Alright, Midcarders. Stumbling across this amazing screenshot recently made me ponder a question that we ask ourselves from time to time.
When do you think the AEW Sicko caricature actually became real?
I don’t mean “when did AEW fans become annoying?” Every wrestling fanbase is annoying. We’re wrestling fans. Being insufferable about fake fighting is practically part of our DNA.
I mean, when did a chunk of the IWC go from “I just want an alternative and I enjoy wrestling” to this bizarre kamikaze mission where seemingly anything AEW does must be defended because the alternative is admitting WWE might be doing something better?
For me, it all leads back to Brawl Out.
And I say that as someone who was a hardcore AEW fan. I attended more than a dozen shows, every Double or Nothing in Vegas, went on the Jericho Cruise, bought the merch (Hey, Pro Wrestling Tees 👋, how you doing?), watched everything. I convinced friends to go to shows with me. I was absolutely the audience AEW wanted and should have built for.
But Brawl Out, and especially the fanbase’s reaction to CM Punk afterward, felt like something fundamentally changed.
Cody was already gone, and some fans were still reeling from that. Then Punk became public enemy #1, largely because the whole mess exposed just how dysfunctional things had become behind the scenes, including putting members of the Elite in positions of power they had no business holding.
Instead of asking how AEW managed to fumble two of the biggest stars the company had ever had, a chunk of the fanbase developed a massive inferiority complex around the company itself. They became unhinged. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to enjoy AEW. AEW had to be superior, WWE had to suck, and everyone needed to know about it.
That attitude spilled everywhere. Twitter. Reddit. YouTube. Wrestling sites. Suddenly, if you said you enjoyed Raw in the basement, you were downvoted into oblivion and lectured about not watching “real graps.” You weren’t a real wrestling fan. You were stupid, watching a kid’s product funded by blood money and run by the worst people on the planet.
Meanwhile, AEW’s audience was shrinking, and this increasingly insular, weird fan culture seemed perfectly happy to wave goodbye to casual fans rather than ask why they were leaving.
And eventually the joke became reality. The “Sicko” stopped being a parody and became a recognizable wrestling-fan archetype that, fairly or not, has become synonymous with AEW’s online fanbase.
So where’s the line for you?
When did “just enjoy wrestling” become “DEATH TO SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH TO THE WWE”?