7 Worst Possible Fates In AEW
6. Participate In An Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch
John Moxley's run as a babyface in the first few years of AEW was the stuff of legend. His bitter feud with the 'Le Champion' era of Chris Jericho was superb, and the follow-up rivalry with Kenny Omega was even better. At a time when Omega was being seen on weekly television for the first time (and after a fairly lackluster few months in that role), 'The Best Bout Machine' desperately required somebody to showcase his immense talents with. Moxley did that and then some.
After Kenny defeated Mox for the AEW Championship on the Winter Is Coming 2020 episode of Dynamite, smashing the champion in the head with a microphone and aligning himself with Don Callis to send his heel turn into overdrive, the feud needed something colossal to escalate things to the extreme. That would be the Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch at AEW Revolution in March 2021.
The match's reputation for being an intense and violent construction speaks for itself, and the "barbed wire" and "deathmatch" parts of the equation were actually executed brilliantly, but then there's the whole "exploding" part. With Kenny Omega emerging victorious, the end of the match was billed as if the ring was going to explode like Nakatomi Plaza at the end of Die Hard. The reality was a wet fart of an ending, with the "explosion" looking like a faulty box of fireworks in your dodgy uncle's backyard. That AEW has never used this stipulation for a match again tells its own story.