hot take: as somebody who watches both wwe and aew the latter is more innovative and original while wwe follows a structure and relies heavily on callbacks to the past. wwe WANTS you to think they're original but any of the wrestlers in storylines can be replaced with any other wrestler and it would still flow. you don't get that with aew.
the structuredness of wwe also goes into the wrestling styles.
This is one of the smartest things I’ve ever read and I appreciate it so much.
I’ve never even thought about it that way. But you are right. And it’s because (in WWE) they create the storyline first (storylines that are super general and around superficial things), and then you use the wrestlers that they want to see in it. And why does it work? Because most wrestlers have unidimensional characters, so they can fit in any narrative. Everyone is generic so they can fit into any story they can think of. And the ones that are multidimensional, are the ones they use the callbacks with.
It’s different from creating a story based around the complexities of your character, which is what AEW does. And when they have made mistakes, that’s when the stories don’t work, because people immediately know something is out of character for someone. And this type of work helps make characters who are more one dimensional than others more complex. Basically, it forces every character to become complex. Hence why we have people like Hangman, Mox, Swerve, Statlander, Willow, Fletcher, now Ospreay, Mercedes and, of course... MJF.
