Nov 7, 2021

Is Wrestling still relevant?

 With WWE going PG and writing going down the toilet, is wrestling still relevant? Before people mention AEW or Impact, hear me out.

Impact died unceremoniously, because it bit a lot more than it could chew. Being a recycling center for former WWE Talent.

AEW it's a decent alternative to the WWE, but it still has a couple of issues that worry me:

- with Vince dumping a lot of talent this past year, I'm worried that they'll fall for the Trap that McMahon has been setting up: clogging up the AEW roster with WWE Has-beens. 
While AEW has mostly been able to juggle the balancing act of homegrown Talent versus former WWE Superstars, the possibility of them pulling a WCW or TNA (whose dark eras curiously involved one Eric Bischoff) 

-the constant potshots at WWE worry me as well. While it's not like AEW is going all tsundere about WWE the amount of potshots taken is noticeable enough that even casual fans say: "dude let it go!" AEW is delivering a more entertaining show than WWE. There's no need to mention the dying giant. It breaks the entertainment when they take potshots at or whine about WWE.

So to answer the question I made:
I guess I could say that it is losing relevance mostly due to management, but there's another factor at play that I haven't touched:
The end of Kayfabe and the mystique of Rasslin' as a sport.

Vince has been trying to recapture the Federation years with the PG era, but the missing Kayfabe is what ruins it for him.
Back then, ring rivals would never be
that chummy in public. This means that
The pic where fierce rivals are hanging out would've been a lot more shocking!
Nowadays it's Tuesday.
With the knowledge of the behind the scens stuff, the technical stuff and all the information available on the internet, there is no room for The Kayfabe. It's kinda hard to have your gimmick as a nightmarish (formerly) masked demigod who tortures souls on the ring for sustenance, when you're also Mayor Jacobs of Knox County Tennessee.

Regression might be what's making Wrestling irrelevant. With Vince trying to recapture the 80s in a modern landscape, while AEW is trying to recapture the 90s and early 00s.

To me, it feels like the end of Kayfabe and the rise of the exposure of what's behind the curtain is the biggest culprit. Add the incompetence of WWE writing/management and their inability of delivering PG entertainment good enough for the people older than 6. Add the demise of the competition for WWE to the mix and you can see why Wrestling is becoming irrelevant. AEW's playing a dangerous game that could either yield great results or force them to become as irrelevant as TNA is now.

But I'm like Jon Snow


No comments:

Post a Comment