r/midcarder

I can only see Mox losing so that he can enter the casino battle royal & win that contract & hold it over the new champion Ospreay’s head for an undetermined amount of time.. other than that.. #LOLMoxleyWins

Don’t care about Nigel or the masked guy..

TBS 4 way.. Persephone is going to win tonight only as a bribe so that she doesn’t jump to AAA/NXT when her contract is up later this year.. &
stays in CMLL/AEW. Shida just had it.. so she ain’t winning.. Maya has no character & Stat can’t promo.. Maya should win to give meat to her championship reign but it is going to Persephone.. if she doesn’t win.. she definitely AAA bound..

Renee interviewing all 4 of em.. eh.. trying so hard to make her the Erin Andrews of AEW but she doesn’t have the gravitas of Erin.. nor talent.. with that said Mercedes/Willow feels like a Dynamite main event & not a big match that belongs in Wembley.. Kenny & Will need a big night tonight to get their match feeling like a Wembley main event..

Speaking of which.. I am beyond sick of the DCF.. they have championships but the group still feels small time & unimportant.. maybe because everyone but Fletcher & Knight always lose..(Okada barely wrestles) how is the group helping to elevate Fletcher? Knight? The championships feel like an afterthought when there is 25 members of the DCF..

Also, Bucks teaming with Omega, is this Tony throwing in the towel on the “dream match” between Cope & Christian & the Young Bucks.. for such an “dream match” there is absolutely zero heat behind it.. & no beating up Cope &
Christian backstage like the Dogs & Pac & Claudio did ain’t going to put “Heat” on this match.. to me it feels super unimportant..

So Ospreay’s match will further tensions between his old group in NJPW & himself.. great, I don’t watch NJPW so these guys mean nothing to me.. hence the match means nothing to me..

All in all, this doesn’t feel like a “Wembley is 2 weeks away” excitement type of card.. but we’ll see if the 9738 time WON Booker Of The Year can cook up some heat for All In cause boy howdy, does it ever need it..

Agree or disagree Midcarders?

Running 50% off tickets until show day isn’t inspiring confidence in your product…

You know who isn’t running 50% off tickets?

Taylor Swift, whatever K-Pop bands are in America, Backstreet Boys at the Sphere here in Vegas, Usher on tour with Chris Brown, Jay Z at Yankee Stadium last month, etc etc..

You know why, because there is a demand for their product & can charge top price for them cause people want to buy them & see the entertainers..

There is no demand for AEW, hence the 50% off promotion to get Wembley at least half full, less than 3500 for the last Dynamite show in America before their “WrestleMania”(next weeks show is in England) when allegedly AEW is the “hottest” & “bestest” it’s ever been..

Speaking of Dynamite, a show that will struggle to get 3500 when it’s your last show in America before your “WrestleMania” tells you what the general real world consensus is about your product.. & not AEW pilled bots on here & other “AEW state media” subreddits & Facebook pages.. are saying..

This is a dead promotion that is being held together by duct tape, magic, & NDA’s.. I can only imagine how bad the vibes are backstage..

There is ZERO talent in AEW that you can put on the marquee that can get you 5-7k minimum just off of their name.. & then you can build off that with the rest of the card .. the artists formerly known as New Day isn’t going to help in that regard either.. speaking of which, I wonder how much Tony is overpaying for that nostalgia act? 2-3 million each for Creed & Kofi is my best guess..

Speaking of dead promotions.. ROH has a PPV in 2 days & NO ONE is talking about it.. like I haven’t seen one post about ROH in any wrestling subreddit this week that wasn’t DubOfficial & that was the ROH special on Tuesday that had 5-7 people in the thread..

ROH is more dead & buried than the New York Jets with Geno Smith at QB this season.. who the fuck is even watching ROH at this point.. Tony needs to be taking way more heat for his absolute mismanagement of ROH..

Hell, the Buss family kids family drama with selling the Lakers is not as fucked up & dysfunctional as what Tony Kahn did to ROH..

Agree or disagree with anything I said Midcarders?

Not necessarily when WCW officially died. I’m talking about your moment when you realized the war was over.

It can be something from Nitro, Thunder or a PPV. A booking decision. Someone jumping ship. Something backstage. Hell, maybe you were sitting in the building when it hit you.

For me, it was February 9, 2000. WCW Thunder.

I was there live.

I had attended countless Nitros throughout Oklahoma and Texas. We were Mid-South/World Class country, and we preferred ‘rasslin to sports-entertainment.

