10 Problems EVERY Wrestling Company Has In Common
Have your friends heard of your favourite wrestler?
Wrestling fandom is basically AEW Vs. WWE now, and it sucks.
Your writer is drawn into it far too often, and so consider this an attempt to move away from the comparisons that, to be fair, AEW and WWE invite by taking digs at - and going to head-to-head war with - the competition.
Your company excuses sexual predators.
Well, your company excuses sexual predators, too!
Your company gave Matt Hardy head trauma!
Yeah, well, your company was thick as sh*t enough to make Dexter Lumis Ricochet, and they nearly shattered the poor prick's ankle!
Your company just pushes ex-WWE guys!
Your company is PWG with no soul and a big budget!
Your company won't book women's wrestling!
Your company can't book!
And on and on and on it goes, an endless dance that intensifies whenever there's a third dive in two matches on one show, or a show on the other show. There is no tribalism here - there's just a good and a bad company - but neither are perfect.
Outright promoting or failing to condemn predators is also a massive, overwhelmingly putrid issue, but libel laws exist, and that issue is not being conflated here.
10. The Entrance Music Pop
AEW has all but abandoned a very cool early feature of Dynamite.
Those early Elite Vs. Inner Circle brawls were so magnetic because they cast such an immersive spell; everything was so elegantly arranged to account for what the players involved had done earlier in the night, and indeed their headspace in general; MJF very gently teased turning on Cody, Hangman Page, distancing himself from the Elite, stayed on the margins.
Those melees didn't stop when the TV cameras did, and the players emerged to no entrance music because there wasn't a crowd to pop. There was a war to wage.
Regrettably, this is no longer the case. AEW is too similar to WWE in the way these angles are now framed.
This doesn't happen all the time, but it happens too often. It's a very dated '90s thing, the entrance music pop, and it worked back then because why, amid fierce competition, would you squander a single shattering of that iconic glass?
All this weird residual echo accomplishes now - especially with no crowds of significant number - is the reveal of the artifice behind the TV production, thus stretching all-important suspension of disbelief.
Jon Moxley isn't even anywhere near the sound guy, not that it's any better to imagine the wrestlers cueing them up backstage.