Typically, if a professional wrestler gets any reaction or heat from a crowd, be it booming applause as a heroic good guy/babyface or thunderous boos as the villainous bad guy/heel, they’re doing their job well. But occasionally, a professional wrestler gets reactions that verge on apathy. Such is the case in AEW with professional wrestling legend Chris Jericho.
Chris Jericho, one of the founding members of AEW in its humble beginnings five years ago, is, by all accounts, an all-time great professional wrestler. Not only is he a former WWE superstar, but he’s a world-renowned talent who has his name in the annals of U.S. wrestling history with WWE and then-competitors WCW and New Japan Pro Wrestling. In many ways, Jericho’s involvement with AEW legitimized it as a new avenue for wayward WWE veterans and new talent alike. Unfortunately, however, most if not all of Jericho’s booking has hampered new talent rather than helping them flourish.
Traditionally, wrestlers enter a feud with another talent that can last upwards of a month with a big payoff at a pay-per-view where the victor—typically a good guy—graduates into a bigger feud with someone who has a championship or is issued a rematch with their villainous competitor. This structure allows companies to build new stars by having them overcome feuds with industry veterans or promising new talent. However, Jericho’s feuds—unaffectionately dubbed the “Jericho vortex” by fans—have had the opposite effect. Jericho’s booking only benefits himself while keeping younger talent like Konosuke Takeshita, Ricky Starks, Darby Allin, and Hook caught in his nebulous orbit until he’s done with them.
AEW’s “Jericho Vortex” phenomenon started to take shape when fans noticed that the Canadian wrestler’s feuds with younger talent felt more like Jericho clinging to their coattails for relevancy. As an AEW fan, knowing your favorite wrestler was entering a program with Jericho meant you wouldn’t see them do anything worth watching until the Jericho Vortex was done sucking up all their star power. Things have gotten so bad that fans began memeing the phenomenon on X/Twitter with videos of migrating WWE superstars interrupted by Jericho’s theme music—signaling that they, too, will be stuck in his vortex.
While the Jericho Vortex isn’t as all-encompassing and toxic as Hulk Hogan’s disastrous late-stage TNA run, it has garnered its fair share of groans from AEW audiences whenever they see a promising young talent enter a deadlock feud with the 53-year-old wrestler. Four months ago, fans voiced their growing frustration with Jericho by chanting “Please retire!” at him during AEW’s Dynasty pay-per-view.
Instead of retiring, Jericho did what he usually does: create an on-screen character with a new gimmick. Only this time around, instead of backing off of the antics that got him bad heat in the first place, Jericho leaned fully into the Jericho Vortex meme with his new bad guy persona, “The Learning Tree.”
With this new gimmick, Jericho takes up precious TV time every other week in a talk show segment called “TV Time with Jericho,” a glorified promo segment where Jericho and his lackeys glaze him up while standing next to cardboard cutouts of trees. During these segments, he refers to the Jericho Vortex by name, claiming it’s a mutually beneficial feud for his opponents. In theory, Jericho’s newfound gimmick is meant to give fans a scripted reason to boo him by utilizing their frustrations with how his booking tends to overshadow younger talent. But in practice, fans absolutely hate it. Jericho’s Learning Tree bit makes everything worse because it excuses how terrible his booking continues to be by retroactively folding it into his character arc.
Moreover, Jericho’s character—a fake-smiling “I’ve got the company’s best interest at heart” do-gooder is already cribbing off of The Young Bucks’ Succession-inspired EVP gimmick. A gimmick, mind you, that is also inspired by real-life heat the pair garnered during the whole CM Punk kerfuffle.
While this would typically be the part of the wrassling dissertation where a solution would be offered, there isn’t one here short of Jericho leaving the ring to go do something else. He’s a problem that would benefit AEW if he just went away. Whether he takes time off from AEW to appear on The Masked Singer again, or to go on tour with his butt rock band, Fozzy, or to take a vacation with his wife who may or may not have been “breaking the walls down” on January 6, fans need him off TV so they can finally breathe a sigh of relief, knowing his music won’t hit their ears the moment their favorite wrestlers are on AEW.
