In December 2013, AJ Styles left TNA after twelve years as an active wrestler. Now, if Vince and Triple H had truly been on the ball, they would have signed him up there and then. However, as we all know, the WWE didn't even make him an offer and he went to New Japan Pro Wrestling in April 2014. In hindsight, it's easy to say they should have at least made him an offer, but seeing as he's had a great career in the WWE IOTL so far, it's also fair to say that it didn't really matter.
But what if it did?
Two years is an eternity in professional wrestling. Two years into AJ Styles' tenure in the WWE IOTL, he'd won the WWE Championship twice and the United States Championship twice, and he was incredibly over for all of that time. At the start of that period, Daniel Bryan had just retired - two years and three months later, he unretired, became an active wrestler again, and eventually ended AJ's second WWE title reign. Anything can go differently in those two years.
So let's imagine for a second that someone like, say, Christian sees the news that AJ's left TNA and goes straight to Vince. He says to Vince, hey, you should probably look into signing this AJ Styles guy, because he's phenomenal and you wouldn't have to train him or anything. Vince, being the senile old coot that he is, would probably be kind of sceptical, but eventually Christian would convince him to sign AJ Styles on the proviso that he showed AJ how the WWE style works in the run up to Mania. Yeah, I don't care if you remove me from Elimination Chamber, but you should probably add him too, because he's so fucking phenomenal and he'd be perfect there. Vince shrugs, says 'fuck it', and gets Hunter to make the call. AJ accepts, and he debuts in the Rumble two years early.
This TL will be structured like
Megafighter3's collection of wrestling TLs. There won't be any grand narrative to this, but I'll report on PPV results ITTL if and when they change. It'll run from 2014 to whenever I burn out from this because of uni and other shit in my life, but I'll try and keep this going until Wrestlemania 32. Updates will be inconsistent, but I'll try not to make the gaps between updates too big. I'll mostly skip Raw and Smackdown, because realistically they'll suck just as hard ITTL as they did IOTL, but if there are any significant changes, I'll mention them in the post. Otherwise, each post'll cover one PPV at a time, with a brief summary of how each match has changed, if at all. With the exception of a couple of necessary changes, I'll hopefully try and book things as Vince would have ITTL, so that'll unfortunately mean that a fair few stupid booking decisions and angles are staying in. Butterflies must flap though, so things can't stay exactly as they were IOTL. (Such is the nature of alternate history.)
But what about New Japan? If Devitt goes (and he's definitely going) then he's going to need a replacement as Bullet Club leader. But who could that be? Well, I'll cover that soon enough, but I'll just say that it probably isn't who you're expecting, and he probably isn't going to the WWE ITTL.
So with that all out of the way, let's flash forward to the 2014 Royal Rumble match, where Damien Sandow and Jimmy Uso have just found out they're not actually going to be in the match after all...