| Jumpin said: I don’t know, I thought AEW was quite good a couple years ago. But a lot of that was because of the edge given to them by the Punk factor and MJF. The shows, admittedly, felt very duct-taped together and haphazard. At least until they started doing more traditionally structured shows like Collision (which was kinda too little, too late). Another plus for AEW’s past was that the matches were often more enjoyable than what WWE had going on. But since Triple H has taken over and Punk has joined WWE, it seems to have not only switched, but WWE has gone further up in quality than AEW ever reached on all fronts—or at least from what I’ve seen. I’ve been a big fan of Triple H’s management ever since the golden age of NXT. |
To be fair, I didn't watch AEW on a regular basis. Watched a bit when it started, and I would generally tune in for a few weeks when something big happened, like CM Punk signing, Chritian signing, Bryan signing, if something interesting was advertised (i.e. Christian vs Edge) or just sporadically when I happened to have nothing better to do on a wednesday night. So, take my opinion on programming for what it's worth.
But, TV is about having a consistent cast of chatracters and featuring them each week. And except for a few people, Jericho, Young Bucks, and Orange Cassidy, they don't have that. People kind of float in and float out. You can't really get invested in anyone new if you don't see them regularly. Since the beginning, most characters have just appeared and disappeared with little rhyme or reason. Even at its worst, WWE at least had a reasonably consistent cast of characters. The creative may have been terrible, but at least it was structurally sound.
And, there's also an assumption that everyone is already a huge wrestling fan. For instance, look at Okada. If you weren't already a fan who follows Japanese wrestling, why would you care about him? What has AEW done to make you care? Why should you care about Daniel Bryan fighting a Japanaes senior citizen? Tony Khan just kind of assumes that you follow this stuff like he does and will be as excited as he is, but even WWE is really a bit of a niche product. And AEW really doesn't do a lot of recap packages and such. I'm sure loyal fans appreciate not having to be constantly reminded of things like you are when you watch WWE. But if you're a newer fan trying to get into it, it's hard.
Whether it is/was a good product is completely subjective. But, it was never a product that could viably grow. It had a ceiling as we saw. And as people get older, get married, get other hobbies, get bored, the numbers are going to decline. That's natural, and something that happens to everything. But, when that happens, you have to have a way to draw in new viewers to replace the older ones or better yet, draw in more new viewers then you're losing. And AEW/Tony Khan doesn't know how to do that. Now that the trend is becoming too obvious to deny, he's kind of freaking out, and doing stuff that is making even the fanbase he had start to tune out.
As for the fans... I think all fanbases are toxic. Mainly that's a side effect of social media, where engagement is the name of the game. Part of the reason why I prefer things like message boards where there is no algorithm manipulating things (although trollish voices do still somehow get amplified). But, fans of super niche things do tend to take things more seriously, like ECW fans back in the day. And... at this point, there's not a whole lot of legitimate ways to argue that AEW is doing well, so the discourse is getting more or more trolly.
