All fandoms have passionate fans that love the thing the follow and will always watch it no matter what. Pro-wrestling with no doubts has the most passionate fans in all fandoms and its a good thing to have this amazing passionate fans, but why is being a passionate fan of Pro-wrestling this looked down upon ?
A lot of “wrestling experts” like to blame the passionate fans as one of the many reasons the “business is dying”. Another argument you can hear all the time is that wrestling promotions should cater to casual fans over the regular fans.
Wrestling promotions should listen to the passionate fans opinion and points of view, but instead this experts think the casual viewer is more important. The current wrestling business has less casual viewers than ever before and yet WWE, the biggest promotion in the world, for the most part caters to the non existent casual viewers.
Calling someone a “mark” or “smark” because they watch wrestling outside of the WWE bubble is just overdone at this point. I ‘ve been call mark so many times i just don’t care anymore. In this current society of information, we are all “marks”, we all are informed of what happens in every promotion in just a few seconds.
The wrestling fans have done wonderful things for this business, like being an important reason why WWE stopped treating female talent like only eye candy into serious competitors able to perform 5 star matches. Or the fans that donate money to their favorite wrestlers when they need money for a surgery.
In the other side of this coin there also the gatekeeping fans, that hate new wrestling fans and like to presume they’ve watching wrestling since forever and this type of fans need to change and be more welcoming to these new fans.
Wrestling over all is changing for the better and is some ways it has become more inclusive to all people, but it needs a lot of work to be done.
