AEW's Secret Weapon (You Won't Want To Watch)
There's no grim, inevitable march to a foregone conclusion, and even when the direction is clear, as it was on the glorious stretch to Full Gear 2021, Khan has mastered the real magic of pro wrestling booking. The trick isn't to outwit or swerve the audience; they should be convinced to actually want something just as much as they expect it to happen. The Hangman Page arc really was the zenith of AEW's booking model. The idea of a loss had become so important, so detrimental to the pursuit of capturing a championship, that Tony Khan effectively worked the audience, through a defeat to Brian Cage and the Dark Order's fall to the Elite, that the fairly obvious grand plan wasn't to be realised. Khan made you think that two years meant nothing; Kenny Omega was simply too invincible.
The epic production behind the latter match - "You don't need a hat to be a cowboy" - drove this feeling to an unbearable extent. The worst anti-"AEWsexual" Twitter accounts got so worked that they thought Page was WWE-bound. The real metric - PPV buys - exploded. Full Gear drew the second-biggest number in AEW history, bettered only by All Out '21 and its promise of CM Punk's in-ring comeback and the potential transformation of the industry. That's how much the loss means. Mostly.
AEW has a Dark problem.
What AEW is doing is clearly working, but too often, the winner barely registers as a winner because Khan has developed a booking habit that can be most generously described as "cheeky". "Lazy", "pointless", and "mystifying" are also adequate - and probably more accurate - descriptors.
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