So, you love wrestling but WWE is going fascist and you don't like AEW or NJPW: What's out there for you?

Alright, so many people are feeling burned by a bad WrestleMania main event and a week's worth of public relations mishaps so bad that it had legendary, record-breaking champion John Cena tell the New York Times he loves disgraced ex-WWE Owner Vince McMahon and the finally-beloved (after many, many attempts) Roman Reigns piss some of his goodwill away by talking about how great of a leader Donald Trump is in a Vanity Fair puff piece meant to be a profile that promotes the show.

If those PR fiascos aren't enough, current CEO Nick Khan went on a media tour to say some of the dumbest things imaginable and current Chief Content Officer (essentially, head of creative) Triple H praised the president for getting heat one day, and complained that fans are too critical of his storylines after that. Then Paul Heyman, legendary manager and former ECW owner, told a fan he'd have him deported live on ESPN.

I'm not going in depth on any of these because it's too much to get into, and it's not why I'm here, though it is important context to help you understand why I'm here: I see a lot of people swearing off WWE for one reason or another but combining it with "but AEW/TNA/MLW/insert other option here is bad, too, so I guess I'm done with wrestling."

First off, I get it. If you're a WWE fan, whether new or old, you've been bombarded with propaganda and imagery depicting it as the Big Time, the Major Leagues, where all wrestlers aspire to go and the only place that's worth watching. Second off, it's a shame to throw a love of something as varying and fantastic as wrestling away because the one company at the top of the world decided it preferred having shit in its diaper to not having shit in its diaper.

I was the same way, at one point: I was a WWE viewer from around 2005 until 2016, when life got in the way and I didn't have the time or money for fun things anymore. I've been to a few PPVs and live shows, and several house shows, and it wasn't until CM Punk made his return to AEW that I ever really bought into a show that wasn't WWE. In the time since, I've become an avid viewer of more than just AEW: I've started watching indie wrestling and Japanese wrestling, and going back through the archives to find matches that I've never seen before. It's been enlightening, as someone who really wasn't into the bones of wrestling before that.

Of course, the Deadlock Podcast is part of this. It helped me learn that I could still enjoy myself watching wrestling that isn't good. There's always something to pick up on, whether it's a way a wrestler moves or a sign in the crowd, or the announcers saying something that sounds insane out of context.

I think that's enough groundwork: I'm here to discuss some different promotions that aren't AEW and WWE that I think anyone who has sworn off both for one reason or another can learn to love.

1) Deadlock Pro Wrestling

It's the best. It's $14.99 a month for their on-demand service, and they run their shows on about a week tape delay. Those are two hurdles for me, personally, since there's a spoiler risk and a high price tag. When I spent that $14.99, I was taking a leap of faith that a voice I trust (for some fucking reason), John Blud of newLegacyInc, wouldn't steer me wrong. He didn't.

Thanks to Deadlock, I got to see nationally renowned wrestlers like Jake Something and Speedball Mike Bailey before they were on my television, and I caught the tail end of the Motor City Machine Guns' independent run through there after getting to know their work more when I was a kid. It also introduced me to the future of wrestling in guys like Jay Malachi and Lucky Ali (who have, unfortunately, I will never see again until the WWE has a bad quarter), and it introduced me to guys I've never heard of like BK Westbrook and LaBron Kozone. DPW puts on a fast-moving, hard-hitting show that's by far the best produced independent wrestling show literally ever, and it actually outpaces WWE because their website's stream runs in 4K. Can I gush more? Should I gush more? Yes, I should. They also have Caprice Coleman, Veda Scott, and Rich Boccini as announcers, and they're the second-best trio in the business behind whoever gets paired with Excalibur and Taz on Dynamite.

2) DDT

I've known of DDT for a long time, but WrestleMania this year was the first time I'd ever gone out of my way to watch one of their shows. It's comedy wrestling mixed with some of the most impressive technical work you'll see anywhere from guys like Konosuke Takeshita and Mao. I'm still learning the roster and not every show has English commentary, so I'm guessing on a lot of it, but any promotion that has a blow-up doll as one of its top attractions is fine by me. The best part about getting into DDT is Wrestle-Universe, a cheap streaming service that carries every DDT, NOAH, Tokyo Joshi Pro, and Marigold show along with many others. Is DDT not your thing? Try NOAH: It's quite a bit more serious, it's definitely not my thing.

3) TJPW

I watched it with my friend once, and he left because he thought the Up Up Girls were cringe. I did not, and I think Miu Watanabe managed to sneak her way into my list of favorite wrestlers because she does the giant swing better than everyone else by a wide margin. Anyway, TJPW is hard for me to explain. You just have to go into it with an open mind. It's fast, hard hitting action along with some of the hokiest, campiest comedy you'll ever see, like Raku, who comes to the ring with her pillow and tries to sleep during matches. It's all fun until the violence starts. You're also likely to see the moves American wrestlers will be doing in five years: Pretty much every major finisher the fans know these days was stolen from a joshi (women wrestler in Japan, basically).

4) Defy

Swerve Strickland, Darby Allen and Nick Wayne's home promotion. If you've seen them wrestle, you get the vibe. Until recently, their champion was legendary Japanese wrestler Kenta, who, like the aforementioned joshi, is responsible for all the moves guys like Bryan Danielson and CM Punk do. Defy also runs its shows on TrillerTV+, a $10 a month streaming service that carries all sorts of independent wrestling, MMA, boxing, and for some reason, cycling and cricket. I get a lot of use out of TrillerTV+. It's solid.

5) GCW

Heavily partnered with WWE these days, which sucks because I actively curate my viewing experiences to avoid that company. GCW is also on TrillerTV+, and it's the top deathmatch promotion these days. It also has some pretty incredible special shows like Effy's Big Gay Brunch, the Clusterfuck, Backyard Wrestling, Bloodsport, and Joey Janela's Spring Break. Even if I'm not regularly catching their regular shows, I make sure to watch those five every year.

I can go on pretty much forever about all kinds of different independent companies like Progress, Dreamwave, Pro Wrestling Revolver or larger companies like Stardom (I've literally never seen a bad Stardom show) but this is a list of affordable options to get started for those who aren't willing to give up on wrestling because they don't like the two major companies.

There are also a century's worth of matches that you can find online in places like YouTube and the Internet Archive from both living promotions and dead ones. I've recently fallen into a rabbit hole of Pancrase and Alpha matches from the mid-90s, two MMA/pro wrestling fusion promotions that run a worked shoot style. This means it looks like they're really fighting, doing things that seem like what would happen in an MMA fight, but things are still predetermined. Sometime soon, I'll start my deep dive into Lucha Libre, since beyond mid-90s WCW, I don't know much about it.