8 Problems Nobody Wants To Admit About AEW
1. It's Nearly Impossible To Be A Heel
AEW clearly has characters who are portrayed as the villains of the promotion, yet it’s pretty much impossible for any AEW talent to be fully embraced as a heel.
An excellent example of this comes from this week’s edition of AEW Dynamite. After screwing over Cody at Full Gear, MJF came out to the ring to a chorus of boos on Dynamite. Great, that’s the response a heel should be looking for, right? Of course it is. Yet while those initial boos were ferocious, the crowd was soon laughing along with MJF’s lines and cheering on his interaction with Chris Jericho.
Likewise, Jericho himself is the company’s biggest bad guy, yet he also finds himself being cheered and chanted for each and every week – regardless of what heinous acts he partakes in.
It’s not necessarily the wrestlers’ faults, per se, but the AEW audience makes it an unenvious task to try and get genuine, sustained heat. By this point in time, a certain section of wrestling fans want to make it clear that they appreciate how good you are at being bad, and so thus end up applauding your villainy and character work… which in turn defeats the object of even being a heel in the first place.