Just curious about everyone’s thoughts on this. I’m 30 male just for the record. Most of my friends who use to be wrestling fans in the past have given up on wrestling completely because they said WWE became way to PG. They hated the no swearing, no blood and the corny dialogue they would have.
I only bring up WWE because that’s what we grew up watching. They are not hardcore and don’t watch indies or other wrestling shows at the time. I wonder how much of that audience they have lost and what if anything can WWE or AEW do to get them back.
One thing to note is the PG 13 style of wrestling was popular for like... half a decade? If you go back to the 80s and early 90s you get even cornier stuff than Super Cena. It's just not that sustainable when a lot of people who watch wrestling are kids, and when you don't always have Stone Cold to build the whole company around. Their best talent in mid 2000s was John Cena so they adjusted a PG style that suited him better. Furthermore culturally the Attitude Era came about in a time when rebellion was in with other cultural influences such as Eminem, Limp Bizkit, South Park, etc. We are now living in the complete opposite time overall with hyper sensitive people getting offended so how do you book an edgy wrestling show.
The truth is that in the ring wrestling is better now than 20 years ago and talking is worse. Most people in the IWC prefer in the ring technical type wrestlers over guys who excel at talking like the Miz. The WWE along with AEW has adjusted to the social media era by giving them a healthy dose of their favorite kind of guys which is the in ring ones, including an entire show in NXT who's Black and Gold era will probably go down as legendary for technical quality. They now have another company AEW that's built around making the internet happy. The ONLY time they really care about good of promos wrestling shows have is when hyping up the Attitude Era which has become to them what the green light in the distance or his idolized version of Daisy was to Jay Gatsby.
In reality, wrestling was more fun for everyone when they're kids, and some people that grew up with the AE will never be able to replace that. Furthermore, bashing wrestling on the internet is trendy, and some people are self loathing about their lifelong fanship about wrestling. I personally thought the ending of Dexter New Blood was satisfying enough and somewhat boilerplate ending to an overall good season, but it has a lot of people attacking it online and its IMDB score is as bad as the original ending. Why? Because trashing Dexter endings online is a cool thing to do and I think some people reached for the worst possible things about its ending. Some WWE bashing also falls into this camp.
