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Believe it or not, one of the hottest WWE stars of the modern era is soon going to take the world outside WWE by storm as well. After walking away from WWE at the height of his popularity, Dean Ambrose is back to being Jon Moxley.
Of course, unless you've been living under a rock, you've already seen the video that he posted on his social media account by now. My colleague Nishant Jayaram even wrote a piece about the same.
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As cool as the video is on first glance, there is a lot of subtext to it as well. I shall elaborate upon the things that I caught in the video in this article, and I'd be glad to know your thoughts too.
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Dean Ambrose is a very creative man and one can rest assured that his message to the world, independent of WWE script writers, will be quite profound.
#5 WWE probably felt like prison to him
If you notice, the video begins in prison with a warden watching over him. My colleague Pratyay Ghosh remarked that this could be a metaphor for what he felt like in WWE, because he is frustrated and counting the days in the video. Jon Moxley pounds on the walls again and again until it gives away at long last.
And then the sprint begins. If the prison is a metaphor, Dean Ambrose is running like the wind away from WWE as far as his legs will allow him. This is jailbreak in the truest sense of the word, for a creative soul who wasn't really allowed to express himself in the best manner possible.
Isn't it great that Ambrose communicated so much through a video? I can only imagine how creative he will be when he re-debuts the Jon Moxley character again.
#4 He left the hounds behind
Did you guys get a chance to watch The Shield's final chapter that aired on the WWE Network? As The Shield took their final bow, there were chants of 'please don't go' from the WWE Universe. Seth Rollins would joke at that point and address the crowd- 'You think we didn't already try that?'
As he is running away from prison, we see that he runs away from a hound as well, guarding the prison yard. While we may believe that he was proud to be a part of The Shield, here is Ambrose letting us know that he is leaving that part of his persona behind. He is heading to a new phase of his life, down a creative new path at last.
Is this a shot at The Shield, his own brothers in arms? Maybe not directly, but you can see that he's not a fan of the gimmick.
#3 He's training hard for a big return
Of course, the obvious thing we've learned from the video is that he's back in the gym putting in the work for a big return. But did you realize that he's also revealed the big day of his return too?
On the 1st of May, Dean Ambrose releases a video which shows two numbers on a dice, which are two and five. Put them together and on the 25th of May, you have Double or Nothing, All Elite Wrestling's big inaugural event (thanks to Ryan Satin for putting the clues together).
Because Dean Ambrose believes in symbolism, as the last two pages have shown us, it is abundantly clear that he's also telling us the date of his big return. Dean Ambrose may just become the new Lex Luger of the new wrestling promotion mega wars.
Luger famously jumped ship to WCW, on the first WCW Nitro episode, to kickstart the Monday Night Wars.
#2 He's embracing the hardcore persona
We've always heard about Dean Ambrose being The Lunatic Fringe but did we honestly see him display that side of his persona back when he was in WWE? I've often said in all of my pieces that I felt that Dean Ambrose isn't half the lunatic that Nikki Cross is. But in the video, we finally see him embrace the hardcore element.
Remember the passing of the torch from Mick Foley to Ambrose, when he handed the latter a barbed wire bat? We had assumed it would lead to Ambrose actually bringing the hardcore aspect back to PG programming. But over time, Dean Ambrose just became another character in the roster.
But now Dean Ambrose will be embracing his independent roots and his CZW origin, to create a much more lunatic character, at long last. This is the unhinged Ambrose you've always longed to see in WWE.
#1 He's finally going to be active on social media
One of the main reasons why there has been so much buzz around Dean Ambrose's departure is because of what a private person the man is. He's only close to a handful of people in the WWE locker room, like Roman Reigns and R-Truth, and was hardly active on social media before this video.
His wife Renee Young posted the following Tweet about Ambrose not using social media which made waves last year:
However, the very fact that he will no longer be in WWE and will not have the WWE social media machine to support him anymore pretty much means that he will now utilize Twitter to reach out and connect with his fans henceforth. His radio silence on the social media front may be a thing of the past.
Do you think there's any aspect of the video I missed out?
