10 Iconic Wrestling Storylines Summed Up In A Single Frame
4. FTR Cut The Team In Half
FTR's storyline introduction is so goddamn brilliant, organic, everything - a just perfect meeting of happenstance and tremendous booking.
They are beer-drinking southern boys. They are, in an inspired storyline development, compatible with Hangman Page. They have sensed this, and sensed also that they can, much like they do with the ring, exploit the budding friendship to cut his team with Kenny Omega in half. AEW used the beer glass as a visual metaphor for the philosophical difference between Page and the Bucks in January and February, and have since used it, in a sumptuous parallel, to tether FTR and Page together.
In the meantime, FTR have a stylistic beef with the Young Bucks stemming back years - held back in AEW by a sense of professional respect - that bleeds so naturally, via the ongoing tension within the Elite, into the most organic and intricate triangle feud ever booked.
This is so deft. It is exquisite episodic booking.
On June 24, Kenny Omega gently chastised Hangman Page for having no drinking buddies. On July 15, FTR joined Page at the bar with a sinister motivation Page received, because he's more F*ck The Bucks than F*ck The Revival, in earnest.
FTR are cutting the Elite in half in a tremendous psychological extension of their entire M.O. as professional wrestlers.
One day, Kenny Omega and Hangman Page are going to smash into each other with a V-Trigger and Buckshot lariat, and it will mark a new, transcendent chapter of this thing we are obsessed with.