WWE – The Noise Made By People

Becky Lynch Returned — Was it Horrible or Genius?

Let’s say you were reading a book, and you stopped after every page to think about where the story was going. And while you were thinking, your concern wasn’t so much with the characters and their motivations as presented to you, but with what you think should have happened based mostly on second-hand rumors and speculation you’ve heard about the writer, who you assume to be a complete idiot even though they are wildly successful in their field. Would even the greatest book ever written actually seem good under those conditions? This offers some insight into how a lot of hardcore fans interact with WWE — they are the most myopic and reactionary people on earth. The plus side from WWE’s perspective is that makes them easily manipulated, and at last Saturday’s Summerslam event they pulled off a troll job for the ages.

Background:

Becky Lynch, my favorite wrestler, became pregnant last year and hasn’t been seen on TV since April 2020. At the time she stepped away from WWE, Becky was being pushed harder than anyone and she never actually lost her belt in a match, instead relinquishing it due to her pregnancy. While there was initially some doubt expressed by Becky herself over her future in wrestling, rumors have been swirling for a long time that she was on her way to a return, and fans were speculating heavily over how it would be done. Because Becky is very popular and had an infamous botched heel turn (reported on at the time by me) that catapulted her to success, the assumption made by everyone was that she’d remain a babyface.

With Becky out, WWE needed to create a new top babyface, and they went all in on Bianca Belair, who in many ways represents the perfect WWE wrestler. She has a cool look, she can talk, she’s a legitimate freakish athlete, she can do a variety of media appearances, and she was built as a wrestler from the ground up in their own performance center, which means she was trained into the WWE way of doing things and is a team player. Adding to Bianca’s current trendy feel is that she is a black woman, making her the company’s answer to popular athletes like Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka while also potentially crossing over to the massive hip hop audience by collaborating with rappers like Megan Thee Stallion. Belair won the Royal Rumble in January, beat Sasha Banks in a highly acclaimed match in a Wrestlemania main event for the Smackdown women’s championship, and has been flying high since with a streak of wins over various opponents. Summerslam was supposed to be the rematch between those two, but an unknown issue kept Banks out of the event, creating a domino effect that led to the controversial segment which I will try to recap very briefly.

First, WWE plays a hype package of the Banks/Belair feud, implying that the match is still on. Belair’s music hits and she does her usual entrance to the ring. Then the ring announcer says Sasha cannot compete and is being replaced by Carmella, an annoying low-card heel who Belair has already beaten roughly 800 times this year. Carmella comes out and the crowd is grumbling as it seems this nothing match is really what they’re getting instead of Sasha/Bianca. Then Becky’s music hits for the first time in a year and a half and the crowd goes nuts. Becky makes her entrance, and I note live that she is acting kind of weird (sort of being over-the-top happy with the fans in a way that seems disingenuous), but I don’t think a lot about it because it’s her first appearance back and she might just be really excited. Belair reacts to this similarly to the fans — she is putting over Becky as a legend she is thrilled to share the ring with. Becky looks at Bianca, then throws Carmella out of the ring, bashes her into the steel steps, and gets back in the ring to stare down Bianca and let the moment sink in. Then Becky grabs a mic and says (this is important): “what do you say we blow the roof off this joint, for the Smackdown women’s championship?” Bianca, being a typical babyface who takes on all challenges, accepts. The bell rings, they circle each other, then Becky extends her hand for a handshake. Belair accepts it, but Becky cheapshots Belair and hits another move to win the title from her in roughly 30 seconds.

Reaction to this has been uniformly negative. Anyone can google around to find discussion, but the short version is fans were extremely unhappy that the popular champion Belair got “squashed” and “buried.” They didn’t like that Becky, presumably a babyface, finally got her big return and instead of it being happy, it ended up being confusing and weird. They didn’t like that the match was so brief and wished they could have put on a great match for the fans. But I thought this was possibly genius, and will go over goals I think this segment accomplished that make me excited about the future.

Goal One: Turn Becky Lynch Heel

There have been casual discussions about whether Lynch could ever be a heel, and I didn’t think WWE would even try due to her popularity. Even now, arguably this is something they shouldn’t try, and I’m open to that critique of this segment. But I feel like she is in a different place now than last time they tried it, and there was no better way to get her “heat” than to have her be the Karen white lady who tramples all over the dream title reign of the top face who has come to represent Black Excellence in WWE.

