How AEW's Numbers OBJECTIVELY Prove Its Success
They don't lie.
Last night, AEW Dynamite celebrated its one year anniversary. Well, not exactly, but the narrative patterns leading to Full Gear encouraged AEW to kayfabe the date.
It was a subjectively received show for what was projected to be an amazing, outright success. Miro continues to divide opinion with a persona more dissonant than layered; FTR Vs. Best Friends was really good with a really strange finish; Big Swole underwhelmed in a clumsy challenge of Hikaru Shida's AEW Women's Title. But elsewhere, Cody and Orange Cassidy built towards an incredibly dramatic time-limit finish, MJF and Chris Jericho once more created verbal magic loaded with narrative intrigue, and Jon Moxley retained his AEW World Title in a cracking short-form war with Lance Archer.
"Subjectively received" very much distills the reception of AEW, weirdly controversial, on the whole. For some, Dynamite has revitalised their interest in a mainstream pro wrestling product that refused to even acknowledge itself as such. It is an eclectic and high-grade in-ring product that incorporates southern-style tags (FTR), wry irony (Orange Cassidy), physically impossible lucha (Lucha Bros.), super-compelling and violent brawls (Jon Moxley), the wholesome (Jurassic Express) to the frightening (Mr. Brodie Lee), top class traditional U.S. TV-style (Cody, Chris Jericho) and, in the Elite, the absolute high-end of the modern hybrid style that has, in fact, changed the world.
But it also means something; the details-rich episodic storytelling convinced those fans to geek out - and fork out - across its first year.
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