I’m gonna start covering AEW shows when I can, I’ll be attempting to keep up with Dynamite and the PPVs at the least. Why? Well, I don’t like AEW, so it’s not out of enjoyment. I just need to get back into watching wrestling regularly and, more importantly, talking about wrestling. While I don’t like AEW, I like WWE less, and WWE is barely pro wrestling so there’s less for me to talk about.
I love pro wrestling. I do not love watching pro wrestling, I love the idea of pro wrestling. This is said badly: I do love watching pro wrestling. When I say that I don’t love it, what I mean is that I don’t love all wrestling and I don’t just watch wrestling that doesn’t connect with me. I haven’t been watching regularly for years because most wrestling does not appeal to me. The last promotion that really grabbed me was New Japan Pro Wrestling in its golden period under Okada, but that’s over now and New Japan stinks.
So why am I covering AEW? My ambition is to run wrestling. I don’t know how that’ll happen or if it’ll happen. It probably won’t. But I’m covering AEW so that I can think more about my ideas of what I want to see in wrestling. This is also why I’m going to be doing commentaries on audio from the Voices of Wrestling Flagship podcast fairly frequently as well. More than anyone else, I feel that Lanza and Kraetsch think deeply about wrestling. I don’t always agree with them but they are usually good at explaining trends and they at least prefer to think in a more sophisticated way than who is a fan of who and isn’t it cool that this happened (though they do that too, that’s what being a fan is).