A lot of this segment clicks into place when viewed as something that is supposed to make fans upset because it’s a heel turn. Becky’s behavior throughout is trollish, and the giveaway is her “let’s blow the roof off” line. She promises the crowd a great match, then wins in 30 seconds with an underhanded tactic. More of this will be fleshed out on TV, but early reports are that Lynch is indeed a heel and it was her idea to try it. Obviously I think very highly of Lynch as a performer and I’m actually glad she is doing something new and turning before she became fully stale to the audience.

Goal two: Progress Bianca Belair’s Character While Making Her Extremely Sympathetic

To this point, Belair has been a squeaky clean babyface whose weakness is that she is a bit gullible and can be taken advantage of. It’s pretty easy to imagine Becky sitting at home, watching Belair, and thinking she can manipulate her to get back the title in the exact way she did it. This type of setback should set off a fire in Belair; I expect her to come back with more of an edge.

Belair comes out of this situation with a visceral level of sympathy from the fans, most of whom are saying how disgusted they are that she got screwed by WWE out of her title while not even getting a match. There is some irony in seeing people say this is “horrible booking” while also having the exact emotions it was intended to evoke from them. And wrestling in the end is about creating strong emotions in the audience, even if it involves some trolling and possibly some logic breaks. This made people want to see Bianca get her title back in a powerful way, more so than if she just lost it in a straight up match. And because we know this is all pre-determined, nobody actually thinks Bianca is worse because she lost a quick match through underhanded tactics to a top star that tricked her.

The Ultimate Goal: Elevate Bianca Belair to Becky Lynch’s Level of Stardom

This sounds weird to say since she just dropped her title in 30 seconds, but the more I think about this, the more I think this story is WWE showing a tremendous amount of confidence in Bianca Belair. One reason it seemed insane to ever turn Lynch heel is that there wouldn’t be a babyface who could equal her (without a strong face, fans would just gravitate towards Lynch and cheer her instead). The way this played out indicates to me that WWE believes Bianca is likable enough and a strong enough character to make this work. And based on the initial anger and “Bianca deserves better” sentiment going around, it seems like they’re off to a very strong start. At the very least, it is worth watching this play out, especially given Lynch’s strengths as a character and on the microphone.

A lot of fans think this was a “burial” of Belair, which I find utterly absurd. WWE likes money, and they very obviously see a lot of money to be made from Belair, who is immensely marketable and talented. Comparisons have been made to when Kofi Kingston lost to Brock Lesnar a couple years ago, but that was a very different scenario where he lost in a more decisive fashion and was more obviously a guy they didn’t see as a top talent. What’s more likely is that WWE wants fans to think Belair is being buried as a way to generate sympathy for her. I realize it is hard for fans who are really invested in Belair to see it now, but from my standpoint it feels like this story is actually being done in service of Belair, to try to take her to another level.

Wrestling fans live in this weird bubble where they think it’s a good story for a babyface to beat everybody and never show weakness. In any other medium, a hero is defined by the obstacles they face and how they are able to overcome them. This was an obstacle for Bianca Belair and I suspect the end goal is her beating Lynch for the title in an actual match. This is WWE though, and this segment proved how much they like swerving the audience, so it’s often fruitless to try to speculate too far in the future. Either way, this angle created a lot of speculation, emotion, and intrigue, so it is hard for me to see how it was terrible unless you are someone who is purely getting worked by WWE.

To be clear, I like it when fans get worked and there isn’t any shame in it. Part of why I don’t like AEW is I don’t think anything they do provokes real reactions like this that almost exist outside of the wrestling universe. But there are fans who act like they know everything, always have negative knee-jerk reactions, and then get played like a fiddle, which will always be very funny to me. It’s possible I’m totally wrong about all of this (in which case I’ll delete this post later), but it seems like almost everyone commenting on wrestling — including the like 40+ year-old dudes who run wrestling sites and have devoted their whole life to covering this silly pseudo-sport — are wildly wrong about this angle and are judging the entire book after misinterpreting the first page.

Becky vs. Shayna and Cheering for the Yankees

Wrestling fans have an unhealthy obsession with losers. Most online discourse now seems to revolve around who is getting “buried” or who “deserves better,” and often these complaints come with some bonus conspiracy theories about who Vince McMahon likes and why. It’s a very easy habit to fall into because the outcomes are pre-determined, which means theoretically any wrestler could be booked to win any match, so anyone can fantasize about what would happen if their favorite received the strong booking of top stars.