I still remember walking into Thunder that night.

The crowd was a fraction of what WCW usually drew. WWF shirts were everywhere and outnumbered WCW shirts. The energy was different. The excitement was gone. People seemed to be there to laugh at the product instead of believe in it.

WCW was still on television. There were still another 13 months before the final Nitro.

But sitting in that arena that night, I knew it was over.

And weirdly enough, I experienced that exact same feeling decades later attending AEW after CM Punk left the company. I’d been to AEW shows when the crowd was electric. This time, the building, the energy, even the feeling around the company had completely changed.

Sometimes you can watch the ratings fall and attendance shrink.

Other times, you can feel it in the building.

So r/midcarder, what was YOUR moment with WCW?

When did you realize WWF had won the Monday Night War?

Was it something you watched on TV? Something that happened backstage? Or were you there live when the air finally went out of the balloon?

Let’s hear the stories, Midcarders.

H/T to WrestlingNewsCo, as seen in the watermark.

Seems Brock Rechsteiner has the same temper as his father. So, let’s go ahead and start the betting lines on how long before he’s in the WWE system, midcarders.

I made the mistake of wandering over to Dave Meltzer’s X account today.

And holy shit. The man is ALWAYS online.

Arguing with fans. Defending AEW. Explaining ratings. Explaining attendance. Explaining why something that looks bad for AEW actually isn’t bad when you consider the demo, streaming, competition, the phase of the moon, etc.

Dave Meltzer has become the Donald Trump of wrestling Twitter.

Some random guy with 84 followers says Dynamite sucks? Dave is six replies deep explaining television economics.

And this isn’t new. Meltzer crossed the line from covering AEW to advocating for it years ago. At this point, I wonder if that advocacy is actually hurting the company.

AEW has lost hundreds of thousands of weekly viewers from its peak. Crowds have shrunk. Buildings have gotten smaller. Yet every warning sign seemingly comes with a Meltzer asterisk explaining why it’s not actually that bad.

That feeds directly into the AEW bubble: every criticism needs a rebuttal, every bad number needs context, and nobody ever stops to ask the obvious question:

Why have so many people stop watching?

Meltzer didn’t create AEW’s problems. Tony Khan is perfectly capable of booking his own tournaments.

But constantly explaining why the smoke isn’t really smoke doesn’t put out the fire.

Is Meltzer’s nonstop defense of AEW doing more harm than good?

This one is specifically for the old fucks among us who were actually there. When WCW started its decline, why did so many of us keep watching? Because WCW got BAD. Sometimes spectacularly bad. The Fingerpoke of Doom. Titles changing hands every five minutes. Celebrity nonsense. Worked shoots. Chucky threatening Rick Steiner. The Misfits in Action. Judy Bagwell on a forklift. Whatever the hell Vince Russo was doing. And yet… I kept watching.

I watched WWF too. I watched ECW whenever I could get my hands on it. I bounced between all three because wrestling at the time felt completely chaotic, unpredictable and, most importantly, fun. My experience might actually be in the minority, but during much of the Monday Night Wars, I slightly preferred WCW. And I absolutely loved ECW. There was something about WCW’s particular brand of insanity that kept me coming back even when I knew the wheels were falling off.

Hell, it still works on me. I’ll be working and throw on the WWE-maintained @WCW YouTube channel, one of their live watch parties, or an old Nitro in the background. Inevitably I’ll look over and start chuckling because fucking “That 70s Guy” Mike Awesome is on my television, or FUNB Hogan is wandering around backstage looking for Bischoff and Kidman. It’s ridiculous. I love it.

Which brings me to AEW. A lot of us were there at the beginning. We wanted another major wrestling company. We bought the PPVs. We watched Dynamite every Wednesday. We defended it. We genuinely wanted it to succeed. And then, somewhere along the way, a huge portion of the audience didn’t just become frustrated with AEW. They stopped watching.

That’s the difference I’m interested in. WCW could frustrate the absolute shit out of us, and we’d still flip over to Nitro to see what those idiots were doing. AEW frustrates people and they seemingly just… leave. Why?

Was WCW simply more entertaining even when it was bad? Were the characters stronger? Did Sting, Flair, Goldberg, DDP, Booker T, Hall, Nash and everyone else give us reasons to stick around through terrible booking? Was channel flipping itself part of the fun? Did WCW still feel unpredictable while AEW feels repetitive? Was wrestling fandom fundamentally different before social media? Did AEW burn through goodwill faster because of everything surrounding the company, not just what happens on television? Or are we looking at WCW through nostalgia goggles and forgetting just how many people actually did stop watching?

