The Problem With AEW That Nobody Wants To Talk About
AEW Dynamite has a creeping, nagging problem. And it has nothing to do with factions...
The discourse swung fairly dramatically from "Young Bucks melodrama descends into parody amid ratings crisis" to "Young Bucks draw second-highest Dynamite rating with all-time great TV match" over the last fortnight.
Matt Jackson, wearing a f*cking chandelier on his head, last week entered a fabulous full heel performance by parodying that for which he was criticised in an overblown, sh*t-eating sequence of a fire-up babyface spot. It's not so much that he listened to the criticism, as AEW tends to do to shape the product. He seemed to scream in the ears of those fans who didn't watch the product closely and patiently enough to recall that, more often than not, everything is OK in the end.
The brain rot fostered by WWE is a significant problem because so often, such a development is received through the lens of the monopoly's suffocating modern history and not a well thought-out wrestling promotion with a pristine record of peaking its various plot threads at the precipice of each and every pay-per-view, no matter how well or otherwise the show itself pays everything off. The market leader's modern sh*t-show of a record is so profound that, despite said record, AEW is so often analysed in the same tones as it, and not, for example, a prestige drama. Functionally, AEW occupies a middle ground. It is produced like WWE, in that it is a weekly endeavour, but exists, not unlike Game of Thrones, within a sprawling, intricate shared universe, the destination at the end of which is sometimes - in the case of Hangman Page's pioneering character arc - years and years away.
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