Welcome to The Pipe Bomb, where we discuss the latest news and events from the wrestling world, both inside and outside the ring. This week, let’s talk about Gail Kim vs. Riho (I know I’m late on this), The Death Riders secret formula and the AEW tag team divisions.
Cutting Gail Kim some slack
In adolescence, Awesome Kong was one of my favorite performers. I connected with ODB on a spiritual plane (also her boobs) but in TNA, Awesome Kong hitting the ring meant it was time to lock in.
Poor Gail Kim, cast away from WWE, presumably because “Blonde” started to out-trend “Asian” on Youporn, dumped on her noggin over and over by Awesome Kong for years.
Good on her maintaining the wherewithal to even articulate a thought.
Professional wrestling is a brutal endeavor.
Any man or woman who can come out the other side without murdering themselves and their families deserves praise.
Gail Kim, the war veteran, is under attack for simply stating her own unique and fully fleshed out opinion, based on facts and evidence, of course.
Recently, Riho returned to AEW, challenging Mercedes Mone for the TBS Championship at All Out.
Riho, the first-ever AEW Women’s World Champion, under fire from day one, daring to be small, youthful-looking, in a wrestling ring of all places—the audacity.
A Twitter user asked Gail Kim what she thought of the discourse surrounding Asian women in wrestling, many bad faith wrestling content creators infantilizing, fetishizing and dehumanizing Riho for attention, clicks and eyes and views providing these unskilled laborers feelings or worth, meaning.
Here’s what Gail Kim said about Riho:
The only issue that I had was that he made a comment about her teeth. I will say, and I haven’t watched AEW in a very long time, but when I did watch Riho and nothing against her at all bc I am The biggest supporter of all women who wanna make it in this business, but I did feel uncomfortable watching her because the camera shots would go up her skirt and she was always dressed like a very little girl and it felt improper
I am also into very believable Wrestling. Not everyone is especially nowadays. And it was very hard for me to believe a little girl that was being portrayed of that size was fighting the women they had in that division. To put it into context, I find Io, Mia, Asuka, Kairi and Lei Ying to be more believable and I don’t feel uncomfortable watching
Gail Kim is the “biggest supporter of all women“; however, she felt uncomfortable watching Riho because “the camera shots would go up her skirt and she was always dressed like a very little girl and it felt improper.”
She later, much more days later, unprovoked, added more—this time invoking the most notorious child sex trafficker in modern American history:
It might have been Nyla (Rose), because it was very early on, and when I said she wasn’t believable in that match, it was just ‘cause I felt uncomfortable from the start, if you get my drift, in terms of — in this age of the child — you know, Jeffrey Epstein-era… I just felt really uncomfortable
Gail Kim watched a 22-year-old woman wearing a skirt, desperately searched for the remote to turn her television off, sweating, grabbing her family together to swear the demons away from their place of rest.
Gail Kim thinks it is disgusting to sexualize a young asian woman, even if I can’t find *any* of these upskirt camera shots Kim was clutching her pearls over.
She’s into “believable wrestling”. So many (non-AEW) asian women who don’t make her feel uncomfortable the way Riho does.
Anyway, here’s a shot of Gail Kim, barely dressed, a camera up her ass, in the midst of beating a woman twice her size.
Super believable.
You could make the argument Gail Kim is speaking from experience.
She understands what it feels like to be fetishized due to her ethnicity and wants to protect Riho from the hardships she had to endure as a young woman in an uncaring business that commodifies the talent’s bodies while outsiders try to mock them and jerk off at the same time.
Unfortunately, Gail Kim didn’t say any of those words.
Her problem with Riho is, she’s never watched Riho.
She has a faint memory of opening her phone one night and seeing losers type creepy things about Riho and/or concern trolls, questioning AEW’s early legitimacy, choosing to start their women’s championship division with a big trans woman and a small, young-faced non-English speaking Asian—creating something no one has seen before—inherently leading small-minded, uncreative thinkers to be shepparded by snakeoil salesman like Jim Cornette—who want to ratchet up their phobias for his own personal gain. The American Dream now.
