10 Things Only '90s Wrestling Fans Will Understand

Be born earlier.

It's a simple but impossible trick to understand the sheer extent to which WWE has nosedived, and why certain people within wrestling media are cynical as a default. WWE used to function correctly as a wrestling promotion. It doesn't anymore. Those people won't "let things play out". They won't "give Storyline Development X a chance". They can't "be positive". They are able to draw on the bottomless reservoir of failure and apply it to everything because they lived through WWE when it wasn't the Darwin Award-winning corpse it exists as today.

Pore over certain social media sites, and you get an indication of how years of WWE conditioning has destroyed the ability of a generation to get this.

"Lots of filler on this show. Not a bad thing - they're set for SummerSlam," reads one such comment. No, this is bad. The go-home show is the big sell to convince the public to buy the big pay-per-view. You don't half-ass a sales pitch.

"RAW Underground is more entertaining than UFC" is a comment that at time of writing has received likes in the double digits. F*ck off. Watch UWF-i to get an indication of how worked shoot wrestling is supposed to work. Be born earlier.

Apparently, there was a "God promo" on RAW last night. No, there wasn't. You don't know what a "God promo" is because you were born too late.

Be born earlier.

In the late '90s, the WWF functioned as something adjacent to a meritocracy.

The WWF didn't have a Network that fostered inherent laziness. The WWF had mainstream competition, and, since this was years before they didn't have institutional brain worms, they were actually capable of recognising the boot.

"There's something repeatedly kicking me in the ass. But it's a new boot, and once that boot is broken in, it won't kick my ass no more. Because that's how it works. People are only watching AEW over NXT because it's new. That's why NXT UK, formally incorporated in 2018, is the most-watched WWE show and consistently defeats RAW, SmackDown, and NXT in viewership!"

-Triple H, speaking to investors on a quarterly conference call.

This "AEW will force WWE to get better!" myth is just a myth. It's an echo of rhetoric that WWE, through its dumbsh*t revisionist history, has arrogantly allowed themselves to believe.

Competition in the '90s informed drastic, thrilling, transformative change. Competition in the modern era has informed NXT's spiral into lamentable desperation. They're doing the same old things, only, at the expense of a story and consistent success, to the slight and temporary detriment of AEW.

Competition in the '90s gave us Stone Cold Steve Austin whaling on Mr. McMahon with a bedpan with a priceless sound effect of which the Simpsons would be proud.

Competition in the modern era is WWE counter-programming AEW with the dying mewl of EVOLVE.