Tonight’s episode of Monday Night Raw saw an incredibly bloated segment focusing on the schism between Nikki and Brie Bella. Viewers also saw the continued escalation between current champion Paige and recently dethroned champ and now number one contender, AJ Lee.
The fan reaction during the latter was some of the louder cheering we’ve heard from the WWE Universe during a Women’s segment in a while. The “Divas Suck” chant during the former really illuminates what the fans think about current booking of the women’s division.
For the past eight or nine years, the WWE has been littered with a bunch of women who don’t really care about professional wrestling and only seek to use the company as a springboard to acting or modeling careers. The few women who HAVE cared about wrestling and about their company (ex. AJ Lee, Paige, Emma, Tamina Snuka, Natalya, Naomi) have had to work twice as hard because of they had to carry mediocre in-ring opponents and three times harder than that just to get noticed because they haven’t, as AJ Lee so eloquently put it, “sucked up to the right people.”
Then you have the Bella twins. The majority of the audience has been lethargic since this angle began and doesn’t show any sign of changing. It’s no secret that the Bellas are in a protected position, with Brie marrying Daniel Bryan recently and Nikki dating John Cena. It’s argued that had it not been for that, they may have been part of the purge that saw nearly twenty superstars released from contracts earlier this year.
Though Vince McMahon, Triple H and company have never been the best when it comes to tapping into the zeitgeist of the modern era, even they have to be getting the hint. The WWE fans no longer want failed lingerie models for eye candy. They don’t want Divas, they want women’s wrestlers. Do you also feel the same way?
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