As a long-time Becky Lynch fan, I feel like a veteran of this type of fandom — I’ve already been through it all, come out the other side, and am now free to offer my wisdom to the less experienced fans who don’t know any better. Because Lynch was the loveable loser in WWE for most of her career, really starting with her classic match with Sasha Banks in NXT in 2015, then in her feud with Charlotte Flair, where Becky portrayed the plucky underdog who constantly got screwed by her former friend with a family legacy. At one point, I think Lynch lost something like 11 pay-per-view matches in a row. She was never portrayed as a complete joke, as WWE would throw her a bone with wins here and there, but she was obviously not a priority of the booking team for most of this time.

After a lot of these losses, Becky would go backstage and cut an unscripted fiery promo, where she was outraged at the villainous behavior of the heels and vowed to get revenge. These would be posted on WWE’s YouTube channel, where not a lot of people saw them, but most people who sought them out were won over by Becky’s genuine demeanor, her passion, and her ability to seem real in the increasingly fake world of wrestling. After every loss that should have made fans give up on her, Becky had a knack for saying exactly what she needed to in order to make people keep believing in her. She plucked away at this for a long time, gradually building an army of passionate fans without WWE really taking much notice until they turned her heel and the fans rejected it because they liked her too much. And at WrestleMania 35, it all paid off when she defeated Charlotte Flair and Ronda Rousey in the first women’s main event as the ascending fan favorite.

At Wrestlemania 36 this past Saturday, Lynch and her fans found themselves in a very different place: she has now been champion for a year, she’s one of their most promoted stars, and there is more scrutiny than ever before. While it’s so easy in wrestling to root for the underdog or the loser, Becky has become the ultimate winner, and a vocal segment of the audience is sick of her “holding back” the division, preventing their favorite losers from becoming stars. Her match with Shayna Baszler seemed prime for a passing of the torch: Baszler is a vicious heel who thrived in NXT and I thought was likely to defeat Becky to cement herself as a major player on the bigger stage of Monday Night Raw.

The company had other plans, and Becky prevailed in my favorite match of the first night of the two-night Wrestlemania spectacular. The match only lasted about nine minutes, but it was hard-hitting, intense, and both wrestlers fought like winning meant more to them than anything. In the end, Becky won with a roll-up out of a submission move by Shayna, which Shayna will likely view as a flukey embarrassment while Becky will see it as her outsmarting Shayna and finding a way to win through superior technique. As chapter one of likely a two or three match story, it was exactly what it should have been.

Watching that match is where I fully realized the weird position I’m in, cheering for the frontrunner as someone who almost never loves anything that’s too popular. Similar to Yankees fans, I’ve learned to embrace the trollish aspect of it — regardless of whether it’s “good booking,” at this point I cheer for Becky to win and then make fun of the people who get mad when she does. As far as I’m concerned, Becky should be champion forever.

This is probably the optimal way to watch wrestling rather than micro-analyzing the business decisions, and her matches particularly benefit from this method of viewing. Becky isn’t the most athletic or smoothest in the ring (she’ll be the first to tell you), but she fights like she cares and is able to scrap out these victories over seemingly much more physically gifted performers. She’s a protagonist people can believe in who is fun to root for, and it all feels natural because she created this energy herself through hard work and determination. So it’s a very different vibe than some of WWE’s other stars like Roman Reigns or (in the past) John Cena, who were the top face but had a certain hand-picked corporate stench to them.

Becky is certainly a corporate favorite now, but only because she made herself undeniable by using every chance she could to develop her character and make herself sympathetic. I included the history lesson at the beginning because I feel like there is some revisionist history around this, where people act like she got over through happenstance and then WWE started pushing her. The reality is that she dug herself out and changed the way the higher-ups perceived her by connecting with the audience at a level few ever have. Nothing is stopping other wrestlers who people moan about “deserving better” from doing this except that they aren’t as talented and smart as Becky Lynch.

The Women’s Elimination Chamber Was The Best Worst Match

One of the personalities you unfortunately become acquainted with when you get way too hardcore into wrestling is Dave Meltzer, who has reported on the industry for years and created The Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Meltzer is maybe most known these days for his star ratings of wrestling matches, which started with a 0-5 scale but now has had multiple scale-breaking matches, including a recent AEW match he rated six stars. His ratings feed a concept that has taken hold of the wrestling industry: the idea of a match as an artistic performance that is held up to a critical standard of excellence, and fans now often rate matches themselves based on how “crisp” the “workrate” is. Meltzer’s system in particular favors matches with high athleticism, long run times, dramatic kickouts and false finishes — the recent AEW tag match he gave six stars was basically four wrestlers hitting every move that ever existed for over 30 minutes.