Gail Kim has never actually sat through a 2-hour episode of Dynamite featuring Riho.
But, like everyone with a Twitter account, including myself, she just had to weigh in on a trending topic.
Except she was like, 4 years late on the trend—jumping off the top rope to shit on a performer who makes buildings erupt when she comes to the ring.
But to be honest, I do actually want to cut Gail Kim some slack.
Professional wrestling needs to unionize and create a retirement plan.
Too many old timers like Stevie Richards begging for attention and dollars, screaming on the street corners about the rapture and how AEW wrestlers need to sign with WWE so they can “learn” the business they are actively dominating. I promise you, there is nothing The Undertaker could say to Kyle Fletcher to improve his work.
Gail Kim should be allowed to say silly nonsense without us accusing her of trying to gain the favor of WWE, even though that’s obviously what she’s doing.
#UnionizeWrestling
The Death Riders Secret Recipe
The Death Riders’s birth bred contention. Nonsensical, indirect backstage promos, a feud with the statue of Edge no one asked for. They lost the plot before it began.
They would eventually developed a textured context, leading to the greatest All In main event of all time, Mox losing the belt to Adam Page in a Texas Death Match. Good times.
Tiny introcacies explain their success. Turning Marina Shaffir into a better, MMA-style Chyna (I mean early DX, not all the lame shit later), allowing her to act as no. 2 in command, often responsible for controlling the matches from outside of the ring.
Introducing Daniel Garcia into the group, a character who genuinely makes sense with them. His promo before All In about always being a loser and his promo a couple weeks back, explaining to Daddy Magic why he’s done being a loser.
Reintroducing PAC, fresh off a cycle of asparagus and spinach. Just clean eating to become Bruce Banner mid-transformation.
Love that Claudio Castagnoli is only with them on occasion, seemingly only showing up exclusively to snap a dude’s neck in a steel chair.
But within all of their introcacies lies the key to their success: clean ass daps.
Each entrance is better than the last, Death Riders are one of the biggest redemptions all year in pro wrestling.#AEWDynamite pic.twitter.com/P63llzJ4Er
— Santielagüサンティ✮ (@santielagu) October 2, 2025
AEW Dynamite and Collision episodes live, each week, from new, unique venues, gives all their shows a different vibe—each episode backdropped by a new terrain.
The Death Riders coming out from the crowd, each location different from the last, is cool as shit.
But the installation of Jon Moxley dishing out clean ass daps to Claudio and Daniel Garcia upped the stakes for me.
In a world where these characters make decisions no regular person ever would, there is something so human and relatable about just dapping up your boys. Such a simple way to indicate to the audience these guys fuuuuck with each other for real for real. And you care more when you see they care about each other. They’re not cartoons.
Now, will you allow me to put on my booker cap and plot the future of the DR?
I don’t know where the Death Riders go next.
I reckon if I were in charge, I’d have Darby Allin win the I Quit match.
Perhaps the group loses respect for Mox and desire new leadership.
Real quick, here are 3 directions they can go:
- Personal pick: This beef with Roderick Strong leads to them respecting him as one of the best wrestlers in the world and Roddy gets a monster heel run for a year. I’d even go as far as having him win the C2. Takeshita and Okada can figure their shit out in the semis; winner gets their back broken. Plus, his built-in relationship with Marina Shaffir already makes sense. Give the people (me) what they (I) want.
- Could make sense: It doesn’t need to happen this weekend but Daniel Garcia is the best stickman in the group. He could very easily lead those backstage promo segments on his own. This feels very down the road though, in no way satisfying my desire to see a radical change sooner than later.
- Best-case scenario: Kris Statlander not only joins the Death Riders but becomes the leader of the group. If Mox left the group, I’d prefer Shaffir to go along with him. You can pay off all the Wheeler Yuta shenanigans and lead right into a huge championship main event—potentially as big as last year’s with Mox and Hangman—between Statlander and Willow Nightingale. These two women are obviously destined for that big showdown. Have Stat be the one to kill off Mox—presumably with the ol’ plastic bag over the head routin—and let her be the big bad of the company for a while with PAC and Claudio behind her, murdering innocent civilians.
