The Point

Another grainy image comes into hazy half-focus, this time showing AWOL’s garage. At least, we can presume that this is the room we’re seeing, but the identification is made much more difficult due to the fact that everything is currently upside down, including the Big Crazy Bastard himself who is perched on the hood of his car, shaking his head in disappointment. It is clear that he has simply unplugged the webcam from his study, carried it to the garage workbench, and has for some reason chosen to knock it over onto its side.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” he says to the assembled masses watching him through their computer and television screens, “You really have no idea. I tried to convince myself that you were just spinning the facts, trying to make yourself come out clean in the final analysis and work your way around the volume of facts that are stacked against your actually managing to defeat me. I thought, ‘He’s got to be at least moderately intelligent. He has all these people snowed, after all. He convinced Douglas to give him all that power in the company. He's got a whole list of title belts he's won. Christian Savior can’t really be as dense as he unwittingly makes himself out to be in his promos, can he?’”

He sighs, apparently still oblivious to his currently topsy-turvy orientation. “But then I saw this last effort of yours, Christian. And yes, in this case I will use the word ‘effort,’ because unlike you I can tell when an opponent has actually put some time and thought into his work. For instance, the parody of Cruze’s affliction that you did was actually amusing. Maybe it’s just the lowered expectations I have for your promos, but I honestly thought you were going to try to sell yourself as having your own new crippling affliction, and I was honestly wondering ‘Why doesn’t this doctor know how to pronounce “subdermal hematoma?’ But then you spun it, pulled the curtain away, and showed that you were just mocking our former co-owner. I was honestly amused. I may even have laughed. Try not to faint when I say it, but that part of the promo was a well thought out, well executed example of what parodies are supposed to be.

“It probably would have made more sense if you actually did it against Cruze, of course, but you know, baby steps.

“However, in this case, the fact that part of your promo was actually intelligent only serves to reinforce and ultimately paint in a tragic light the sad, pathetic effort you’ve seen fit to inflict upon the viewing audience with the rest of that tripe. It’s sad because I finally had to stop denying the truth to myself and admit that, at the end of the day, this is in fact the best you can do. Tiny, mocking, belittling insults about me are all you can really come up with. A cacophony of half-thought out attempts at mockery, an attempt at building character drama that even you couldn’t get through with a straight face, your girlfriend wandering in and giving you a high school football coach pep talk, and an attempt to try and reinvent yourself by, what, changing your wardrobe? This is the best that you, the might Christian Savior, once the most feared man in this company, can throw against me?”

“Oh, yes, and of course we wouldn’t want to forget the copious insults thrown out against MY promo style. Let’s put aside for a moment that a man who thinks calling Johnny Kingdom “Kingdumb” is clever and who believes that starting his personal talk-show by quoting, verbatim, Serling’s monologue from the opening sequence of the Twilight Zone is creative somehow feels he’s qualified to make any sort of criticism about another person’s choice of promotional expression. Those sorts of arguments would work with logical people, which we’ve established you clearly are not. However, you seem to be operating under a dangerous delusion Savior: that I somehow believe I have something to prove to you. Here’s the truth: I don’t write them to entertain you. I don’t write them to keep your interest. The sole and only purpose of my promotional videos is to mock you. You are, without a doubt, the most ridiculous specimen of a human being I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across in my career in professional wrestling. You embody a sort of dangerous combination of sociopathy and dissociative disorder that leaves you completely unaware of what is going on in reality, operating under the mistaken belief that somehow the rules of the way the world works apply to everyone else but somehow, just by being you, you’re exempt and no sort of consequences will ever come for you in response to your actions. No matter what happens, no matter how many matches you lose, no matter how many times the world title that you claim not to care about slips through your grasping, desperate fingers, somehow you’re still the best there is at what you do in this business and anyone would be a fool to think otherwise."

AWOL reaches forward, twisting the lens of the webcam and taking it further out of focus. “You say that my promos feature me talking to a brick wall? Congratulations, champ, you can be taught, because as I’ve said on a number of different occasions that’s basically what promoing against you is like. There’s no give and take with you, no back and forth. There is simply the real world and Savior world, and the few places where these two alternate versions of reality intersect are twisted so thoroughly by you as to be unusable. You're honestly going to complain that in my promo all I could talk about was things that happened on the last episode of Riot! and the things you put in your promo last week? News flash, jackass: that’s all I have to work with. You would have to give me something somewhere before an hour prior to the first promotional video deadline in order for me to talk about anything else. What do you expect me to do? Follow you on Twitter? That would be riveting! ‘@CSavior says ‘Eating a ham sandwich now, is very tasty.’ Clearly this shows how much better I am than him.’ That’d get the viewers to tune in!

