12 Things You Didn't Know Tony Khan BANNED In AEW
11. Selling That Is Too Realistic
Well, there you have it, fans of 1980s wrestling who can't actually recall how phoney wrestling looked like in the 1980s: they don't sell in AEW because it's outright banned. It actually is, in a way.
Bryan Danielson is a manipulative scoundrel, which is another way of saying that he is a genius pro wrestler. AEW was perfect for him; the man literally told Vince McMahon in 2021 that he needed to go to AEW because he wanted to bleed, which he couldn't do in WWE. Danielson was hugely respected, well-paid, and had even orbited the WWE creative team. The inner sanctum was his, if he wanted to join it. He instead wanted to run the razor across his forehead. He also wanted to make anxious wrestling fans believe that he would have to retire, again, in some of his key AEW matches.
Before he did the bit one too many times, revealing where he hid the card, Danielson was fond of feigning a potential concussion by adopting a "fencing" gesture. At times, he would also convulse, as if experiencing a seizure, knowing that attentive wrestling fans remembered this as a symptom of the head issues that removed three years from his career.
The likely problem is that this sort of thing is too serious to work. If the planned finish involved a catastrophic head injury, but something very serious in fact had happened, it would be impossible for Danielson or anybody else to communicate this effectively.
This is another 2023 rule that was either abandoned, or a misunderstanding in the first place: Danielson enjoyed torturing his fans by working a serious injury at Dynasty 2024.