Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Nerfect
WWE production is too glossy and the direction is terrible. The direction in AEW is often pretty bad — lots of tech flubs — and the commentary is awful, but not as stilted as WWE. Neither company really hits it out of the park. WWE’s video packages are amazing though.
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This is the current industry on the whole. Both "major" places are doing majorly wrong shit in two divirgent directions.
AEW has burned through a full decade worth of angles, debuts, matches, and "big moments" in their barely 3 years of existence because there is no constraint or control, while WWE has gone so far up their own ass, that they are a wrestling company that
doesn't even want to be a wrestling company resulting in a lot of boring, predictable shit and nostalgia acts because they forgot how to work talent up the card. AEW pretends everyone knows everything going on in the entire wrestling world "because social media" instead of following the axiom of "every show is someone's first time"... while WWE pretends the wrestling world outside of their own current product - which often even includes their own goddamn history - doesn't exist.
I personally wish there were greater equilibrium. Or at the very least, a stable place where that can exist.
Bad News Gertner NXT was a smarky money pit*
*(
I fucked up and somehow erased the quote. I just cut and paste rather than go back and re-format it.)
Even though that comment was supposed to be some inflaming hot take, he's kinda right. The problem, though, is that was supposed to be. That's how a
service works. It was looking like it was going to subsudize itself by running its own touring, but then it didn't. Another issue for another thread.
They were doing it right. But then, they proceeded to fuck up nearly every call-up from Bo Dallas onward. People who got called up oftent got fucked with or minimized or gimmick completely changed. Leo Kreuger was a threatening madman... can't have that... let's make him fake Russel Brand who leads a parade of furries and cosplayers to the ring for a couple of months until Vince gets sick of his own idea. Asuka was a world beater who chainsawed through bitches Goldberg style in handicap matches, but then could barely handle a woman who was about to be fired from the main roster. Let's take masks off all the luchadors, but then put masks on peple everyone has seen before! Meanwhile, people who got negative over like Baron Corbin were figured in. He still sucks, all these years later, just not nearly as much. They've had more supposed "failures" than successes, but there come a point where you have to realize that maybe it isn't the process itself that failed, but WWE moving goalposts and sometimes even outright changing the sport midgame without telling any of the players.
NXT is similar to the idea of the RAW/Smackdown brand split in that if you're not going to operate the function what it's for, why even have it? The end result was supposed to be this factory of ready-made superstars, but then fuck with the formula on whatever got them over instead of continuing to use that. I can train somebody to do my desk job almost perfectly, but if my boss then decides to take that person and stick them in the kitchen, that trainee shouldn't then be told they're a shitty employee for being a bad cook. That wasn't what they were trained in and not what they expected.
There are tons of people waiting around to see exactly how they fuck Rex Steiner up outise of the stupid name, because it's been a thing for so long that it is expected that they'll drop the ball on him. It is viewed as more an inevitablity than it should even ever be on paper. And when that day comes, all the excuses will fly in about how he must have done or said something bad, or his dad or uncle did or said something bad, instead of the simpler, but more heartbreaking possibility of WWE not knowing what the fuck they're doing anymore in the way similar to a SquareEnix being
surprised at their successes with classic turn based RPGs in spite of BOTH companies the name is comprised of building a nearly 20 year pre-merger reputation on exactly that genre fairly exclusively.