10 Things That Will NEVER Happen In AEW
Cody Rhodes has confirmed that we'll never see a General Manager in All Elite Wrestling. What else?
A good Women's division! HAHAHAHA! Right?
Right? Get it?
It's not actively bad; the progress is just slow. Too slow for some, but slow for a reason: many of the women are inexperienced by the standards of U.S. wrestling television, the pressurised stage isn't the ideal to place to develop, and the conditions brought on by the pandemic make it difficult (if not impossible) to get the all-important reps in. This has created a paradox: the women are shunted into the penultimate quarter hour, which limits their profile, but they aren't over nor experienced enough to break the pattern. But the pattern exists because they are too inexperienced.
The upcoming third hour represents a platform on which to get those reps, and the recent hiring of Serena Deeb can - in addition to the offscreen training conducted by Dustin Rhodes - hasten the development of the greener reaches of the roster. The creative is in place. Dr. Britt Baker's arc has generated much entertainment, and subsequently, numbers. It's time for a bit more conviction, which the big introduction of Jade Cargill hints towards.
By the end of 2021, with the hopeful reintroduction of the much-missed Riho and Yuka Sakazaki, AEW will have a strong Women's division. This will happen.
What won't happen is...
10. Humiliating Talent Onscreen
These things that WWE do are not normal or productive.
Amid Team Taz fever, your writer fired up the ECW archives on the WWE Network over the weekend. Awesomeness bred awesomeness, literally in this case: the old nostalgic glow led one to the unreal Mike Awesome Vs. Masato Tanaka series, which ECW used to pivot away from Taz's ECW World Title reign. He was WWF-bound in September 1999. ECW needed to get somebody over, and definitively, at his expense. He was the first man eliminated from the Three Way Dance at Anarchy Rulz. He ate two finishers in as many minutes. But he wasn't buried; after leaving the ring, he stood on the entrance ramp, humbled, and gestured for Awesome and Tanaka to bring the fight. He wanted the two men to beat the f*ck out of each other to bring honour to that which he had relinquished. ECW allowed its top star, who left at a very inopportune time, to go out like a man.
It's really only WWE that humiliates its talent onscreen because there is zero worth to the practise. Particularly when those talents are going nowhere, and, in the unfathomable case of Zack Ryder in 2012, had just formed a connection with crowds.
When a certain ex-NXT talent spoiled a Dynamite segment, he wasn't brought back and set upon by some stiff f*cker on Dark. He wasn't mocked up in some self-serving skit.
Knowing that unnecessary cruelty is a pointless heel move, AEW just let him fade into view, and moved on like grown men.