As often happens around an AEW PPV some members of the wrestling 'press' blurted out their hot takes about wrestling and specifically about the level of blood and violence. It's fine not to like blood in wrestling, everybody likes different things, but often they spout off with an ignorance of the history of wrestling beyond what WWE has written it to be for the past twenty years. Which is fine for just a viewer of wrestling to feel, I don't need everybody to know the lineage of wrestling back to when it started, but if you're writing about wrestling you can't respond to tweets about nobody knows who Abdullah the Butcher is when he wrestled on WCW ppvs and at some point was in every wrestling territory that existed. But more than that it's the idea that blood can't add anything to a match.
I'm a proponent of blood in wrestling and think it always makes every match more visceral when it happens, but I understand why people want to limit it to big matches. Sometimes in AEW the blowoff match happens on tv when the whole feud has been on their youtube shows so it seems like a nothing match like when Dustin Rhodes and QT Marshall took on Butcher and Blade in a bunkhouse brawl. For the most part if you want to avoid bloody matches in AEW it's easy to tell when it's going to happen. Any hardcore gimmick match is going to have some blood and any Moxley match as well.
For me the biggest benefit is emphasizing the story of an underdog trying to overcome the bigger or more experienced wrestler. They're already at a disadvantage and now they've got one more thing working against them. It's a great visual indicator of their stamina being drained by the length of the match and them fighting against the loss of blood and energy.
Another factor is it makes the violence seem more real and reflects all the other combat sports. At a certain point I know if you're taking elbows to the face you're going to get busted open because it happens in MMA when somebody is being elbowed. This especially extends to any match with hardcore elements. When you smash a chair into somebody's face or send them face first into a ringpost there's a good chance skin would yield to the metal surface. Obviously wrestling involves a suspension of disbelief, but at a certain point blood would just happen, it's my main problem with cage matches and especially wargames in WWE.
And lastly, and most subjectively, it looks cool as hell. Behind Hogan slamming Andre the most iconic moment in wrestling is Stone Cold bleeding while in a sharpshooter from Bret Hart refusing to tap out. Nia Jax accidentally breaking Becky Lynch's nose and her bleeding while she continued fighting in the ring and into the stands made her the biggest star WWE had and that was accidental. And not just in matches, cutting promos after bleeding in a match was done well by Ric Flair after his Wrestlemania match with Savage, and probably other times and especially by Moxley leading up to the Revolution PPV.
As for the specifics on this AEW show the build to Moxley vs. Hangman had left no doubt that it was going to be a bloody affair with barbedwire used throughout. And to be honest until Moxley bladed the second time there wasn't that much blood throughout this match as there is in many other deathmatches and AEW is much smarter about barbed wire tables and doesn't put so much on the table that it takes minutes to cut a guy out of the barbed wire to continue the match, although the chair had enough barbed wire on it to rip out a bunch of Hangman's hair.
In the main event both Danielson and MJF bled and MJF cut quite a gusher on himself after a flying headbutt from Danielson. MJF definitely bled a lot in the final quarter of the match, but as much or even more than the previous match it really added to the toll that an hour long wrestling match takes on somebody. MJF's cardio was already being questioned and was a big aspect of the story of the match so him losing blood at this point just added to it. The final minute when he's bleeding in a single leg crab from Danielson shows him standing strong in the face of Danielson's overwhelming cardio and technical ability.
In summary blood is great in wrestling. It may not be for everybody, but it's for me and that's one of the things I appreciate the most about AEW. If you don't like blood, you know it's going to happen in AEW so just don't watch it and don't complain about seeing it on their ppvs. And you can complain about it as a wrestling journalist if you don't like it, but making ahistorical arguments that forget there was wrestling before WWE banned blood is a ridiculous way to make your argument.
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