elderly._.enthusiast

Okay, so I'm not an Ospreay fan. His character in AEW basically boils down to "gormless dipshit". His promos are usually full of incoherent rambling. Ospreay apologists charitably defend this by saying he just says whatever's on his mind. So he'll cut a white-meat babyface promo and just suddenly announce that he fucked his wife in the crudest fashion possible that won't get bleeped on live TV. One time he cut a promo about Stephanie McMahon and Triple H fucking each other, because... I think WWE said something catty about him on Twitter?

My point is "shoots from the hip" only works when you actually hit what you're aiming for. They keep putting Ospreay in these main-event-level programs where he's doing serious promos and pre-taped segments, and he looks and acts and talks like someone who doesn't understand the assignment. Why is it a good idea to let him improvise his lines?

Mic skills aside, he's extremely dismissive and indignant with his friends and bizarrely naive in the presence of his enemies. The Death Riders (kayfabe) broke his neck, so he came back to challenge Moxley for revenge. Except he came back too early and got destroyed so badly that the Death Riders took pity on him and showed him how to rehab properly. Then Ospreay was shocked-- SHOCKED-- when the Death Riders tried to brutalize Kenny Omega the same way they did to him.

So he saved Kenny and drove the Death Riders off, and Kenny attacked him anyway just for the aggravation Ospreay put him through. He kept warning Ospreay about the Death Riders, and even though Ospreay eventually figured it out, it took him way too long to get the message, and Omega was fed up with his shit. That's kind of the inciting incident for this All In program. They're not enemies, just friends who are pissed off at each other.

The problem is that I don't see the hook for this match. They want the AEW World Championship, but that's boilerplate. They're frequently billed as two of the greatest wrestlers of all time, but in 2026 that's boilerplate too. Kazuchika Okada is in AEW, for fuck's sake. They did Omega vs. Okada in AEW a while back and it wasn't even the main event because they have such a stacked roster.

Ospreay made a name for himself in NJPW by doing flippy shit. I like flippy shit, don't get me wrong. Young Bucks vs. Lucha Bros. was one of my favorite AEW matches from the early years of the promotion. But that's kind of what I'm getting at. Ospreay came to AEW in 2023, and there were already plenty of flippy shit guys there. And I feel like flippy-shit as a style has been on the wane in the 2020's. Ospreay's whole character arc in 2026 is that the neck problems mean he can't do flippy shit as well as he used to, so he's had to adjust to a more ground-based style. Except there's a lot of striker and submission specialists in AEW too.

They hype Ospreay like he's this lovable goof who's going to have seven-star matches like he did in his 20's, but then the bell rings and I find myself noticing that he's not even the best wrestler in whatever match he's in. I'd rather see Moxley or Swerve or MJF. Or Fletcher or Okada or Takeshita. Or Knight or Bailley or Orange Cassidy. I could keep going, but what I'm trying to say is that Ospreay never really felt like an attraction. He's more of an annoyance than anything else.

I could take time to critique Kenny Omega, but honestly, I think he does a better job maintaining his credibility. He knows he can't perform on as high a level as he used to, so he picks his spots and does just enough to look dangerous in the ring. Kenny Omega vs. Kevin Knight was a great match, so I think having Omega as the defending champ at All In is not a mistake. That said, I've noticed fans seem to have difficulty figuring out who's the bad guy in the program. Ospreay is my pick by default because he's a thoughtless asshole, but then you have Omega cutting supervillain promos and literally quoting Voldemort. This may be an intentional effort to blur the lines or make Ospreay look more sympathetic, but my pity well ran dry for Ospreay a long time ago.

So part of this build has been about trying to establish Deep Lore behind the Omega/Ospreay rivalry. This sounds like a smart play, since Rock vs. Austin at 'Mania 17 had a built-in backstory from the previous years. The two headlined 'Mania 15, then Austin had to take time off for his neck, during which the Rock took over as the top guy in WWF, and now Austin has returned to reclaim his spot. I still remember this a quarter century later.

In 2026, Ospreay cut a promo on the July 15 episode of Dynamite and described their All In London match as "the real life Goku and Vegeta fighting it out." And that's just...

Okay, so his point was probably just to use a metaphor for a storied rivalry between two top fighters. Goku and Vegeta are generally depicted as the strongest major characters in Dragon Ball, so their rivalry has become sort of a pop-culture shorthand for two of the best seeing which one is better. I just watched the clip and Ospreay pointed at Omega when he said "Goku" and then at himself when he said "Vegeta", so I think that's him acknowledging Kenny as the superior of the two. Omega is the reigning champion after all.

It irks me, though, because the line implies that there's this deep, emotional core to Ospreay and Omega's history, one that resembles Goku and Vegeta's rivalry. Only... no. There isn't.

