Hmm, I kinda hoping this is my one and only post on this subject. We'll see.
My thoughts on the tribe war, and own personal history with AEW fans.
I've been in the IWC for more than 20 years now. And throughout those 20 years, most of the content on IWC has been us taking jabs at WWE in good fun. And, for a period of time, TNA. That's kinda what the IWC has always been about to me: being critical, being negative, making fun of, doing this all between friends. WWE and TNA in particular have always generally deserved the criticism from the point of view of fans like us. That last part is important: the internet has always attracted certain types of fans, the ones like us. We have our opinions on how stuff should go, or how we would like for them to be. It's not always the stuff that draws the most; actually, if there's been one constant in the IWC that every time something the IWC likes is tried, the ratings go down. And stuff the IWC hates, like John Cena, are always proven ratings draws. More on this later.
My point being that in my 20 years in the IWC, I've never had to fight off ravenous zombies when I've been negative on the WWE or TNA. It's been the standard. That's what you come to the IWC to do. Especially as a Finnish person, our culture is such that if we have nothing negative to say, we say nothing. If we say nothing, we probably liked it. IWC is where you come to voice your opinion, and usually when you have something to say, it's negative. And there's nothing wrong with that.
So, I dropped out of wrestling years prior to last summer when I came back. I still followed some wrestling pages on Facebook and stuff. And I came across a post about AEW Fyter Fest. Maybe this was 2019. I knew that AEW was a thing, I knew that Jericho and Cody were there. But I wasn't following wrestling, so I hadn't checked them out because I didn't care. But I did think, cool, a new wrestling promotion with money backing it up, I hope this turns out well. It's nothing but a positive.
But I did leave a comment, just casually mentioning that "Fyter Fest" sounds pretty dumb. And I still think it does. It sounds like a 7 year old comes up with a PPV name for his EWR save. I wasn't shitting on the company, I just left a lighthearted comment about how they may want to tighten up their event naming game. And thought that was the end of it. Maybe I'd get a few likes, a few laughter emojis.
This was not the case, though, as I would get notification after notification after notification for comments telling me to go back to sucking on Vince's nutsack. How does it feel having Vince's cock so far down your throat. Dude, please just kill yourself. You should die. You are the reason wrestling is almost dead.
They just kept on coming and coming.
And I was like, wow, this is indeed a fanbase. And I lived through the glory years of RoH. Those fans could also get pretty aggressive, but it was never like that - but I was an RoH fan back in the day, I even have a T-shirt and all the DVDs from 2002 up to 2009, so I'm aware that my experience here is obstructed.
I thought, well, maybe that was just a one time thing. But it did cause me to pay attention to this. And even though I wasn't following wrestling, I did keep up with the social media, and I started paying attention to AEW fans. They would fling that stuff to everybody. Every single time I saw completely innocent criticism of anything AEW, those people would be told to go die, basically.
And this was so weird to me because I've been in the IWC for so long, and the main thing we do is bitch. We humans have a natural tendency to voice our opinions about stuff we disagree with. There's nothing weird about that.
What really started driving me nuts was this narrative that "oh, both sides are just as bad".
No. No, no, no, no. That is a damn lie. And since I'm not passionate about either company at all currently, I feel like I have the ability to be an objective observer. There is no emotion here, no attachment to either company.
I've never seen anyone telling someone to go commit suicide if they didn't like an episode of RAW. Hell, when people are critical of WWE, everyone just agrees lol. "Yea, bro that's so dumb". It's all in good fun. People keep talking about these WWE diehards, but I don't see them, personally. I don't see WWE having the white knights that AEW does. The main purpose of the IWC has always been to shit on WWE, and there's nothing wrong with that. People indeed have the natural habit of being critical. And for a lot of us, being couch critics is the main reason to keep watching wrestling. The critiquing itself is the main drive, moreso than the actual television show. Without the IWC, I would have quit on wrestling entirely decades ago.
Shitting on WWE is the norm. And no one is told to go kill themselves.
You do have tension these days between WWE fans and AEW fans - or rather, non-AEW fans and AEW fans, WWE doesn't really have fans online like AEW does, just people who follow WWE and maybe agree with WWE's general philosophy more than AEW's - but the difference that no one ever talks about is that it's the non-AEW fans on defense. This is key. Two parties shouting at each other are not the same, it's extremely relevant to know who started it. Just because someone is pushed and provoked to join the shouting doesn't mean he's as bad as the person instigating it in the first place.
