Austin Aries Is Damaging Impact Wrestling’s Reputation

Impact Wrestling World Champion Austin Aries will defend his title at Bound For Glory against Johnny Impact, but it’s hard to find the desire to pay attention to this match after Aries went on an unhinged Twitter rant in an effort to obtain “heat” from the fans. Contrary to what a few narrow-minded Impact diehards think, this attempt backfired.

Although he is a talented professional wrestler who excels inside the ring and can cut above-average promos, Austin Aries is damaging Impact Wrestling’s reputation. Ever since becoming the Impact World Champion, Impact’s TV Ratings have slipped. The most recent episode of Impact only garnered 190,000 viewers, and the main event heel trio of Aries, Killer Kross, and Moose has stagnated the show, whereas “undercard” talents like Brian Cage, The Lucha Brothers, and everyone in the Knockouts Division have created more compelling stories.

Aries doesn’t seem like someone the audience is invested in as a character, in spite of his strong work in WWE. His segments as Impact World Champion have been cringeworthy, including one where he started minimizing “fat-shaming”, and he generally receives less views on his YouTube videos than more talented wrestlers like Brian Cage and Pentagon Jr.

Unlike Aries, Cage and Pentagon also don’t damage the company’s reputation by going on unhinged social media rants directed at their opponents. There’s a huge difference between generating heat and turning away fans. The tweet linked here (not embedded due to slur) is an example of Aries creating an unsafe viewing experience for prospective fans.

Using the r-word and using “gay” as a slur is simply unacceptable, and fans were rightfully incensed by Aries’s comments. As someone who is 5’5″ (shoutout to my fellow manlets who could never see over the offensive line when playing quarterback but could squat four plates), I get that being made fun of for your height gets old real quick. But that is nowhere near equivalent to discriminating on race or sexual orientation, because people literally die because of this. The fact that this tweet trivializes this is disheartening, especially since the BBC recently released a thorough investigative report on how people with disabilities are killed by police officers at a horrifyingly high rate.

Aries’s decision to use slurs in his tweet is horrendous, and the fact that this tweet remains live on Twitter is a huge indictment of Impact Wrestling as a company. Apparently they don’t care enough about their reputation, as they are allowing their world champion to use language that would get anyone else fired by their employer if they tweeted this publicly.

Sadly, that tweet wasn’t the end of it. Aries responded to Johnny Impact by stating that his initial usage of the word “gay” wasn’t a slur (it was used as a slur, and people who are gay took it that way) and then pulled the “But I like Elton John” defense.

I honestly have no idea what purpose THIS tweet served (again, I don’t feel comfortable embedding the tweet), other than to make Aries look even stranger and creepier. It does nothing to build to his match with Johnny Impact, so even the flawed “He’s getting HEAT” argument doesn’t work here. All he is doing is embarrassing himself.

(Taya Valkyrie, by the way, has a far more important match with Tessa Blanchard for the Knockouts Championship and is a pro wrestler worth supporting.)

UPDATE: You can view some of the deleted tweets here. Even though Impact was late to the punch, it was a Friday night/Saturday morning, and I’m glad the tweets are no longer publicly available.

The tweets were finally deleted after being up for several hours, and this was likely due to pressure from Impact and not Aries’s own doing. Because Aries had the following message for everyone:

I feel like a lot of fans who defend Aries’s despicable behavior here are missing the entire point of what heel “heat” actually is. “Heat” isn’t just getting a negative reaction for the sake of getting a negative reaction, because any bigot can scream a bunch of slurs at a wrestling show, diss fans on Twitter, or pull rhetoric straight out of the “MAGA” playbook. You know, all the lazy stuff Aries is doing here.

None of that makes fans more interested in watching a wrestler’s match. The whole point of getting heat is to get people to watch the match, which means that the heel’s job is to get fans invested in the babyface winning. Tommaso Ciampa, The Miz, Cody Rhodes, Shayna Baszler, Alexa Bliss, Su Yung, Jinny, Kevin Owens, Adam Cole, and Sammii Jayne are all brilliant at accomplishing this without ever crossing the line in kayfabe. They don’t use slurs, they don’t marginalize the discrimination that entire groups of people face on a daily basis (sometimes with fatal consequences), and they produce entertaining television.

