The Inner Circle and American Top Team Feud Is One of the Most Ignorant Feuds AEW Has Produced
The Inner Circle and American Top Team have been feuding for two months. This feud and their segments have been an anomaly when it comes to AEW and their morally-correct business and creative.
Over the past two months or so, we have seen a feud between the MMA camp American Top Team and AEW’s Inner Circle develop. We have seen them take on each other in three different matches: Sammy Guevara vs ‘All Ego’ Ethan Page, Chris Jericho, Jake Hager, and Sammy Guevara vs ‘All Ego’ Ethan Page, Scorpio Sky, and Junior Dos Santos, and Chris Jericho and Jake Hager vs ‘All Ego’ Ethan Page and Scorpio Sky. At Full Gear 2021, it seems we may see the blow off for this feud. It will be a 10-man tag team Minneapolis Street Fight, featuring Chris Jericho, Jake Hager, Sammy Guevara, Santana, and Ortiz vs Ethan Page, Scorpio Sky, Junior dos Santos, Andrei Arlovski and Dan Lambert.
We have gotten promo segments from these two teams seemingly every week since their feud began. Both of these teams have displayed utter ignorance in some of their promos. It seems as if this feud is filled with sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and racism.
Chris was also openly homophobic in his promo segment with ATT on September 15, 2021. He asked the male dominated ATT, ‘Who’s on top?’ This is incredibly avoidable. We have all seen Jericho get other, non-offensive, promos and gimmicks over. This childish humor is utterly unacceptable. It is also a shame that the fans continue reacting to this, which throws fuel on to this dumpster fire of a feud.
Chris Jericho has asked if Paige VanZant has an obsession with him and is going to try to slide in his DMs… This was just unnecessary. In the same promo, on October 16, 2021, Jericho asked what kinds of filters Paige uses on her Instagram: Claireden, Juno, Bimbo, or Bitch. Why? Just why? You don’t have to call women a bitch in every promo. In this same segment, Dan Lambert said Santana and Ortiz had ‘the biggest rap sheets’. This is just such low-hanging fruit to assume Proud N’ Powerful are criminals because of their race/ethnicity.
On November 3, 2021, we saw another segment with ATT and the Inner Circle. Paige VanZant mentioned that by looking at the Inner Circle’s tight pants, none of them have the ‘balls’ to take her on. The ‘balls’ lines in promos always kill it for me. It’s outdated, no one even speaks like that anymore. Paige also said she could take all of the Inner Circle on by herself, obviously she meant fighting. I just don’t know why it was so necessary for Chris to turn this into a sex joke. He then told her she could put it on her OnlyFans. I just don’t think we need any slut-shaming in our wrestling in 2021. Ortiz then proceeded to ask her in Spanish, ‘You kiss your mother with that mouth?’ Sammy Guevara then translated this to ‘He called you a Bitch’. ONCE again, we do not need to call women a bitch in every promo segment. It’s tiring and aggravating.
I haven’t even begun to touch on the talent being wasted by this feud. Santana and Ortiz beat FTR in their last TV match. I really think that Santana and Ortiz should be the ones to take the AEW Tag Team Titles off of the Lucha Bros. I’m hoping either Scorpio Sky or ‘All Ego’ Ethan Page win the TNT title off of Sammy Guevara. Ethan Page has an amazing upside and he has the potential to be a star! Jericho seems to be holding back stars by keeping the Inner Circle together and it is extremely worrying.
This feud has been nothing but disappointing. It seems as though AEW creative only gets ignorant when it comes to Chris Jericho. I wish that they would be able to hold the same morality that they do for their other creative work and even their reputation within the wrestling community. I have admired how AEW has handled situations by treating people as humans and meeting them where they’re at. This has done anything but that. MJF should’ve retired Chris Jericho at All Out 2021.