AEW X NJPW Forbidden Door 2023: 3 Biggest Winners And 3 Biggest Losers

Forbidden Door was — for better and for worse — a night of bad taste, with some wrestlers going to extra lengths to shock and concern fans. The show featured a slew of questionable choices that seemed tailor-made to provoke wrestling fans with gentler sensibilities, making for a great night for the sickos in the Scotiabank Arena.

Take Will Ospreay’s brutal bout with Kenny Omega, for instance. Ospreay and Omega took each other to their physical limits in a bloody 40-minute affair, but towards the end of the bout, Ospreay cinched in a Crippler Crossface, the infamous finishing maneuver of Chris Benoit, a choice made even grimmer by Ospreay using the move so close to the 16th anniversary of Benoit using that very hold to end his son Daniel’s life in the horrific double murder-suicide that rocked the professional wrestling world in 2007. Ospreay seemed to relish the “You sick f***” chants the submission hold received from the crowd.

If dark callbacks to the Benoit tragedy weren’t enough, later in the night, Bryan Danielson took a moment during his main event match against Kazuchika Okada to reference his own longstanding history with concussion issues, convulsing on the ground after a hard hit, much to the concern of viewers and fans in attendance. Danielson, who plays a heel character in AEW, was thankfully playing possum, goading Okada into letting his guard down, but the moment was nonetheless another over-the-top moment of bad taste, that fans — and likely Danielson’s own wife and child — could’ve done without.

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