I didn’t like that match a whole lot, and I’ve increasingly become alienated from what the typical wrestling fan perceives as a “great match.” Wrestling is an art form, but I don’t think it should ever overtly resemble art. You should feel like you’re watching people fight, not like you’re watching people put on a great performance. And too many of these highly acclaimed matches are more like Cirque Du Soleil demonstrations, with everyone trying to “steal the show,” but in the process losing the thread of this being a simulated competition that it should look like you’re trying to win. This is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy from Meltzer’s scale — his influence on wrestling has shaped what a generation of wrestlers think “great wrestling” looks like, and they put on matches looking to score high on his star ratings scale rather than to tell a story or make people emotionally invested.

Context is also something I think about a lot in art, and in wrestling it is particularly important. If every match is a “banger” where the competitors trade moves back and forth, kick out of everything, and engage in non-stop frenetic action, it has a numbing effect. Part of what once made these matches great was that they were rare and special, but now you can see an indie-style 20 minute “classic” every week, if not even more often. I’ve felt this in particular watching NXT, where everyone is so highly trained and athletic, but it leads to a sameness in the matches. My exhaustion of this style of wrestling has led to a weird effect where I have started to appreciate matches that just tell a coherent story of reasonable length and don’t engage in any of these modern wrestling tropes. Exhibit A for this happened last Sunday with the women’s Elimination Chamber match.

The chamber is a WWE match type where wrestlers are locked in pods and there is a convoluted rules system that basically leads to them wrestling in this dangerous structure. There is an underlying expectation to these gimmick matches now, that they’re going to be full of exciting action and creative moves. In the chamber match that happened earlier in the night, a wrestler climbed to the top of the cage and did a backflip onto all the other wrestlers, which wowed the crowd. With the women’s chamber match, which main evented a long three-and-a-half hour show, WWE subverted those expectations and essentially put on a match that was intentionally unentertaining and bad — and I loved it.

I realize that sounds weird, so I’ll try to explain. To start with, everyone knew who would win this match — the winner would get a match against this blog’s hero Becky Lynch at WrestleMania, and Becky had already started feuding with Shayna Baszler, the former long-reigning NXT champion. Along with that, the other five women in the match (Asuka, Natalya, Ruby Riott, Liv Morgan, Sarah Logan) had all either lost to Becky already or not been portrayed as serious competitors. So there was no drama in the outcome, which led to a disinvested crowd. The way the match played out pissed them off even more: once Shayna got in the match, she just systematically eliminated all the other competitors, and multiple times she cleared the ring and just stood around gloating while waiting for the next victim to come out of their pod. So a large chunk of this main event match was, incredibly, just Shayna Baszler walking around the ring taunting the other competitors while no action occurred. Everyone knowing Shayna would win and then Shayna easily dominating made this match unappealing while also adding a lot to the story, as there was a crushing and depressing inevitability to her victory.

Part of why I loved this match is that it had a verisimilitude to it that you rarely see in wrestling anymore. I remember watching Floyd Mayweather fights, and I would get pissed off that he dominated boxing in such a boring and workmanlike fashion that wasn’t fun to watch. I would be desperate to see a boxer step up and kick his ass, but no one ever could because he was too good. The psychology of this match felt similar: this wasn’t about every wrestler getting to showcase their artistic abilities, but about Baszler, a cage-fighting specialist, just being much better than everyone else and focusing only on winning the match and abusing her competitors rather than being entertaining. Now obviously wrestling should maintain its unique quirks that separate it from just being simulated UFC, but this was the perfect way to establish Baszler as a total killer, as well as a vicious heel who you hate in part because she “ruins” matches like this with her methodical style. This was a match that had a purpose to it that told a more resonant story than “look at the moves these wrestlers can do.”

The cost of this presentation was that WWE put on a main event that most people hated, and not really in the “getting worked” way where they’re upset at a heel but still hooked into the story. It remains to be seen, but I think the benefits of this are worth it: it makes future Shayna matches more compelling, especially her upcoming showdown with Lynch, because she seems unbeatable and is hated by fans for being “boring.” Ideally, that can be paid off with a satisfying moment when Baszler loses, and she’s already set the template in NXT, where both of her title losses were the kind of joyful moments that make me love wrestling. It also creates a context where you don’t know that every single main event is going to be a 30-minute thrill ride, or that every gimmick match is going to have the predictable high spots and excitement. In a sense, this match died so that other matches could live.