AEW AND WWE Fandoms Are Holding Back Wrestling’s Greatness

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, so that when one doesn’t deliver the goods, the other picks up the slack, 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 define the WWE from the era of disgraced former CEO Vince McMahon.

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 would sling mud and refer to WWE as “the Fed” and AEW as “All Friendship Wrestling.” While this cross-town rivalry, reminiscent of the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, initially arose because both companies openly kayfabe-breaking shooting at each other in various TV segments And behind the scenes interviews In order to captivate their audience, the jokes have since become less playful and more venomous teasing.

I’ve hung out in wrestling circles online and attended multiple AEW events in Chicago, and I’ve seen fans gratuitously trash each other. This often manifests as fans booing AEW shows by chanting CM Punk’s name – a chant once reserved for WWE events when they disagreed 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 for WWE and assume he’s jumping ship. All while having a lively conversation and reading about “the mud plates“will always be a part of wrestling fandoms, having an unhealthy parasocial relationship with their talent is just weird behavior – especially when those same wrestlers don’t feel that way at all.

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 this weird thing going on in professional wrestling right now, where I see fans online, the way they communicate with each other, it’s like all-out war,” AEW wrestler Maxwell Jacob Friedman said in an interview with The Guardian. City Hall Interview with Busted Open. “Just so you know, that’s not what’s going on with 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.