What on earth is with the sharp division among wrestling fans?

It’s a strange question to ask, but honestly, what is the deal? It seems as time goes on wrestling fans become nothing more than a bunch of grouchy old men who do nothing but critique every single thing about a show. And I mean EVERYTHING. From a wrestler maybe having a slight slip during his or her entrance, to even them being pushed up the card when they’ve been waiting for their whot for YEARS. It’s crazy to me.

The thing is, most of the hate will always come from the two biggest competitors like it actually makes a difference. WWE fans will criticize an AEW show just as fast as the opposite. And why do they do that? Because of brand loyalty and nothing more. No, really, that’s it. Both wrestling companies are freaking fantastic in the products they put out, but if you look online all you see is hate and frustration from people who expect more from what they’ve seen elsewhere. This is by no means a new phenomenon in the world of pro wrestling. Let’s look back a bit…

Back in the day you had the original pro wrestling rivalry that dominated discussion topics in the sweaty dungeons of some dude’s mom’s basement. WCW and WWF would go toe to toe to battle for supremacy for the Monday night television crown. Back then the hate was minimal as most wrestling fans at the time knew that WWF was not only the better product but also the future of professional wrestling. Of course there were still some hold outs the would die on the hill of WCW’s ability to capture your attention for a second with traditional matches, at the end of the day, WWF’s ability to shift the market to an edgier, more in your face aggressive style of wrestling is what eventually captured the loyalty of traditional and new wrestling fans of all ages.

As we move into the mid 2000s WWF became WWE as we know it today in terms of branding, but competition was limited at that time. WWE entered the best era in all professional wrestling history: The Ruthless Aggression era. During this time WWE’s biggest rival early on was ECW which they quickly bought out to bring their hardcore style and talent to the WWE locker room. This brought some of the greatest highflying, hardcore talents of all time to the biggest stage of them all, giving WWE total dominance in the wrestling world. After that the only competitors keeping WWE away from a full monopoly was TNA Wrestling which gave fans a different feeling of wrestling with an hexagon ring instead of the traditional square ring. I personally felt like in doing this, they set themselves a part enough to where it felt like something completely separate as if they weren’t competing with WWE, but simply coexisting with them. That’s what led to TNA’s success that they’re still enjoying to this day. Minus the hexagon ring which is silly…

Now, in the age of extreme and garbage social media, we have a terrible division in the wrestling world that has never been seen before. Like I mentioned earlier, there were definitely people who preferred the old ECW to WWE’s product after the buyout, but they still supported their favorite wrestlers when they made that switch. Today as WWE faces off with the up and coming AEW, you will see fans absolutely trash the character and morals of a wrestler who chooses to sign with a different company without even knowing why. All they see is so and so is now a part of this company or that company, and choose to completely disown them for the business decision they made. It’s absolutely crazy to me. I believe social media, along with many other things, has damaged wrestling fans’ ability to simply be fans of the show. We are now all forced to make a statement whether we like a show or not, and defend that with our life behind a screen. It’s so stupid.

Recently, Sami Zayne won the United States Championship on Smackdown, and on Youtube it got something like triple the amount of dislikes that likes. Why? This guy works his ass off every single week, and it was only a few years ago when he was facing off against Roman Reigns for the WWE Championship those same people got mad he didn’t win.

Y’all are silly. Seriously.

I may be a huge WWE fan, but I will watch all the 5 star bangers in AEW just as fast as I’ll watch the greats still be great in TNA. Why can’t we just enjoy wrestling like we used to? That’s all I ask.

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