10 Things We Learned Attending AEW Dynasty 2025 Live

8. A Forgiving Philly Crowd

AEW Dynasty 2025 Arena
Scott Carlson/WhatCulture

Philadelphia sports crowds are not known for being kind and patient. They expect the athletes they’re watching to perform at peak levels at all times. Anything less will result in instantaneous boos.

So, when Mercedes Moné and Julia Hart had a sloppy match with several clunky sequences, the natural expectation would have been that fans would have rained down jeers and just turned on the contest mercilessly. Shockingly, aside from one “You f***ed up!” chant at Moné for a botched arm drag (which Mercedes played off with her CEO dance to a huge pop), the crowd was incredibly forgiving.

In fact, fans continued to back Hart and try to rally her to victory rather than turning on her. It probably helped that Moné played up her heelish tendencies to the crowd whenever she had an opportunity.

The finish – which saw Julia repeatedly try to escape the Statement Maker only for Mercedes to hook in the seatbelt for the pin – fell a bit flat, with fans rooting for Hart to escape the submission hold and then got pinned by a hold Moné never really has used in AEW. Still, fans were pretty hot for this match despite the flaws.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.