“I don’t really get the point of your complaint, anyways. It’s not like you’re actually listening, is it? Anything I say that makes a point is immediately ignored unless you can find some way to twist it out of context so that it favors you. I’ve been doing this a long time, as you’re fond of pointing out, and I’ve literally never seen anything like it. It would be truly remarkable if it wasn’t so goddamned aggravating. It’s like living in a constant Catch-22. You won’t accept that I’m better than you in the ring because I can’t get a clean win over you, while at the same time you ensure that I never get the opportunity for a clean win by having your associates interfere in all our matches. You point out that you were fighting me tired from fighting a match earlier in the night, but you conveniently leave out the fact that, by the time that sensational clusterfuck of a match was finished, it was essentially a 3 on 1.5 handicap match slanted in your favor. Your team intentionally disqualifies themselves on last week’s Riot!, and you hold that up as some kind of achievement. Like somehow, despite the fact that you lost the match intentionally, ensuring that I never actually had the chance to put you away, this gives you any kind of right to rub it in my face that I couldn’t overcome the odds to pin you. As ironic as the statement truly is, you hold up losing by disqualification, cheating in other words, as a 'moral' victory.

"No, Savior, I’m sorry. I can’t go with you on this one. Wins matter, and you lost. The fact that it was intentional doesn't change that fact. You were fighting me in a match where I was first saddled with a partner whose brain literally exploded mid-contest and was quickly replaced by another person who blindsided me and walked out of the ring, and yet, despite all of this, you STILL couldn’t beat me. The deck wasn't just stacked in your favor, you literally had the whole fucking deck in your hands and you still came away with an L. And somehow, someway, you want to portray that as a victory for the Society? You’re either more desperate than even I could have imagined, or you’re clinically insane. I can’t make up my mind which."

He shakes his head in exasperation. “But the circular logic doesn’t end there, folks. No, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how now, suddenly, the reason for the chronic late arrival of Savior’s promotional videos is actually because he puts so much more time and effort into his work than I do. Oh, clearly, that must be the case. It’s certainly not because it’s easier to lie about someone and defend your logical fallacies when you know ahead of time that there’s no way for your opponent to craft a rebuttal. Why didn’t that occur to me before? Oh, wait, perhaps it’s because, on the last edition of Riot!, Savior’s final promotional video spent the entirety of its length discussing the things that Cruze and I had said in our previous promos…earlier that day. So tell me, Christian, did part of the “time and effort” that went into that promo consist of buying a Ouija board or a crystal ball to see into the future? Because otherwise I have a hard time believing that you weren’t literally sitting in your office or hotel room or evil underground lair, wherever it is you spend your free time, watching the feed on IWC.com and waiting for Cruze and I to promo so you could throw together a response at the last minute which you knew we wouldn't be able to respond to. All of which, of course, has no bearing upon anything since, as you’ve pointed out, winners are determined in the ring. In the final summation, the only thing the IWC airwaves are good for is winning popularity contests. I just point it out because, one assumes, the IWC marketing department would prefer it if your promos could maybe run for more than ten minutes prior to Riot!'s scheduled start time every week.”

AWOL leans forward, intentionally screwing up the blocking by moving half of his face out of the shot. “And that’s just the point that you’re failing to grasp, here, Savior. I don’t give a shit about popularity contests. I don’t care if fans cheer for me or boo. I promo because it's my job to promo, not because I think that somehow it'll allow me to win friends and influence people. The fans will cheer me when I’m in the ring with you anyways whether I promo or not, and they’ll cheer all the louder the more savagely I brutalize you. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t nice to have their support when you’ve got it, but ultimately who they chose to rally behind isn’t my concern, and it never has been. I would turn on them tomorrow if it meant advancing my career, and I would laugh at the boos right in their fat, stupid faces. I don’t care how many t-shirts I sell or how many votes I get for Superstar of the Year. I care about one thing: victory. I am here to win, and winning is what I’ve been doing since I came back to this company, like it or not. Despite your insistence that I somehow need to spend more time focusing on the match, of the two of us, I’m the one who comes down night after night to wrestle while you, Savior, are busy running around the arena dressed up in Halloween costumes or kidnapping IWC officials. You’re the one who is ditching your suit and including your middle name and trying to pretend like, somehow, this makes you no longer the man who has thus far failed to dislodge me from his path back to the world title. You’re the one spending your promo time ranting about my promo style, and you’re the one reenacting general hospital in yours, while I’m content to sit here and just tell you straight to your face that I’m better than you in every aspect of being a wrestler and a human being, and I’m going to beat you on Riot! to prove it. I neither want nor need help. I made that very clear when I told Cruze to stay out of my business and walked out to face you and Porno Lad alone on the last show. I don’t need to have one half of the ownership in my back-pocket. In case you haven’t noticed, Johnny’s not exactly been sprinting out to my aid any of these previous weeks as it is, and I wasn’t exactly rushing to his defense when your masterstroke was falling to take away his title last week either, so your notion that somehow I’m riding his coat tails is once again proven to be patently false. I don’t need a personal referee. I don’t need a stable. All I need is to walk down to that ring each and every night, look you straight in your wormy-little eyes, and slap you in the face repeatedly until someday you’re forced to admit that, no matter how much it may bruise your ego, I’m just better than you.

