10 Powerful Wrestling Promos That Never Uttered A Word
5. Darby Allin
All Elite Wrestling is built on the principle of expression.
As a result, it is always going to prove divisive, but it's so crucial in opposition to WWE's rank, imposed homogeny. AEW exists because the professional wrestler is a creative beast, and an appalling number of them have been scripted into normalised oblivion for much too long.
Darby Allin himself is emblematic of this division. Some weeks, he will betray the deep pathos that drives - or once drove - his character. Is he half-dead, numbed into electric recklessness as the result of childhood tragedy, or is he a numbskull Jackass extra who does dumb sh*t for a cheap thrill?
In other weeks, Darby will use his filmmaking background to inform the unique, captivating aspects of his character. Much like Guevara - and this must have been ideal for booker Tony Khan, when timing out those crucial pre-Revolution Dynamites - he is demonstrably capable of telling stories in mere seconds.
On the Revolution go-home show, Darby tied a bodybag reading the word 'SAMMY' to a truck, in a haunting, artistic short film conveyed to underline the grim fate that awaited his opponent in a reckoning of the throat injury he was subjected to.
A stunning use of eerie, stark imagery, Allin in some ways has reinvented what it means to promote a match.