I looked up their history on Cagematch.net. Omega and Ospreay first met one-on-one at a PWG show in 2015. Then they traded the IWGP U.S. Championship in 2023. Kenny won it from Ospreay at Wrestle Kingdom 17, and then Ospreay won it back at Forbidden Door.

This kicked off Ospreay's year-long run in the Don Callis Family, a stable Don started to replace Kenny Omega after the two of them split up. So there's always been this undercurrent of a storyline between the two, even when they weren't facing each other in the same match, because Kenny Omega used to be a Don Callis stooge, and Will Ospreay was following that same path. Later, the two of them became allies against the DCF, mostly because neither one of them had anyone else to turn to, and that brings us to 2026, where they would share encouraging words in backstage segments.

For contrast, I'm going to very briefly summarize Goku and Vegeta's rivalry in Dragon Ball.

First, Goku is killed while defending the Earth from one of Vegeta's henchmen. As he dies, Goku learns that Vegeta himself will arrive on Earth one year later, and he's far stronger than the henchman Goku couldn't defeat by himself. So Goku has to train in the afterlife, and he returns from the dead just in time to meet Vegeta, who is still too powerful to beat alone. The rivalry really begins in the middle of the fight, when Goku briefly overpowers Vegeta using the Kaio-ken technique.

It doesn't last long, but Goku is able to physically humble Vegeta, which enrages him so much that he tries to destroy the Earth to avenge his pride. This leads to the classic beam struggle between the pair, which Goku wins only by pushing the Kaio-ken technique even further beyond the recommended limits.

From there, Vegeta resorted to using his Giant Ape transformation to crush Goku and win the fight. The rest of the battle involved Goku's allies fighting in his place, as he lay in a defeated heap of broken bones. But Vegeta was finally defeated, and he only escaped into space because Goku pleaded to let Vegeta go, so that they could fight again someday.

This led to a conflict on Planet Namek, where Goku expected to face Vegeta in a rematch, only to discover a new enemy, Frieza, who was even more powerful. During this adventure, Goku and Vegeta were uneasy allies against Frieza, with Vegeta discovering to his horror that Goku had surpassed him in strength. Vegeta convinced himself that he could close the gap by becoming the Legendary Super Saiyan, only to die in the effort. When he was later resurrected, he learned that Goku became the Super Saiyan instead, and defeated Frieza without him.

This led to Vegeta setting up a permanent residence on Earth, so he could study his rival and find a way to become a Super Saiyan himself. This eventually happened, but the two of them couldn't have their rematch because they had to defeat Dr. Gero's androids first. That battle culminated with the Cell Games, where Goku had to sacrifice his life to save the Earth. This time, Goku chose to remain dead, leaving Vegeta without any path to settle their feud.

Seven years later, Goku returned for one day only, which he planned to spend with his friends and family in a martial arts tournament. This reawakened Vegeta's dream of defeating Goku in battle, but their rematch was interrupted again by the threat of Majin Buu. Vegeta ended up betraying the Earth and joining the bad guys, just so he could force Goku to fight him first. The two duked it out and appeared evenly matched, until Goku finally convinced Vegeta to pause their battle long enough to deal with the Buu crisis. But Vegeta attacked Goku from behind and tried to fight Buu himself, and ended up getting killed.

Eventually, Vegeta and Goku got a second chance to face Buu, by which time Vegeta had learned that Goku hadn't been using his full strength during their rematch after all. He was super pissy about this, but Goku managed to convince him to focus on Majin Buu instead. During this final leg of the Buu conflict, Goku used his full strength against Buu, and Vegeta quietly acknowledged that Goku was the better man and always had been.

Following Buu's defeat, Goku and Vegeta remained at least cordial with one another, but they both continued to train to surpass one another. The most recent example of this was in the 2022 film Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, which features a match between Goku and Vegeta that takes place mostly off-screen. Vegeta wins, but only by a very thin margin.

Trust me, that was brief. There's only two actual Goku vs. Vegeta fights in the original Dragon Ball comic, but both characters spend much of the story fixated on their rivalry. Other opponents come and go, and often take priority, but the implication is, once that business is settled, Goku and Vegeta will fight each other again. And this is why their rivalry has become ingrained in popular culture. This isn't just two exceptionally strong characters who fought a couple of times.

And this was kind of what Austin/Rock at WrestleMania 17 was tapping into, although I doubt anyone in WWF at the time was aware of the parallel. Austin and the Rock had a rivalry over the Intercontinental title in 1997, then they fought over the world title in 1999, and then circumstances kept them apart until 2001, leaving an open question over which one was truly the ace of the promotion.

But with Ospreay vs. Omega, that dynamic just isn't there. It's just two well-regarded wrestlers having a "dream match". And there's nothing wrong with that, but AEW seems to want it to be more than that, but they haven't laid the groundwork, and it's too late to start now. This is kind of ironic, considering how much time Kenny Omega put into his storyline with Hangman Adam Page in 2020-2021.