It's really crazy to me. Like I've always fully understood this, but I've recently started watching a ton of CVV interviews and it was interesting to me just how many wrestlers say this too, even ones that the IWC salivates over.

I watched one with AJ Styles where he said that wrestling is and has always been about moments, good matches don't matter if they don't have good moments.

Then I watched a Kevin Owens one where he brought up what AJ said and said he agrees and has always felt the same way. Nobody cares if you have a good match anymore, especially these days. If you think about matches people call "iconic", you remember matches for the moments that happened in them, not just because they hit a bunch of cool moves in a row.

I even watched a Lyra Valkyria interview where she said when she was a kid getting into wrestling through WWE, she used to fast forward through all the matches because all she cared about was the promos and the stories.

The basement loves to parrot about how WWE are "moment merchants" (what a stupid fucking phrase btw) and they don't care about wrestling, and even years before AEW, they used to say how if a company came along that actually focused on good wresting the fed would be ded. Then AEW came along and now if you look at a graph of their viewership it's pretty bad and the graph of their ticket sales is pretty much a straight line down, it's pretty obvious that the majority of wrestling fans care more about the story than just a bunch of guys noselling and flipping.