The Secret Reason Why AEW Can Beat WWE
In WWE, where WrestleMania headliner Daniel Bryan can lose in 4:10 to Cesaro in February, and #1 contender Drew McIntyre can lose two matches on one show (!) three weeks away from his shot at WrestleMania Backlash, wins and losses don't matter. In AEW, as Hangman Page discovered to quiet devastation as part of his long redemption song, they do. Just one shattering loss removed him from the World Title picture ahead of Double Or Nothing, and in a competitive landscape where wins and losses matter, PAC and Orange Cassidy overtook him in the rankings.
The creative expression, undiluted in-ring range, openness to work in tandem with other promotions to deliver dream matches all the more awesome for being so unexpected: AEW is the alternative, even if it's not the alternative you pretended to want.
The events of Blood & Guts brought into focus that, in this numbing content era, all of this can mean something again. That AEW for the first time won the night on cable represented a victory for long-term storytelling over last-minute match graphics. The MJF Vs. Chris Jericho rivalry did not begin even in August 2020. It all started in November 2019, when they shared a laugh at Cody's expense and articulated their similarities. In the subsequent months, further, indirect parallels were drawn between both men before the sprawling game of chess mutated into a claret-soaked stable war between November 2020 and May 2021. Drawn in by months of investment, more Americans tuned into the promise of perfectly escalated violence than they did any other cable television broadcast. The scope of storytelling here was not a one-off.
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