I’m genuinely curious about this one, especially from Midcarders who were sitting there with the remote every Monday night in the late 90s. How long did you stick with WCW, and why? And if you were once an AEW viewer who checked out, what did WCW have that kept you watching that AEW doesn’t?

For me it’s Eddie Guerrero. I had seen Pay Per Views on DVD years before Eddie was WWE Champion but his reign holds a special place in my heart as No Way Out was the first live Pay Per View my Aunt had paid for. My little brother and I were loving the build up to WrestleMania XX and were big fans of Eddie and Chavo when they were tag team champions prior plus everything he did in the ring was great as well as Smackdown at the time. I remember the shock of seeing Goldberg spear Lesnar and then Eddie hitting the frog splash to win the gold along with his matches that followed against Kurt Angle, JBL etc.
RIP Latino Heat 🌹 🔥

Midcarders, we need to address something that’s been happening behind the scenes.

Over the past several months, a very small group of Sickos unhappy with the conversations and criticism surrounding AEW in this community have taken their issues with us well beyond disagreements about professional wrestling.

Members of our team have dealt with targeted harassment across Reddit and other platforms, personal photos being taken and redistributed, attempts to follow people into unrelated communities, impersonation-related activity, and other behavior that has absolutely nothing to do with wrestling.

We’re not posting screenshots. We’re not naming people. We’re not interested in turning this into subreddit drama.
But we are establishing a zero-tolerance policy going forward.

And that goes both ways.

This applies to harassment directed at our moderators, our members, and people completely outside our community. That includes moderators and members of other wrestling communities, including the basement. Being on the other side of the fence doesn’t make someone fair game.

Disagree with us. Criticize WWE. Defend AEW. Tell us Tony Khan is Booker of the Year or Triple H couldn’t book his way out of a rest hold.

Just keep it about wrestling.

Call Tony Khan a dork. Call Triple H a doofus. Tell someone their wrestling take is the dumbest thing you’ve read all week. We’re not interested in sanitizing wrestling discussion.

But there’s a line between talking shit about wrestling and invading the privacy of the actual person behind a Reddit account.

Doxxing, digging up and distributing personal photos, tracking people across platforms, contacting family members, impersonating people, or trying to uncover someone’s real-world identity crosses that line immediately.

Don’t be a Sicko.

You don’t need to know what a wrestling fan looks like, where they live, who their family is, or what they’re doing outside Reddit because they said something mean about your favorite fake fighting company.

Argue with the username. Leave the human being behind it alone.

The second someone starts targeting people personally, distributing personal information or photos, impersonating people, organizing harassment, following people around Reddit or other platforms, or encouraging others to participate, you’re done here. Permanently.

And if a Midcarder is caught doing this to somebody else, the exact same standard applies. This isn’t a rule designed to protect “our side.” It’s a rule against being an asshole over professional wrestling.

If you witness this behavior, report it and send the mod team whatever evidence you have. Do not retaliate, brigade another community, or start harassing someone on our behalf. We don’t want that either.

Where appropriate, activity will be documented and reported through the proper channels. Some of what we’ve experienced has already reached that point.

We started r/midcarder because we wanted a place for long-form, open wrestling discussion. That means you’re going to encounter opinions you think are completely ridiculous. That’s the point. Debate them. Make your argument. Tell someone why they’re wrong.

What we will not allow is wrestling tribalism becoming real-world harassment.

Thankfully, we’re talking about a handful of people. The overwhelming majority of you, whether you watch WWE, AEW, TNA, NWA, MLW or whatever else, understand that none of this is remotely worth targeting another human being over.

It’s professional wrestling. Grown adults pretend to fight in their underwear.

Act accordingly.

— The Midcarder Mod Team

Ibou and the Self-made guys popped up on my radar when they got outed for spreading fake rumors about Britt Baker a while ago. No clue how they've managed to amass such a large following but from the looks of things they have a lot of connections within AEW, MJF being one of them.

That has ALWAYS been my main problem with AEW and the wrestling climate today in general, catering to these online geeks with too much time on their hands.

MJF during his promo last Dynamite. For those at home, yes. This is backne. Not as extreme as Sam Sulek, but give him time. MJF is in his 30s, and let’s face it, the body goes downhill from here. He got as big as he could in his 20s, which still put him as a light heavyweight. So, midcarders, does MJF have a shelf life, and when did the clock start?