Hear me out... Jon Moxley is AEW's Tony Stark.

I understand that this makes me sound like a lunatic but when contextualized in this way, it makes a lot of sense. It also might help to explain the Death Riders to those people who just complain about it because they do not understand the story. It is not a perfect metaphor but there are a ton of parallels.

Revolution was a loose retelling of Iron Man 3. The Mandarin(Cope) took out all of his Iron Man suits(the Death Riders) leaving Tony(Mox) to fight him and discover that he is just an actor(lets be real, mox was destroying Cope the whole match). The real villain, Aldrich Killian(Christian Cage) reveals himself right at the end.

The parallels are endless in a lot of ways when the MCU timeline is ignored.

Loki(Punk) exposed Tony(Mox) to the threat from outer space(In AEW story terms, the idea of ego. In other more blatant terms, what Mox is directly fighting, the fans thinking that every wrestler that signs a contract should be world champ. All this does is inflate the ego of every wrestler into thinking they belong at the top of the mountain when realistically it makes the title worthless.) Mox is obsessed with this threat to the point of seeming like a villain.

Yuta is Peter Parker, Mox's chosen successor. Their relationship seems toxic and unnecessary but it is ultimately about leaving a legacy and having the world protected by smart people with honorable goals.

Bryan and the idea behind the BCC was Ultron. He wanted to create a shield but it did not work as expected. Ultron(Bryan) wound up with the wrong idea of how to protect the world but at the end of the story, without Ultron(Bryan) there would be no Vision(Claudio).

Right, you would think that was Civil War but no, Civil War was BCC vs the Elite. Hangman was Captain America and Omega was Bucky the whole time. Omega is the one that killed his pandemic title reign and Hangman was the one who protected him and ultimately handed the BCC their loss. The whole thing was orchestrated by Callis who is Zemo in this context. It turns out the Orange Cassidy is still being typecast as an AntMan.

I've seen so much discourse about the Death Riders and realized that putting Mox's actions into these terms makes everything so much easier to understand. It also really makes me wonder about the looming threat, Thanos. Maybe I am crazy.