And I see the instigation coming from AEW's side. Some people are just tired of being called less than for enjoying a particular form of professional wrestling. So they retaliate. It's unfortunate, but completely understandable. It's like "Okay, you guys started this, you got cocky, you called us idiots for liking what you call objectively bad wrestling, so fine, we'll give it to you, and we'll point out how what you don't like doesn't draw ratings or money just to prove you wrong". Is it childish? Of course it is, all of this is. But I can see where it's coming from.
And going back to my earlier point about what draws and what doesn't, I do have a theory that a lot of AEW hardcore fandom isn't so much about liking AEW as it is hating WWE. For years, people were bitter because Vince wouldn't push their favorites, Vince wouldn't do this, and he wouldn't do that. Now they finally have AEW, which is about pure fan service to the hardcore internet fan.
It is absolutely PARAMOUNT that AEW succeeds, outdraws WWE, puts WWE out of business, reigns supreme on top of the wrestling business. Because it will prove Vince wrong. It will finally settle this decades-long rivalry between Vince and the internet fans. If the opposite happens, and AEW is just a good little secondary company, it will prove that Vince was right all along in his philosophy. And that is the absolute worst outcome. There is so much ego attached to this whole thing from the hardcore fans' side.
This is why AEW hardcores engage in these extreme mental gymnastics justifying all bad markers as actually being positive because, again, if AEW fails then Vince was right. If AEW fails, the indy favorites were never that good, and the hardcore fans would have to swallow humble pie. And that's why they so aggressively attack people being critical of AEW because they are so protective of this company that can be sort of their avatar to stick it to Vince - one that has a chance of getting revenge on Vince.
And this leads to the double standards.
On online groups, forums, discords, everywhere people engage in live threads and discussions for RAW, and it's 90% negative. And this has always been the case. As it should, cracking jokes at dumb wrestling shows is fun. It's pretend fighting in tights, it's inherently dumb. And fun. You have AEW fans attending and taking shots at everything. Again, no problem so far. But the problems start when it's the other way around, when someone who isn't as much of an AEW fan attends Dynamite discussions, he's told by dozens and dozens of people "Hey, umm, maybe you shouldn't be here? If you don't like it, don't watch it".
I'm sorry, what lmao? Hate watching wrestling has been the main thing in the IWC for over 20 years at the very least. It's what we do, it's what we like to do. You engage with friends and buddies, take jabs, laugh, have a good time. If everyone in the world had done the "If you don't like it, don't watch it" thing, the IWC would have ceased to exist ages ago. It's especially grating to see those same people still attend the WWE live threads. Doing the same thing, taking a crap on everything. But somehow they're unable to see the hypocrisy because they, then, attack every negative person in AEW live discussions.
And people are irked by this because we naturally dislike double standards. It's a human trait to recognize hypocrisy and be annoyed by it because we generally want things to be fair. This is at the heart of it.
And attending AEW conversations in the IWC these days is extremely unattractive because you're afraid that if you say one wrong thing, the horde attacks, and the thing is, if you defend yourself, you're the heel - and probably the one that ends up with a warning because AEW fans are, by default, considered to be the babyfaces. And all AEW criticism is in bad faith and/or trolling. So, even if you don't break an actual written rule, you're just trying to get around the rules and your masking your actual ill intent by disguising it as legit criticism. Actual, legit criticism of AEW simply does not exist, it's always just bad faith trolling. Or a bot, I guess.
I'm just saying: every wrestling forum I've used for the past three or so years has had stickied thread on top of the AEW section, telling the section to chill out. I've never seen that before.
Phew, that was like three years worth of stuff to get off my chest. Let me end on this note: I'm really only talking about a vocal minority, it's the same with everything. It's politics. It's friggin diets. It's everything. Social media simply ruined us, and it creates this skewed view of everything where we only see the vocal people. AEW fans mostly just want to watch and enjoy a wrestling company they like. And most of the time when people defend AEW against a critic, they're just engaging on a social media platform. It's just that this certain section of fans has sort of ruined everybody's reputation, and caused the more WWE-leaning people to be on edge and on their guard.
I may not reply to any comments made on this post because, other than this piece, I try to stay out of this, and just respect people's right to like what they like. Hell, I don't like either company lol.