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AEW's obsession with angles is killing my love for it...
Let me get the obvious of the way: AEW is not dying. It is successful and by all metrics the second-biggest pro-wrestling promotion in the world. I’m writing this just to articulate and make sense of why my personal enjoyment of the product is at an all-time low. AEW is the company that rekindled my love for pro wrestling. When I was preparing for and attending my PhD interviews during the COVID lockdown, I would wait for Thursdays (I live in India, so…) because no matter how the rest of my week goes, I could count on having a couple of hours of quality pro wrestling to watch. It was comforting to have some consistency when the rest of my life seemed so uncertain. Though the product certainly was not perfect and there were parts I didn’t particularly enjoy, I never really felt like skipping over anything. And that was because most of it felt (to me, at least) properly planned out and cohesive. While AEW is still capable of producing incredible peaks, that consistency and cohesion I enjoyed then has been continually sinking.
“AEW no good” has been pushed by grifters ever since the company started, but lately dissatisfaction seems to be spreading to an increasing number of its genuine, good-faith fanbase. Some of this is individual preference: from their favorite wrestlers not being featured as prominently, to the company no longer matching their ideal version of pro wrestling. While I do have some issue with some of the wrestlers in a position of prominence, I would like to dig deeper and explore something more systematic that’s been degrading my enjoyment of the product.
AEW has always been a company that has tried to cater to all kinds of wrestling fans with the program featuring everything from sports-entertainment segments to death matches. But it maintained a cohesion and continuity even when shifting through such diametrically opposed forms of pro wrestling because it took the character-arc based approach to storytelling (shameless plug here). While, broadly speaking, they still do character-arc based storytelling, they have been using angles as the only medium to push the narrative forward.
Angles are what separates professional wrestling from normal sports. In most cases, they create the narrative conflict that drives the drama and entertainment. They can happen outside the confines of a wrestling match — like in-ring promos, run-ins, backstage segments, cinematic video packages — or be a part of the wrestling match — like distraction finishes, interferences, attacking/abandoning a tag partner(s). Any such incident that raises the stakes of the conflict between pro wrestlers from a purely athletic one to something more personal could be considered an "angle". They have become an integral part of modern pro wrestling and honestly they are a useful tool in storytelling and story progression. A well-executed angle can add a lot of depth to the storyline and character arc of the characters involved to elevate the feud. The best of which leaves us with memorable iconic images: Toni Storm wailing when Mariah May was stabbing her with the heel, Hangman drinking in front of Swerve’s burning home are some of the recent examples.
The primary function of an angle is to add more heat to the in-ring action. An angle ideally should be a resultant of a wrestling match or should lead to a wrestling match. Either way the focus should be on the in-ring action. A successful angle is one where the audience goes: “I wanna see them fight!” In my opinion, an angle that exists just to push the narrative forward without any in-ring consequences or an angle where the focus is on the angle rather than the in-ring action is a bad angle. I have stopped watching WWE because it is a company where the focus is on the angles so much so that most of its fans and even some wrestlers will say that the actual match is secondary to the angles/stories leading up to it. For all my criticisms, AEW is still not WWE: the focus is still more on the in-ring action… but less and less so, and their overreliance on angles is slowly killing my love for it.
Almost all of the matches nowadays are either preceded by or followed by an angle, as if the company doesn’t trust the wrestling match to tell the story on its own. This obsession with an angle-based approach to storytelling simplifies the story while making it stale and unnecessarily convoluted. In my ideal version, pro wrestling is where an angle is not a given and storylines need to earn them. Not all stories need an angle — some should just be limited to in-ring action, and backstage interviews if necessary. This would make the angles feel special and the feuds that get the angles will receive additional attention. Proliferation of angles to progress wrestling storylines in my humble opinion is detrimental to the product. Because it is impossible to create a memorable image all the time. So, the angles will either be forgettable or feel formulaic.
Ricochet attacking Swerve is an example of an angle that did everything an angle is supposed to do. It arose as a consequence of a wrestling match, made sense for the character arcs of the characters involved, was executed incredibly well and left us with a memorable image (a special mention to the costume Ricochet wore). More importantly, it made me desperate to see them fight!
The much-maligned Death Riders storyline, in contrast, is an example of everything that will go wrong if you rely too much on angle-based storytelling. It feels aimless because the angles lack thematic cohesion, the characters involved don’t really have any well-defined character arcs, most of the angles never lead to any in-ring consequence (a wrestling match) or even follow-up the following week, and don’t even leave us with a memorable image. Remember when one week where random lower-card and mid-card wrestlers were waiting for them outside the arena and were nowhere to be seen the following week?
They beat up Dark Order, but then Dark Order just disappeared after a couple of weeks of random angles. I still remember the match Evil Uno had with Moxley in the Dynamite main event a couple years ago. I’m sure Dark Order could have had a similar match as part of this current story: where they fight hard but eventually come up short. Without that in-ring follow-up, all of these angles feel claustrophobically self-contained, especially for what's supposed to be a company-wide storyline like Death Riders. For something like that to work, the consequence of their chaos should be felt throughout the card. The violence should spill over, and honestly I can't think of anyone better suited than Moxley to lead a faction that symbolizes chaos, and yet... An in-ring payoff would give the angles some thematic cohesion.
But doing just generic heel stuff that we've seen a million times with the talent involved will ultimately lead to nothing but disappointment. Surprisingly, this limping story arc is a product of an inciting angle that was among the best AEW has ever done — the feeling I had when I saw Mox and his crew choke Bryan was so visceral! And yet, since then it just hasn't been connecting.
This obsession with angles is not limited to the Death Riders stuff alone, even Kenny’s return segment had an angle attached to it — where I wish they had waited at least one more week! (I don’t even want to get into how I feel about Kenny going immediately after Callis after saying he’s not looking for revenge just seconds before, or why I think the focus will be on Callis while it should be on Kenny and Takeshita.) Maybe the people in charge of creative thought that unless there is an angle attached to it the segment had no purpose — the segment where Kenny fucking Omega returned after almost ending up dead!
I personally feel this obsession with angles dumbs down the characters involved, (I personally feel Hangman is a victim of this, but he still stays compelling through his sheer will,) and is also stopping AEW from exploring lots of cool stuff within the match. What would be my suggestion to fix it? They should go back to what made them special in the first place — character-arc based in-ring storytelling with occasional angles to supplement/ promote the in-ring action.
Let’s take Orange Cassidy for example — when he was in the Conglomeration, the broad arc of his character was: he’s in a down phase because he lost both his belt and his friends. They could have had him walk out to the theme music of others all the time, never have him be the hot tag guy, even occasionally be the guy who eats pins and never the guy who pins the opponents to win the match. And imagine if it's during his match vs Mox that it's the first time in a long time his music plays? This would have told the story better and added a lot of depth to his character and the storyline of Mox forcing the wrestlers to fulfil their potential, without leaning on angles. I know this seems like something that requires extremely long-term planning, but I believe this is the simplest and most effective way to tell stories: let the wrestlers have broad character arcs that play out through their matches, and when the time comes plug them into significant matches that progress their character to its next phase. In addition to reducing the reliance on angles to progress stories, this would lead to more interesting matches.
So yeah… this I guess is my attempt at verbalizing why I don’t enjoy AEW as much as I used to. Do interact with it and tell me why I’m wrong or what your own ideal version of professional wrestling would look like!
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