Reading Aries’s tweets made me sick to my stomach as a fan of professional wrestling. See, I want to be proud of wrestling and show my fans all the cool matches and promos that are being produced by wrestlers each week. I don’t want them to hear me talk about Impact Wrestling, look up its world champion on Twitter, and go, “Wow, Joe, you like this guy? This is the kind of stuff you are into? You think it’s OK to support people who use this language?”

I hate that I have to feel ashamed of being a fan of Impact, because wrestlers like Kiera Hogan, Matt Sydal, Scarlett Bordeaux, Allie, Brian Cage, Moose, and Joe Hendry are worth supporting wholeheartedly. I believe in the show, in Josh Mathews’s commentary, and in the production team’s ability to create memorable video packages.

The problem is that missteps like this make it harder for me to enjoy the show without feeling guilty. In the back of my mind, Aries’s tweets and the fact that they remained undeleted for hours make me fear that Impact just doesn’t care about how their words affect others. And by watching their show, I am potentially giving my tacit support to a promotion that is OK with using bigotry to pollute the wonderfully wholesome artform that is pro wrestling.

It’s honestly embarrassing that Austin Aries, the Impact World Champion, is on a public forum, using this type of language. The only reaction he is generating is one of disgust, and I cannot see this behavior creating more interest in the product. It honestly undoes the hard, wholesome work that wrestlers like Kiera Hogan, Taya Valkyrie, Brian Cage, and Rey Fenix do to make this show what it is, because it gets overshadowed by Aries. The story isn’t even Aries vs. Johnny Impact at this point. The story has become “Austin Aries is tweeting bigoted things.”

Wrestling fans had some reasons to question Aries’s character in the past. There’s this conspiracy theory tweet. Other wrestlers do not wish to be associated with him. Fans have criticized him for unprofessionally taking shots at wrestlers he used to work with. He also had falling-outs with ROH and WWE. But those incidents were mostly based on conjecture. This is an actual example of Aries making a company look bad, insulting others, and mocking people who were rightfully upset by his comments targeting their groups. Making fun of short people isn’t cool, but, again, it’s not on the same level as using the “r-word” or mocking a woman’s looks. It’s not even close.

Impact Wrestling needs to take a long look at its declining TV ratings, and they need to think about the kind of promotion they want to be. They have the most diehard fans of any promotion. Their current fans will stick with them through thick and thin, and I commend their loyalty. At the same time, if Impact wants to expand, get a better TV deal, and start making some real noise, they can’t afford to run their company like a joke. Allowing Aries to make these tweets and leaving them up on social media is a sign that Impact isn’t taking their brand seriously. I can’t think of a single major wrestling promotion that would do something like this in 2018, and it is unbelievably upsetting to see that Impact cares so little in this case.

It’s important to note that Impact has done some incredible things for its fans this year, and they are indeed on the rise when comparing where they were last year. That’s what makes it so infuriating to see Aries make these comments. These remarks hold back the promotion, because Aries, even as a heel, is supposed to be a public face of the company as its world champion.

If Impact wants to prove to the world that it has indeed changed for the better from previous regimes, then they cannot encourage this behavior. It is lazy, ineffective at building to a match, and is downright offensive to the groups of people that Aries insulted. I fail to see how this is beneficial to the company, and all it does is prevent any prospective fans from showing interest in the product.

Fans don’t want to watch a show that makes them uncomfortable, and they will not throw their money to support a product that uses outdated, bigoted tweets to build to world title matches. We’ve moved past that in society today, and Aries and Impact are capable of better than this. They need to get with the times an get off their “anti-PC” high horse, or fans will continue to invest their time and money into the many pro wrestling products that are both entertaining and respectful.

Love and kindness are hard to come by in today’s world, and Aries’s decision to spread hatred in our faces (and berate us for it) is the antithesis of what pro wrestling can be. Heels can be vicious or petty without being blatantly offensive or bullying those who complain about having to see hateful slurs on social media.

On the bright side, Impact seemingly forced Aries to delete those tweets, so it does seem like they care on some level. It also seems like Aries may have acted on his own, rather than this being a planned work, which was everyone’s suspicion from the beginning. As such, Impact must be wary of having Aries as their world champion. They wisely cut ties with the unprofessional Alberto El Patron earlier this year, and Aries could fall into the same category if this continues.