Let’s Talk Tag Teams
On Saturday’s Collision, Tay Malo and Anna Jay, AKA, TayJay—a name that should rhyme but does not—squashed a couple local girls. I love that Collesion puts indy wrestlers on television. Wrestling makes more sense when you acknowledge the existence of outside companies and wrestlers you don’t own. It legitimizes your sports league. Stripping CM Punk of his ROH resume or AJ Styles of his entire TNA body of work is a disservice to both the performers and the audience.
Tay Melo and Anna Jay are young, homegrown talents. AEW is clearly invested in their success.
Some of their combo moves were a little clunky, including a finisher that took way too long to load up and time out perfectlyl Anna Jay putting a woman on her back, like Mercedes doing the Monemaker, but instead of dropping her facedown, she’s dropped onto a Tay Melo raising knee strike.
A move that could so easily be mistimed and botched and ugly-looking.
They’ll work the kinks out.
Which is why I love the introduction of women’s tag team titles.
Mercedes Mone has elevated the TBS Championship to a level neither Anna Jay or Tay Melo are close to. Yet.
Now, the TBS Championship is as valuable as the Women’s World Title. You have to be able to wrestle to hold that belt.
Performers like Julia Hart and Skye Blue and Penelope Ford, can’t just beat Mercedes Mone. There is no story you could tell that would make Lady Frost going over Mercedes make any sense.
They’ve been priced out of the market.
The TBS Title is for real hoopers and women who could also be realistic world champions. Jamie Hayter, Thekla, Megan Bayne, Queen Aminata, Willow Nightingale, Athena. The best of the best.
But the women who haven’t quite reached that status still require TV time to improve, both their in-ring work as well as their connections to the audience—and they deserve their own belt to chase.
If the women’s tag team titles become a way to showcase Harley Cameron or Ruby Soho or hell, even a way to get Britt Baker back into the fold without exposing her in-ring weaknesses against a vastly improved women’s main event scene then we can finally sort this division out without having to do lazy 8 or 10-women tag matches to stuff everyone into one singular time slot.
Wait real quick if you’re reading this and you agree, let me know which tier you believe Thunder Rosa belongs in when she returns. Email me. I can’t tell if I’m the only one who thinks she’s good enough to be world champ again. Let. Me. Know. Yo.
As far as the men’s tag team division, AEW appears to be resetting the table. Both The Acclaimed and The Jurrasic Express have reformed, albeit one reluctantly.
Brodido always felt like placeholders—both deserving of gold around their waist—both beloved in Mexico, proud partners of AEW—both amazing performers.
Brody King and Bandido came in early, left late, hustled, earned their accolades—but they were never poised for a long tag team championship reign.
If we’re turning the clock back to the OG tag team division, I’m actually down for Swerve Strickland to return with Keith Lee soon.
And I have no idea if Keith Lee will wrestle again.
I don’t know if he’s at home waiting for a Tony Khan text or if he’s hooked up to a ventilator fighting for his life—but let’s get the band back together.
What else is Swerve doing anyway?
If you want to see him lose a lame, overly chummy, not-that-interesting championship match against Adam Page or get jumped weekly by the Don Callis family—I’m sure you’ll get your wish.
But let’s turn this tag team division up.
FTR and The Young Bucks are still putting on the best matches of their lives.
Big Bill and Bryan Keith are the quiet MVPs—used to heat guys up —ike their feud with the Gates of Agony or whatever they’re about to get into with the Bang Bang Gang.
Big Bill and Bryan Keith are there, week after week, spinning plates—keeping every tag team fresh and on television. I pray they are eventually rewarded for their hard work.
Give me The Acclaimed vs. Jurassic Express vs. Swerve in Our Glory vs. JetSpeed or I’ll start tweeting like Gail Kim.
Thanks for reading.
Let me know what wrestling stories you want to write about next. Shoot me an email at Deadseriousmailbag@gmail.com. Let’s yap.
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