I tried to get into AEW a few times but it never really grabbed me.
My biggest gripe is all of the smark winking. Like publically talking about 'hidden doors' and shit like that.
It makes the promotion seem like it geared directly to wrestling smarks who want to be in on the joke.
I watch a few matches here and there though. The ladder match last week was really good.
That's just the age of the internet.
If you follow anything wrestling-related on the internet, you're gonna come across shit that breaks the canon of the shit that's on TV. Whether it's real relationships, or spoilers, or contract situations, all that shit is out there and can't be avoided.
It's just that AEW assumes that you either already know about that shit, or you're smart enough to use Google and YouTube to find out about the shit you don't know.
As opposed to WWE who treats their fans like they're stupid by gaslighting them because they want you to be on an island for the most part, like you're a castaway who only has WWE programming as their source of entertainment. So they act like all these internet stories, current events, other promotions and entertainment avenues don't exist until they enter the WWE universe, or it's convenient for them to mention that shit and then that's when they do the elbow-nudge/winking shit.
And those differences are reflected in the demos. AEW's biggest demo is the 18-49 demo, that's internet-savy millennials. WWE's biggest demos are old people and kids, people who aren't really on the internet like that and are more likely to go with these goofy storylines and trotting out all these old farts because they don't know how good the new wrestlers are.