 |
| The newest faction may be weak, but that doesn't mean the idea is |
QT Marshall unveiled his new faction on Dynamite this past Wednesday, a rogue group of Nightmare Factory students consisting of Aaron Solow (known best as Bayley's ex-fiance), Olympic boxer Anthony Ogogo, and Nick Comoroto. They used an exhibition match against Cody Rhodes to announce themselves forcefully. Marshall got himself intentionally disqualified by striking special guest referee Arn Anderson, and the rest of the group laid waste to the other Nightmare Factory guys, both Rhodes brothers, and Billy Gunn before their carnage was over. Another faction in All Elite Wrestling was born.
The segment divided the viewership seemingly right down the middle judging by what I saw on social media as it happened. I didn't like it because I'm over the entire saga of Cody Rhodes and people close to Cody Rhodes in AEW. I know it's weird to say when Rhodes is arguably the biggest star in the company and the second most powerful person in the house after the guy writing the checks, Tony Khan. That's a matter of personal taste, and truth be told, even though it takes up a lot of real estate on Wednesdays and one Saturday or Sunday per quarter, the other stuff on the show is good enough to keep me hooked. The most frequent complaint I saw, one that took hold among the copy-and-paste sites as a talking point, was that AEW had "yet another" faction roaming around. Don't let the idea that another satellite group orbiting around the supermassive black hole that is Cody Rhodes muddle the issue. Stables can be bad, but the idea of having a bunch of them around is not.
The idea of having gang warfare at the center of a wrestling promotion isn't a new idea. From the days of the territories, having wrestlers team up together has always been an easy way to establish battle lines, provide convenient backup for wrestlers being jumped, and have convenient tag team combinations at the ready for matches in the run-up to big singles blowoff matches. New Japan Pro Wrestling most famously is the most balkanized wrestling promotion in the world (if only because they have a lot more cultural reach right now than the OG of gang warfare, Dragon Gate), or at least it was until AEW came along. That being said, those groups have always trended to a more numerously populated side. It doesn't seem like there are a lot of stables in Nooj because most of those groups have a lot of members. Look at CHAOS, for example. It seems at times that half the roster might be in that group at any given time.
Because AEW's groups tend to max out at five members like with Pinnacle (Tully Blanchard is a manager, not an active member) and the Inner Circle (Dark Order excluded), the fact that so many people have matriculated into groups makes the preponderance of those stables seem overbearing until you realize why having people in groups is such a good idea in the first place. The reasons go above and beyond the normal ones, like having convenient tag match combinations or guys to run in and make the save or generate numbers for a heel beatdown. It all comes down to exposure, and I'm going to use a negative proof to start out my argument.
WWE as a company is based on lone wolves and iconoclasts in key roles. One can look no further than the treatment of their most basic and simplistic of group dynamics, the tag team, to see that. In Vince McMahon's warped vision, the tag team is always meant to be a temporary situation to help get one or both of the wrestlers within it over enough to compete for singles titles. This maxim goes out the window when it comes to Black or other POC tag teams like the Usos or the New Day, which to me is a bigger proof that McMahon's racist ass is still letting his preconceived biases run his company more than people like Sasha Banks, Bobby Lashley, or Bianca Bel Air taking center stage prove he's not racist. That's a whole other post, though, one for someone who cares enough about the greater WWE narrative to watch and analyze how their product deals with the tenuous balance of the boss' racism and the boss' daughter's push to sanitize said product for liberal sponsors. I'm not that person anymore.
Back on topic, with tag teams even being hollowed out as a concept with McMahon, now you have an entire roster of lone wolves who need TV time in order to connect with an audience. Even though WWE has seven hours of main-run TV on big ticket networks every week, having a roster of its size makes it impossible to give everyone shine if they're not attached to a larger group dynamic. With no one in a larger group dynamic, everyone has to swim on their own. WWE doesn't exactly hand out life preservers either. Could a swarming mass of lone wolves work as a wrestling promotion? I guess it could if the time allotted fit all the different lone wolves. WWE has seven hours for hundreds of wrestlers.That formula doesn't exactly fit.
