Are wrestling fans too smarky now7/6/2023 Astroturfers rallying their diehard fanbase every week to keep the hate train going. The tribalism is there because AEW keeps stoking the flames everyday without fail. A lot has gone on since then that isn't "just the way we've always been." Saying that social media has only exposed the way people have always been is only telling at best half the story. There really wasn't any sense of "brand loyalty" or a belief that the promotion one person liked would put another promotion out of business because it wasn't doing things that that person personally liked. That they have more information, better information, and a better understanding of how things work. Social media ignited this desire for pro wrestling marks to try to prove to other marks that they aren't marks. The arguments about pro wrestling in the 80s and early 90s started and stopped with "you know this isn't real, right?" The closest thing to all of this ratings minutiae was anecdotal bar talk that one promotion sold more tickets at the local regional arena. Social media and this sort of faceless and placeless communication exposed things that already existed sure, but it also made it much, much worse. All of whom have lost some of their brightest talent to the new money loudmouth who screeches up and down the street in his convertible. If people wanted to support the real underdogs in the wrestling business, they’d support MLW, Impact and NWA and the like. Don’t get me wrong, WWE aren’t underdogs either - far from it. They’re just new money, doing what new money always does. Remember the absolutely absurd essays to praise the build up to FTR v the Bucks?ĪEW are not the underdogs here. Oh and all the while getting viewership numbers that TNA, who very much were underdogs and had to fight and claw for everything, would have jumped out the window if that was the numbers they got on Spike.ĪEW have done a good job at putting on great matches, but their booking is constantly proven to be hotshots and false starts while their fans defend both as some sort of grand plan. Those wrestlers then hired their friends in a move just as blatant as anything Hogan ever pulled with his gang of cronies and now their fans are running victory laps led by someone who should not be acting like any responsible company owner does because “their” show narrowly defeated the last half hour of a show that wasn’t even on the same network as it regularly is in a time slow that it doesn’t normally air in. Tony Khan is the son of a billionaire, who has been given a football team to run into the ground, an NFL team which was a laughing stock, who was given a blank cheque by his dad and a prime time cable show with no track record of success to launch his fantasy booking company, hired the top free agents and made them EVP’s with no track record of their success at anything other than being wrestlers. What I find hilarious is this constant narrative being driven that AEW is an underdog against the evil conglomerate out to crush them.
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