Wrestling has its own version of a console war and it’s ruining things

To say that professional wrestling is an exciting form of entertainment is an understatement. This year alone, fans of World Wrestling Entertainment and All Elite Wrestling have seen a Samoan family mafia civil war, a horrifying uprising by a horror villain faction, a gothic revenge drama of cuckoldry, and a toxic yuri romance that turns into a bitter rivalry inside the squared circle. Seriously, professional wrestling is a gymnastic redneck anime soap opera, and it’s beautiful. What’s not so exciting is how the parasocial relationships between wrestlers and their fans have led to an unhealthy tribalism.

Wrestling companies have long ebbed and flowed with each other, such that when one doesn’t deliver what it needs to, the other steps up, and WWE and AEW are no exception. WWE—under the guiding hand of Paul “Triple H” Levesque—focuses on long-term bookings, with wrestlers like Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins letting the drama of their scripted feuds influence the death-defying moves they perform in the ring. Meanwhile, rival AEW exists as an alternative to WWE, where the athleticism and work ethic of younger prospects like Maxwell Jacob Fredman, Will Osprey and Swerve Strickland take center stage in the monologue-heavy tirades that plagued the WWE of disgraced former CEO Vince McMahon’s era.

Read more: All Elite Wrestling has made professional wrestling fun again

But if you were to ask any wrestling fan what they thought of the other fandom, they’d sling mud and refer to WWE as “the Fed” and AEW as “All Friendship Wrestling.” While this rivalry between the Chicago Cubs and the White Sox initially arose due to both companies openly taking kayfabe-breaking potshots at each other in various TV segments and backstage interviews in an effort to appease their audiences, it has since become less the stuff of playful jabs and more composed of venomous jokes.

Having hung out in wrestling circles online and attended multiple AEW events in Chicago, I’ve seen fans unnecessarily trash each other’s yum. This often manifests itself in fans booing AEW shows by chanting CM Punk’s name (a chant once reserved for WWE events when they took issue with the pomp and circumstance going on in the ring), making fun of each other about the size of the crowd, or heckling wrestlers like Ricky Starks because they have friends who work in WWE and assume he’s jumping ship. While lively debate and reading “the dirt sheets” will always be a part of wrestling fandoms, having an unhealthy parasocial relationship with their talent is just plain weird behavior, especially when those same wrestlers don’t feel the same way about each other.

Fans upset about AEW and WWE’s perceived warring lines are missing the benefits of the symbiotic relationship between the two companies. In reality, WWE and AEW wrestlers are thrilled that rival promotions like AEW exist, because it means that fired wrestlers or talents who never had a good run, like Malakai Black or Ethan Page, won’t be out of a job if they leave either company. Likewise, both companies have learned tips from each other to improve their presentation. For example, WWE recently adopted AEW’s crowd work techniques by having wrestlers like Sami Zayn walk into the show as a cold opener, much like Jon Moxley does for his entrances. Likewise, AEW has learned tips from the melodramatic love triangle between Dominik Mysterio, Rhea Ripley and Liv Morgan to inform its angle between Toni Storm, Mariah May and Mina Shirakawa.

“There’s something weird going on in pro wrestling right now, I see the fans online, the way they’re communicating with each other, it’s like all-out war,” AEW wrestler Maxwell Jacob Friedman said in a Town Hall interview with Busted Open. “You guys have to know, that’s not what’s happening to the wrestlers. We all support each other because realistically, the better the two companies do, the more money we’re going to make. So stop fighting. We’re all having a great time.”

Without a doubt, professional wrestling is bigger than ever. Yet tribalism disguised as unbridled support is more damaging to the profession than it is supportive. It’s as bad as someone who says they love pancakes saying they hate waffles. You can have two pies, just as you can have two wrestling companies sharing the same space. Whether you have the time to spend 12 hours a week watching both shows is another story.