AEW Vs NXT - The New Wrestling War

"WAR IS HELL!", so proclaimed the title of the 1961 Burt Topper classic and most likely every poor f*cker that actually experienced a real one first hand, but WWE have beaten the Raw/Nitro 1990s narrative so hard into the heads of younger fans over the last two decades that it's likely they'll all want to live through the heavenly creative output of another one given half the chance.

And that's what this wrestling war is - half the chance. Tony Khan's got enough billions in the bank to bankroll a major organisation - and AEW are already feeling the benefits of that compared to just about every other startup since 2001 - but money can't buy him the level of love (and hate) WWE have accrued since Vince McMahon bulldozed the North American territorial landscape and legitimately changed the wrestling world.

If it's a war All Elite are after, it's perhaps their first strategic flaw thus far - the worst thing about McMahon's boiling hot bullsh*t about wanting to help himself but not hurt the other guy is that he believes it. He doesn't draw the line others do between one and the other - he gleefully gobbles up rivals, chews up and spits out talent and chokes on occasional competitors because he sees them all as nothing more than fillings in his giant steak wrap, not because he acknowledges them as bonafide business-based opposition.

AEW's willingness to steer into the narrative comes from the capitalistic roots at the very core of an industry they're pretending to want to change. The same realisation that dawned on Eric Bischoff in 1995 when he started giving taped results away on live Nitros and having his stars literally throw Vince McMahon's belts in a bin. Raw's slumping ratings are of no interest to Cody and Co, though. They want to steal the hearts of the NXT audience - WWE's barely-beating heart. WWE's own core.

Can't we all just get along?

No, can we f*ck. Cody Rhodes and Vince McMahon and Chris Jericho and Triple H have been born and bred respectively in this business, and they know exactly how to extract every last penny from all of our pockets. Divide and rule will protect the men that are already millionaires, but - as with the wasteland that was WWE's post-Attitude Era slump - only in the aftermath will the potential casualties become apparent.