Professional wrestling has undergone a renaissance of sorts since AEW came on the scene and it’s given wrestlers and fans a new life, but there’s a dark side to it and Bryan Danielson recently spoke about receiving death or “not” death threats for joining AEW.
Fans arguing over who’s better or which promotion is the best isn’t something new and there have always been fans that felt the need to send threats of one sort or another, usually directed at the heels.
This one seems odd simply because Danielson seems like one of the true standup people in the world, so when he appeared on ABC 6 Action News in Philadelphia last week, he spoke about the outrage and threats he received.
Some of the threats were even directed toward his son, and though this type of thing has happened for years that’s no excuse for such conduct, and it’s a testament to Danielson for trying to put things in perspective
Danielson also explained why he thinks fans are they way they are and he had a couple of good points.
“We made you”
We want to give special thanks to @theheelera_ for the transcript.
“So, it just felt, it’s weird. You know, there’s a decent amount of tribalism in our culture today where it’s like people are, you know, say politically. If you’re right, everything on the left is bad. If you’re left, everything on the right is bad and same thing with wrestling. There’s WWE fans, and they would — the worst ones would be like sending death threats to me on Instagram or not death threats but, ‘I hope you die’ or, ‘I hope your son dies’ or something like that. But, that’s a small minority. I think wrestling fans for the most part are great people and great humans but what it does is it tells you — it’s kind of like conspiracy theories. The really bad conspiracy theories so like flat earth or something like that. It’s like, you don’t listen to the flat earthers. Why do they — the issue is distrust, right? They don’t have a trust, so the most hardcore of these people who are saying these horrible things, well they’re mad. Why are they mad? ‘Well because we supported you for years and years and we’re the ones who pushed you to this level and we feel like you’ve betrayed us and we feel like you left us’ and that sort of thing.”
As we mentioned above, this isn’t the first time fans have reacted like this, but it might be among the first for someone going to another company.
Through the years, the WWE has been the only company worth mentioning, so they may be the only one many fans know, and given the story that Vince McMahon didn’t believe Danielson could be a main eventer until fans put him over for months only adds more fuel to the fire.
That doesn’t excuse the comments and we think Danielson explained the thought process pretty well.
What do you think about his comments on the situation? Let us know in the comments below.
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