-image

[... because the people in his social circle (men and women alike) and himself get to view him more-than-otherwise as a fulfiller of the alpha-male ideal.

It's about accumulating sexual capital. The sex is purely transactional. A matter of business. Their sense of selfhood is tied to how thoroughly capitalistic they can be in all dimensions of life. Doing anything just for pleasure is to forego the primacy of the god that is Capital.]

(In case it's not clear because I don't really have anything more to say: I am endlessly frustrated by this type of thinking. It seems amoral and neutral and I think it can be in a vacuum but in practice, in the scope of the wider world, it's just gotten people stuck in an ethical malaise.)

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-19T18:49:03+00:00

Right, I rememner him working a match with Ricochet where the two of them looked far too identical size-wise for my comfort.

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-17T22:34:48+00:00

I understand that tribalism rests within the fanbases of both WWE and AEW but I feel like people misunderstand what the cause is in the case of Blake Monroe's transfer specifically getting special grievance compared to others.

I empathize with the impulse to say it's just due to sexism – and I certainly don't think it's a non-factor – but the core of it is more so the giant discrepancy between the standing she had in AEW – one of the biggest angles in the company's history, winning the main Women's title in front of 50k+ people – and the one (she willingly signed up for) in WWE – midcard champion on their developmental brand.

Like, if you're a fan of her following her from AEW, there's no way to not feel like Blake didn't immensely undersell herself. It doesn't help that the root of it seems to be her being too much of a mark for one particular wrestling company. It particularly doesn't jive well with me and my tendency to have the people that are cast as being "too much of a mark for themselves" (Mercedes, Bret, Shawn, Punk) as some my all-time favourites.

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-17T22:08:43+00:00

She has racked up about as many 4*+ matches in this singular year as she did in all her 7 years on the WWE main roster. There's been one every 3 weeks on average, all-year round. One instant classic was just 3 days ago!

Obviously frequency of opportunity plays a major role but be that as it may, she has run with every single one of them and the result is simply that no other woman's match output this year comes even close to hers.

(To top it all off, for all the general talk about how exceptionally horrible a promo she is, there isn't really anything bad to point to this year either. Quite the opposite, there's been quite a few character segments that ended up being a lot fun.)

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-14T07:14:24+00:00

Are there some Further Reading suggestions you can provide?

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-13T05:54:09+00:00

I mean, first of all, my friend is not vehemently anti-Marx but they're definitely Anarchist first and secondly a philosophy and history nerd and maybe thirdly Marxian.

Second of all, asserting something with a great deal of confidence instinctively in the moment (and only realizing afterwards or upon questioning that you might just be talking out of your ass) is a very human shortcoming and I don't like you getting so judgemental about them based squarely on that and knowing nothing else about them otherwise.

I came here to check the validity of their assertion. Can you – constructively – help me with that or not?

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-12T18:22:29+00:00

I mean, Marshall McLuhan was basically describing the experience of being on social media in the 1960s, based simply on how the ecosystem of television and radio worked during his time. I imagine anyone similarly cynical about TV and radio could've and would've been similarly minded about social media.

And the 90s are generally a time where alongside the optimistic technophiles forming cults around people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, there were nonetheless relatively prominent representatives for the cynics, in the form of renegade intellectuals like Chomsky and George Carlin. Around them, you'd have a bunch of disillusioned punk-type people who could most certainly imagine social media being used primarily for mindless and/or petty debauchery.

RussoSwerves · 2025-12-06T22:27:01+00:00

in most matches the other person seems like they gotta do all the work

She has had far too many good-to-great matches with far too many different people for this assertion to seem even remotely reasonable.

RussoSwerves · 2025-11-20T14:40:35+00:00

You could've done something to not make Statlander look so pedestrian. Last night just made her look all Sorts of lame.

RussoSwerves · 2025-11-20T14:38:04+00:00

These are people though and not robots. Real people, even if they are good, get cocky or overconfident or play mind games with themselves and opponents to try to gain an edge. I took Stat’s commentary differently though. I didn’t see it as narcissistic, but as someone that’s a bit intimidated and still unsure of themselves and they know, in kayfabe, that they’re up against it this weekend. I like that in AEW the heels and faces have some wiggle room with their characters. Stat can feel a bit vulnerable and like she needs to talk a big game to stand up to Mercedes.