So, if the negative is WWE, and has been since McMahon took over from his father, then what's the opposite? What is the effect of clustering wrestlers in groups? Mainly, it provides time for wrestlers that wouldn't be there if they were meant to get over on their own but didn't have an avenue to be on the limited time. The best example of this is the Dark Order. The amount of help it's given guys like Preston Vance, Alex Reynolds, and especially John Silver (although it could be argued Being The Elite helped him the most) is immeasurable even if they don't really have anything going on. Proud and Powerful with the Inner Circle, Marko Stunt with Jurassic Express, Will Hobbs as a member of Team Taz, and Private Party as members of Matt Hardy's various entourages are more examples of guy who might have been lost in the shuffle in a different circumstance.
The value of seeing those guys on TV even if they're not the focus of the story is immeasurable. If they get to be on Dynamite instead of just being match fillers on a show like Dark, they get to be seen by anywhere between 600K and 1M people every other week at least. That's all the people at home who get to know their names, get a snippet of their personalities, and get to see them do signature moves. When you don't have avenues for that, and they just wrestle on Dark every week, then they're no better than the random indie guys they bring in to job. There's a reason why WWE has an entire section of their roster that comes out to crickets if they get called up from Main Event, even if they're "indie favorites." AEW may not recognize that on purpose, because again, both Khan and Rhodes most likely see themselves doing a WCW tribute act. Old school Southern territories were big on stables, but it was for the similar reasons I laid out why they work, why those old school promoters used them.
When the audience knows a guy, they can more easily cheer or boo them when their number is called, whether now or later on down the line. There's no detriment to having someone's face be recognized by your fans, no matter how little a role they play, because even the most bit members of the roster will have a fanbase nucleate around them. That small core hardcore fan group can help gestate larger reactions when those wrestlers take bigger roles. It's much easier to do when the hardcore fans can point out who those people are from main exposure and not having to explain that those were the guys in wrestling in dark matches while the other fans were out buying drinks and merch. The value of being seen is huge.
AEW is still a young company all things considered, so it might not be easy to see how all the stables benefit the entire roster. They are not a perfectly booked or organized company by any stretch of the imagination, and there are wrestlers on the roster who still fall through the cracks. Again, Khan being a wrestling fan helps make AEW a more cohesive company, but he's also a capitalist first. There are certain efficiencies he prioritizes over others, and human resources rarely ever are a talent that even HR reps in big companies ever master. It feels like the company needs to get another year or two of history under their belt before they can really see the designs of their architecture work. However, it's not hard to see that this architecture is structurally sound and can help the company bear new star after new star in theory.
Of course, not every group is going to be good, which leads to the problems with QT Marshall's new stable of Nightmare Factory Wolfpac trainees. The idea of it isn't bad, but at the same time, the execution is in service of a continued vanity narrative for Rhodes since he artificially removed himself from the World Championship scene, acting that would make him better than Triple H. A lot of people asked for whom those incredibly self-serving stories are presented, and the answer, after a little soul-searching, became clear to me in an epiphany. It's for the people who will eventually watch that reality show that Rhodes and his wife Brandi will be central to. I don't know how many people are going to watch it, but I can see the reasoning behind it. It doesn't mean I have to like the reasoning behind it, and I don't have to think that reasoning is sound. That being said, the overarching reasoning behind balkanizing the roster into so many rival factions is far sounder than the purpose of this newest group serves.
To me, that seem to be the heart of the discussion. Few people outside of natural AEW haters have complained about this balkanization before they hit with a completely superfluous group serving a vainglorious purpose. Rather than seeming biased (which is stupid, because everyone is biased because human beings are not robots that spontaneously generated from the Scrap Brain Zone in Sonic The Hedgehog), people stupidly go on to attack the structural reasons from whence the bad thing sprung in an attempt to seem smart, or even worse, objective. It's going against years of wrestling logic that worked, not wrestling logic that Vince McMahon says is true despite evidence to the contrary, just for the sake of having a take that gets attention on the subject. Well folks, sometimes you just don't need to have a contrary take on a subject to have a take that stands out. If you're afraid of having an opinion that seems too in line with someone else's, then just press the "like" button on the tweet that originally espouses it and move on with your day. And overall, realize that you can take down a stillborn execution on an otherwise sound idea without sounding like a hypocrite or whatever. Trust me, there are far worse things to be than an intellectual hypocrite.
