Tuesday, April 9, 2024

#AsForDynamite: AEW Is a Young Man’s Game

Before we get started this week, I’d like to acknowledge that the last two articles in this series got way too negative in their approach to the fanbase. I am therefore trying to keep it more upbeat this week. There definitely are times when, “Fuck all these assholes. Normalize tribalism!” feels like an appropriate response to the discourse around pro-wrestling. However, our charge as West Pointers is “to live above the common level of life” and “to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong”. It therefore matters little what other people are doing. I myself have long since been called to a higher standard.



And then, too, it felt like maybe the WWE reached out to AEW fans late this past weekend when they crowned an AEW founder as their champion and then made a point to say, “Pro-wrestling is back!” 

The WWE was right to reach out. I myself got so disgusted with the nonsense over the weekend that I not only didn’t watch any of Wrestlemania, I also muted the phrase “WWE” on Twitter just to cut down on all the toxic discourse in my feed.

That really helped, by the way.

Even so, I saw a lot of WWE fans agreeing with Helwani’s sentiment. 

As a piece of marketing, it feels like maybe WWE wants to encroach on AEW’s wrestling-first niche, but that’s okay. I’m here for any company competing for fans based on the quality of their product. This past weekend’s Wrestlemania broke all kinds of records, and yet, the WWE would still -- obviously -- like to get their lapsed fans back. Regardless of whether or not they get there with this new approach, it remains ten thousand times better than the one where they try to make the AEW experience so painful that would-be fans flat give up on the product because it’s too emotionally taxing to stay engaged. 

Wrestling might be hot, but toxicity will still drive people away. 

Besides, as we said last week, WWE at its core has become a die-hard nostalgia driven product. Maybe that’s inevitable when the brand itself is 50+ years old, and Wrestlemania, which was one Hell of an interesting innovation back in the 1980s, has become a cultural event with name recognition along the lines of the Super Bowl. If that’s your legacy, then of course you’re going to lean into it.

And yet, I often find myself thinking that it’s a shame that I wasn’t a pro-wrestling fan back when Ring of Honor was in its heyday. I missed the rise of guys like Brian Danielson, the Young Bucks, Kenny Omega, and Adam Cole. We may look back on their rise fondly -- now -- but at the time, these guys were doing legitimately cutting edge stuff. Ring of Honor became the birthplace of new stars precisely because they featured young guys having epic bangers on a scale no one had ever seen. Those guys pushed the industry forward, took their act to Japan, and then, once they’d gotten big enough, four of them actually helped launch their own promotion in the United States.

That is amazing.

The thing is, wrestling remains an evolving experience. Not on the nostalgia brand, perhaps, but on the upstart, competitor brands certainly. I feel like we see this most clearly in guys like Will Osprey and Swerve Strickland, but a surprising amount of it still happens on ROH.

Between 35-year-old Athena redefining what a champion looks like at ROH or her 18-year-old protege Billie Starks doing insane injury angles to work the crowd, this is where it’s happening. It’s no wonder that 32-year-old Mercedes Moné wants to work with AEW’s TBS Champion, 22-year-old Julia Hart, and 30-year-old Willow Nightgale. 

These are the new faces. These are the folks doing new things.

Sting did AEW a favor with his run. As Darby Allin noted right before the retirement match, Sting could’ve come in and done a few Scorpion Death Drops to get a nostalgia pop. The check’s would’ve cashed. No one would have complained. Instead, Sting came in and wrestled an aggressive, modern style that pushed the limits of what we could and would do. He changed the narrative around what we ought to expect out of these kinds of runs. As a result, even the veterans like Adam Copeland and Christian Cage now have to come in and produce. We’ve seen those results in just the past few weeks.

Friends, this is exactly what you’d expect in a company that puts athleticism first. They need people who can look and move like real athletes.

They need real athletes.

And so here we are. The company is about to crown its first ever black AEW World Champion in 33-year-old Swerve Strickland. Strickland has made himself a hybrid crime boss/luchadore/music mogul. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s only one guy like that anywhere on the planet. His likely challenger at All In looks to be 30-year-old Will Osprey, who wrestles like literally no one on the planet ever has. Waiting in the wings we’ve got 28-year-old MJF, who’s so good on the mic that people continually forget how absolutely excellent he is in the ring. Max and 34-year-old Cole told one of the saddest, subtlest stories of loneliness and male friendship I’ve ever seen over this past summer. Both guys got hurt, so the payoff kind of fizzled, but this was all anyone was talking about all last year. All of this is before mentioning 31-year-olds Jay White and Darby Allin, 28-year-old Konosuke Takeshita, 33-year-old Will Hobbs, 25-year-old Kyle Fletcher, or even the Scapegoat himself, Jack Perry, aged 26.

So sure. AEW’s current champions are all veterans. Right now. There will continue to be a place for those guys going forward, too. However, as we said in the title for this piece, the reality is that AEW is a young man’s -- or young woman’s -- game.

This is who the company wants. This is who they’re building. 

This is who they’re gonna put front and center when they head to Wembley.

The company is not looking to replay yesterday’s hits. For better or worse, they are all about trying to break new ground.

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