No Matter What All Elite Wrestling Does, It Is Always Wrong for the IWC

Moral Economies, Participatory Fandom, and the Politics of Critique in Contemporary Professional Wrestling

Since its founding in 2019, All Elite Wrestling (AEW) has existed in a state of permanent contradiction within online wrestling discourse. Each creative decision, whether conservative or experimental, nostalgic or innovative, successful or flawed, provokes intense criticism from the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC). AEW is accused of being simultaneously too WWE-like and too indie, too story-driven and too match-focused, too chaotic and too sanitized. This persistent cycle raises a central question: Does AEW operate in a discursive environment where it can never be “right,” regardless of its choices?

This article argues that AEW’s reception cannot be understood solely in terms of booking quality or business outcomes. Instead, AEW functions as a symbolic battleground within a highly participatory fan culture shaped by moral economies, affective investment, nostalgia, and identity formation. Drawing on media studies, fan studies, and performance theory, this essay contends that AEW’s problem is not inconsistency in execution, but rather its structural position as a promotion that disrupts long-standing hierarchies within professional wrestling fandom.

The Internet Wrestling Community as a Participatory Public

Henry Jenkins defines participatory culture as one in which audiences do not passively consume media but actively produce meaning, critique, and identity through engagement.¹ The IWC exemplifies this model. Fans on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, YouTube, and Discord do not merely watch wrestling; they perform expertise, construct moral hierarchies, and police authenticity.

AEW entered this environment not as a neutral product, but as a discursive intervention. From its inception, AEW positioned itself as an “alternative,” implicitly challenging WWE’s cultural dominance. This framing immediately polarized online fandom. AEW became less a wrestling promotion and more a symbolic referendum on what wrestling should be.

As a result, critiques of AEW often function less as evaluations of discrete shows and more as ideological statements. The IWC does not simply ask, “Was this episode good?” Instead, it asks, “What does this episode say about wrestling, WWE, Vince McMahon, Triple H, Tony Khan, or my identity as a fan?”

The No-Win Bind: Contradictory Expectations and Double Standards

AEW consistently faces mutually exclusive expectations that no promotion could realistically satisfy.

1. Long-Term Storytelling vs. Immediate Payoff

When AEW employs slow-burn narratives such as Hangman Page’s extended arc from an anxious millennial cowboy to world champion, it receives praise from some fans for its emotional depth. In contrast, others condemn it as “dragging” or “directionless.” Conversely, when AEW accelerates angles or pivots quickly (as seen during injury-driven reshuffles), critics accuse the promotion of hot-shot booking.

WWE often receives leniency for similar pacing issues, framed as “course correction” or “planting seeds.” AEW’s identical actions become evidence of incompetence rather than pragmatism. The difference lies not in the booking itself, but in the interpretive framework applied by fans.

2. Match Quality vs. Storytelling

AEW’s emphasis on in-ring performance, particularly through promotions like New Japan Pro Wrestling partnerships or tournaments such as the Continental Classic, frequently attracts the charge that “matches don’t matter without stories.” Yet when AEW foregrounds promos or character-driven segments, critics argue that it is “abandoning what made it special.”

This contradiction reflects what Pierre Bourdieu would describe as a struggle over cultural capital.² Fans who valorize “workrate” view AEW as a corrective to WWE’s spectacle-driven model, while fans invested in narrative clarity see AEW’s stylistic pluralism as incoherence. AEW cannot satisfy both camps simultaneously, yet it is judged as though it should.

Tony Khan and the Personalization of Critique

The IWC often collapses AEW’s structural challenges into critiques of Tony Khan as an individual. Unlike WWE, which benefits from corporate opacity, AEW’s leadership is evident. Khan’s public enthusiasm, social media presence, and willingness to engage critics create an unusually personalized discourse environment.

As a result, booking decisions become moral judgments about Khan’s competence, ego, or fandom. When AEW succeeds, critics attribute success to talent or luck. When it falters, critics frame failure as proof that “a fan should not run a company.” This rhetoric reflects what Sarah Banet-Weiser describes as brand-based affect, in which emotional reactions to media texts become judgments about authenticity and legitimacy.³

Nostalgia, Memory, and the Myth of “What AEW Used to Be”

A striking feature of AEW criticism is its reliance on compressed nostalgia. Fans frequently invoke “early AEW” (2019–2021) as a golden age, even though those years were themselves heavily criticized at the time.

This phenomenon mirrors what historians of sport describe as retrospective coherence: fans reinterpret the past as more stable or meaningful once it is safely over. AEW’s willingness to evolve, expanding its roster, experimenting with presentation, or adjusting its tone violates fans’ desire for a fixed identity. In this sense, AEW is punished not for changing too much, but for refusing to remain a nostalgic object.

The Moral Economy of Wrestling Fandom

E.P. Thompson’s concept of the moral economy helps explain why AEW provokes such intense affective responses.⁴ Fans hold implicit beliefs about fairness, labor, authenticity, and reward. AEW’s emphasis on wrestler autonomy, its visible collaboration with international promotions, and its acknowledgment of wrestling’s artifice challenge older moral frameworks rooted in kayfabe and corporate authority.

When AEW elevates wrestlers like Orange Cassidy, Jon Moxley, or Eddie Kingston, figures who blur traditional archetypes, it disrupts established hierarchies of legitimacy. For some fans, this disruption feels liberating. For others, it feels like an erosion of wrestling’s “proper” order.

AEW as a Site of Cultural Anxiety

Ultimately, AEW functions as a proxy for broader anxieties within wrestling fandom:

• anxiety about change versus tradition

• anxiety about corporate dominance versus creative freedom

• anxiety about expertise in an era of endless commentary

  
  

The IWC’s persistent dissatisfaction reflects not AEW’s failure, but its cultural significance. Promotions that do not matter do not provoke this level of scrutiny.

Conclusion

AEW does not fail because it cannot book correctly. It fails, in the eyes of parts of the IWC, because it occupies an impossible position: an alternative that must be different without being alien, innovative without being indulgent, and successful without threatening established hierarchies.

In this sense, AEW’s greatest “mistake” is that it forces fans to confront their own expectations of wrestling. No matter what AEW does, it becomes wrong not because it lacks coherence, but because the IWC itself remains ideologically divided. AEW does not resolve those divisions; it exposes them.

Notes (Indicative Works)

1. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006).

2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

3. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

4. E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” Past & Present 50 (1971).