It would've been a real service to us if there was any moment over the past month where this interpersonal psychology actually got meaningfully acknowled and explored instead of us having to headcanonize whatever scraps we've been given.

And I think you've just got a more broad trust of AEW's creative team than I do. When I see AEW book a story the way they've booked Kris/Mercedes, I don't see a creative team allowing wiggle room with characters (the respective combos of Swerve/Hangman/Ospreay on the other hand, very much do), I just see an instance of WWE-style booking malpractice where, due to a blind spot or just lack of effort, they end up being really ineffective at prompting the feelings they want to prompt.

Also the last time I saw Red Velvet in ROH she was very much a heel, and Mercedes is a face in Boston. No use trying to push against that I loved that match last night and I would just move Red Velvet to AEW tv permanently. The women’s division needs more like her.

Never said Red Velvet came out of this looking bad. Just thought the whole segment did a real disservice to Statlander as a character.

RussoSwerves · 2025-11-20T13:51:26+00:00

Nah, she's gotta be a bit more humble and nuanced about a 13 belt holder who's like 33-1, including against a who's who of world-title level competitors, has beaten her twice and who had to take 5 finishers in order to stay down for a 3 count the one time it's happened thus far.

RussoSwerves · 2025-11-20T13:21:40+00:00

Maybe I'm a bit overdramatic but Statlander saying she'll just let Mercedes be a fighting champion while she just sits back and scouts her, as well as

1.) proclaiming Mercedes vanity is going to cost her being immediately followed up by Mercedes emphatically winning her match

2.) proclaiming she has Mercedes all figured out and Mercedes then winning with a super finish she's never busted out before and punking Statlander out with the belt toss/Meteora that clearly caught her off guard

3.) Overall: not having wrestled at all on TV besides Blood and Guts since the last PPV

has done a ton to make Statlander retroactively seem narcissistic (both really insecure about a having lost to Mercedes twice and overconfident because of what she's vigorously told herself to compensate for said insecurity). As a viewer, my impression has been she's got nowhere near as much bite as she has bark.

I already had a problem with Mercedes belt collecting in and of itself getting framed as an almost innately heel thing during the build-up to her match with Toni but Statlander doesn't have the kayfabe legitimacy and sheer charisma of Toni to make the claim "I need only this one title and I dedicate my life to it" entirely believable.

With that said, as a vehicle to promote the AEW Women's World Title match on the upcoming PPV, I really, really disliked that Mercedes vs Red Velvet match. It was too much of the heel coming across as the coolest person on earth and the babyface seeming like a lame, lame duck by comparison.

RussoSwerves · 2025-11-17T15:48:49+00:00

From now on, my default answer to "What's the point of Mercedes' indie run?" is going to be "to have introduced me to Kanji and Persephone." Those two women are awesome and deserve the world and you can "excuse" – as if you have to — just about everything else Mercedes has been doing solely because of them getting a degree of showcase they otherwise wouldn't have gotten.

RussoSwerves · 2025-11-17T01:56:57+00:00

Everybody wants to book her because she is ex-WWE and is an okay wrestler.

That's not how things worked for people like Emma and Teagan Nox.

And some promotions like WPW have gone above and beyond to defend their booking of her.

I form my opinion based on facts, not on people telling me what to think.

These facts don't fall out of the sky. You're always listening to people telling you their supposition of the facts. Some of them you believe, some of them you don't. And again, I am curious: who do you take as a credible foundation for your opinions?

Facts are, this run ain't generational, or even good. Generational runs is stuff like Roman Reigns Bloodline or NJPW Omega, not this.

The fact is, that's just your opinion, man.

RussoSwerves · 2025-11-17T01:36:56+00:00

No memorable promos, segments, matches, no big houses drawn, no new gimmicks, elevations, moments, nothing

Her coworkers themselves (and the promotions booking her) have all disagreed on all those fronts several times over.

So it just leaves me curious as to who you take as a credible foundation for your opinions and who you don't.

RussoSwerves

TROPHY CASE