It's Official: The Modern Era Of Pro Wrestling Is DEAD
That might scan as hyperbolic, but the AEW business model functions to make everything else feel lesser-than, by accident or design. Apart from women's wrestling. Other people can have that.
Magic and plain nice when it happens - the Sting run is pure working magic, Eddie Kingston got to wrestle Jun Akiyama - when it goes wrong, and Dynamite enters a lull period and the product freezes over, what you're left with is scores of wrestlers with the ability to headline a promotion, like Konosuke Takeshita, doing next to absolutely nothing because, with so many other wrestlers waiting in line, it is inconvenient for him to win too many matches.
In its greedy pursuit of becoming the preeminent custodian of all professional wrestling, AEW became the only hope - and is now trending in a WWE-adjacent direction.
That is "WWE-adjacent", to be absolutely clear. The idea that AEW has become WWE is a bit overblown - neither Triple H nor Vince McMahon would promote a Texas Death match like Swerve Strickland Vs. Hangman Page in a million years - but it isn't without merit. It's not merely that AEW is doing "WWE" things, like soundtracked skits and ultra-broad caricatures that would not reasonably exist in a real world. It's a fed-up Tony Khan going off on the critics at a press scrum. It's AEW, with the worst logic of the dumbest 2000s promoters, replacing a World champion who is too injured to compete in a big main event with a wrestler who is even more injured than he is.
It's AEW knowing full well that the knives are out, and ploughing ahead with romance angles anyway. It's AEW, the plot lost, drawing comparisons to the Black Scorpion and then thinking, after the laughter subsides, to add a hack laughing effect complete with modulated voice to the presentation of the 'Devil'.
What? That is scary. That is the ultimate evidence that the finger is no longer on the pulse. How can you flex your Mid-South knowledge and do Ole Anderson Voice after many have already pointed out that that was the only thing missing from it all?
It's the creeping, unshakeable feeling that it's all going wrong. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes, using an analogy, a previously competent and successful tactician can lead a football team to ruin with no shape nor identity, leading the terraces to shout "You don't know what you're doing!"
Does Tony Khan know what he's doing anymore?
CONT'D...(3 of 5)