“You want to get on my case for putting together uninteresting promos? You may want to listen closely the next time you watch one. If you really focus, you may hear a slight whistling sound in the air, as if something had just flown over your head. What is it? It’s the point, Christian Savior, and that whistling is the sound of you missing it again. My promos against you are intentionally uninteresting. I make them that way to mock you for pointing it out, because I know it aggravates you, and because, frankly, I don’t consider you worth the effort to put together anything better. If I write War and Peace or hire Industrial Light and Magic to do the effects for an action promo, you’ll still ignore it and cherrypick the parts you like the best to mock in your own half-baked response, won't you? I don’t need a script to make you look like a fool. You do that well enough on your own. I can literally grab any device, anything that can record my voice and/or image, stand in front of it, point out how much of a jackass you are, and then go about the rest of my day merrily disinterested in anything you say or do with the knowledge that, ultimately, the intelligent IWC fans (both of them) can see who among us is shooting straight with them and who is putting reality through the ringer every promo just to try and make themselves sound like they’re still relevant.”

AWOL smiles as he reaches forward and drapes a cloth over the camera, blocking out the picture entirely. “So yes, Savior, my promos do not have a clever plotline. There are no actors here who will fail to read their lines properly. I’m not going to drag my personal life in front of the camera for you to see and deride, and I’m not going to hang some office staffer up by his ankles in front of the camera just to prove how tough I am. Putting on a different set of clothing? Coming up with a new name for your grand plan after Project: Shatterpoint hit a big, crazy snag on the last Riot!? Harping about how you’ve reinvented yourself in just one week’s time? Here’s a tip, Savior: if you’re trying to convince people that you’re not desperately trying to curb the downturn your career has taken, completely redefining your entire character on a whim isn’t the best way to go about it. Of course, other than your outfit choice and your insistence on repeating that ridiculous middle name, I’ve yet to see anything out of Savior 2.0 that would lead me to believe he is anything besides the conniving weasel we all know and hate, but I digress. None of those things matter. Wins matter, and despite your efforts to color them to the contrary, I have more of them against you than you have against me.

“Somewhere soon, I have to believe that even you will have to acknowledge the reality of your situation. Your house of cards is falling apart, Savior. You’ve made a mistake when you think I need to go on the offensive and resort to your level of backstage chicanery to beat you. I just have to keep on beating you to beat you, and the world of the IWC is starting to take notice. What few allies you have that you aren’t tying to the roof and pretending to split open with an axe are, soon enough, going to start realizing the fact that despite your big talk and despite your dismissal of me, you don’t have what it takes to get rid of me. You’re already starting to bicker with the talking penis. Robin Brooks is more interested in making Hurse’s life hell than doing you any favors. While the Alpha Generation, the Empire, and the MOUSA don’t exactly get along, the one thing we can all agree on is the fact that we’re sick to death of you and would like nothing better than to be rid of the Five Star Waste of Space once and for all. The walls are closing in on all sides, Savior, and bit by bit your world is getting smaller while mine gets bigger. After I beat you and that other guy they’re sticking into the match with us, whoever he is, it’s on to take back the IWC title from Zero and, unlike your boy PL, I have enough self-respect to keep what I’ve earned for myself rather than just hand it over to my stable-leader like a loyal dog. And the best part? You’ll be there for that moment too from my understanding, moaning and gnashing your teeth and wondering why, oh god why, can’t anyone but you see how incredibly terrible and uninteresting I am and how much better of a champion you would make than me. But it won’t matter, Savior, because the time for games has past.

“This is the IWC now, and there is simply no room for you in it any longer.”

The promo ends, though the only indication of this is the fact that the soon-to-be-champ is no longer speaking.