WWE Vs AEW: The War Is OVER!
Between October-December 2019, AEW Dynamite - the first mainstream alternative to WWE in 18 years - was a strange mix of contrasting ideas and ideologies for how television wrestling could and should be presented. The company couldn't yet calculate exactly what fans it was attracting, but very quickly it became apparent how many were picking it over a WWE show when the market leader deployed NXT to go head-to-head in a futile effort to force viewers to choose.
Though All Elite Wrestling didn't launch because of differing visions and philosophies to WWE, WWE's differing visions and philosophies had a lot to do with AEW's launch.
WWE in the last days of Vince McMahon was routinely risible trash thanks to creative so utterly rotten that even the great matches and ultra-talented roster couldn't recover the weekly acclaim. Raws, SmackDown, PLEs; the whole thing was being swallowed whole by McMahon's delusional autocracy. What a reckless waste of time and money much of the 2010s was to all of us who watched it week-to-week. WrestleMania retained its Super Bowl quality, but even the beloved Royal Rumble was in the toilet by 2022. The first one post-pandemic should have been a celebration of 60 wrestlers trying to punch their ticket to the big dance, but rotten intra-match booking and listless reactions to the fields exposed how bored even the most hardcore of the base was. It had gone beyond simply waving away the comparison as AEW being a wrestling show and WWE being Sports Entertainment, not least because the latter was neither of either.
July 2022 onwards feels like a crackling black-and-white CRT product was upgraded to 8K Ultra HD, and Triple H's year-or-so in the job has been a creative and commercial success story few could have predicted by the end of his NXT tenure. In this unexpected second attempt, he is perhaps only just arriving at the mid-point of his peak as a creative head. Tony Khan feels like he's nearing the end of his, though a rebound is only ever a hot angle away. There's nothing if not hope amongst AEW fans, thanks to a brand loyalty WWE themselves must surely envy.
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