>>15001217Nobody was weeping with the loss of Brandi Rhodes, a massive fucking cancer on AEW, but disrespecting Cody Rhodes (one of the founders and architects of the promotion) scoured a lot of people on it. Then there was the Brain Kendrick thing, with TK kneeling to the Twitter mob. This was more bad optics. To make matters worse, more and more of the WWEjects were coming, and the OG talent was getting pushed aside or out. AEW's identity was being eroded, going from a fun, unpredictable variety show to a formulaic, paint-by-the-numbers WWE style, with the odd deathmatch thrown in. Tony Khan was booking fully from this point, probably with pointers from Phil, and AEW started to further transform into Phil's vanity project. This could be excused if the company was growing, but it wasn't. Despite TK's proclamations, Phil, Bryan, Cole, and all the WWEjects did fuck all for the ratings. Ironically, the episodes that focused on the OGs were the highest-rated. Remember what I said in my first post about the 80s underdog movie? It was as if TK watched those movies but concluded that the problem was the characters discovering themselves and overcoming the odd - nah, fuck that, just buy the players from the other team! So, people (such as myself) tuned out or canceled subscriptions. Around this time, we were hearing constant stories about how miserable people were in the back and how the attitude and mood of the company had changed. Then Brawl Out happened.
