This past week on Monday Night Raw, the WWE Universe finally had its first look at the brand new reinvention of Emma into a revitalised character dubbed “Emmalina”—yet it was over just as quickly as it began.
While there is still a chance WWE can salvage this mess and turn things around, the fact that that is even a discussion from what is essentially the very start of the angle proves there were many issues in the development of this story.
In fact, this Emmalina fiasco isn’t alone, as we’ve seen many of these problems rise up over the years in different ways and for different wrestlers, yet rarely do they all attack one person at the same time.
The story here isn’t that the makeover from Emma to Emmalina didn’t work and it means it’s time to release her from the company, but rather, how it was doomed to fail given the nature of how the whole thing was handled.
There are five major issues of WWE’s creative team that have been exposed even more than normal based on the botch of the Emmalina character alone.
#1 Poor sense of timing
While there are certainly times WWE appears to have the big picture in mind when building toward the future, planting seeds that won’t blossom for months or even years to come, if you look back on the history of the company, that isn’t necessarily the case.
Instead, WWE is very much a reactionary business which focuses on the present and the immediate future rather than thinking too far ahead.
In a way, the nature of sports entertainment forces this upon them. After all, if you plan out five years into the future what you’re going to do with certain people and they get injured, all of your ideas go out the window.
What WWE makes the mistake of doing, though, is being so busy that there’s very little time spent on taking a deep breath and really thinking things out for the future. For the most part, WWE has a mentality of “shoot first and ask questions later.”
Very soon after we heard that Emma would be cleared to compete again, the Emmalina concept was introduced to us, yet it took 17 weeks before it finally happened, all to just throw it away immediately.
Why was she not brought back sooner?
It isn’t as though they couldn’t have used her beforehand on Raw, as the women’s division on that roster has had Paige and Summer Rae out with injuries for months, Alicia Fox mostly busying herself with 205 Live, and Dana Brooke missing in action.
Even still, why bring her back now before WrestleMania when it’s clear she won’t be a priority to book for the big show if we are getting the rumoured Fatal 4-Way between Bayley, Charlotte Flair, Sasha Banks and Nia Jax. Worse, they brought Dana Brooke back the very same night, so Emma/Emmalina can’t even fill the void left by her for even one day!
Dana and Emma had a team together called Team EnD before Emma suffered her injury, which led to Charlotte taking over in her role as Dana’s friend and mentor.
It’s strange that they would both be gone for an extended period of time, particularly after Charlotte seemed to ditch Dana, only for them to both appear the same evening in completely unrelated segments that spoke to how nothing has changed since the last time we saw either of them. Dana is still Charlotte’s friend and Emmalina will apparently still be Emma.
This means one of two things must have happened: 1) WWE legitimately thought this was the best time to bring her back into the mix, not realising that she would be lost in the shuffle as most people do around this time of the year, or 2) WWE jumped the gun with starting to promote the Emmalina character without actually having any ideas in mind as to how to bring her onto the show, so they stalled until they felt they couldn’t any longer
When it comes to the former, just ask The Ascension what happened to them when they made their main roster debut at the end of the year, only to be jobbers by the time WrestleMania came around.
When it comes to the latter, though, that seems to be an issue of impatience. Rather than waiting a few more weeks to test things out and get a proof of concept, they got the ball rolling without knowing where it was heading, which eventually led them down this path.
Judging by the way some of the promotional material was done, it definitely appears to be more of an issue of an unwillingness to wait.
#2 A lack of faith
With WWE rushing to the end of a race that nobody else was competing in, they scrapped together what they could at the last minute just to kickstart it.
This entire angle revolved around the absence of Emma, so a lot more focus was put on her vignettes than what would have been given to any other type of storyline, yet those video packages were some of the worst material WWE has put out in years.
For a company that mostly does fantastic work with cutting footage together to catchy background music and interesting visuals, these appeared to be done by an intern armed with Windows Movie Maker, a stock glittery gold template and some photos he ripped from Emma’s Instagram feed.
If WWE really had a lot of faith in this working out, they would have spent the money to send a film crew out to film her on these beaches and exotic locales where she was wearing her expensive looking dresses and sexy bikinis and such. There would have been actual video of her, instead of static vertical images spliced together like a bad YouTube music video compilation.
For the first week, this can be forgiven. Even in the second week when things are still being figured out, it’s understandable to not have the act completely down pat yet. However, this went on for 17 weeks without much of an improvement!
Case in point, look at what tends to happen with the pay-per-views. Whenever a new one is announced, WWE puts up a very generic set of graphics on the website just to get the information out there about when it is taking place, how to buy tickets and so forth.
Soon after, those graphics are upgraded with a more official logo concept and some wallpapers which go with the theme they are building toward and it all looks like it was done with care.
When WWE doesn’t put a lot of effort into something, it shows, and when the audience can tell that the creative team doesn’t consider something worthy of time and money, then the crowd equally doesn’t want to get invested as it probably won’t be sticking around long.
Was there an uproar over the change from “March to WrestleMania” to “Roadblock” in February of last year? No, because March to WrestleMania looked like a placeholder event put together at the last minute in comparison to how Roadblock was advertised.
Emmalina clearly wasn’t something WWE was excited about, so it gave off a perception that it wasn’t something all that important for us to anticipate.
#3 Not playing to people’s strengths
The best characters in WWE history have always been extensions of that performer’s true personality taken to the next level.
Shawn Michaels was a cocky pretty boy with a sense of humor, so it was only natural for him to play a version of that character as The Heartbreak Kid and a member of DX. “Red Rooster” Steve Austin just wouldn’t be the same as “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, as that is who Austin is at his core.
Whenever someone is shoehorned into a character they don’t have within them, it never works out. It doesn’t take long for them to have to go back to the drawing board or risk looking like a total loser.
Sadly, if WWE wants to have a certain type of character, they seem to try to insert people they particularly want to fill that role into that spot, rather than seeking out who would be best for it and letting them run with the idea.
For example, Roman Reigns is their pick for the top babyface and the promotion has been pushing him as hard as possible for years now, yet it hasn’t worked. They tried to have him turn from a silent juggernaut to cracking the type of sophomoric jokes John Cena often does and it was cringeworthy.
Now that he is back closer to his former self of being less talkative, the promos aren’t as bad, but the damage has already been done and the audience refuses to accept him as the top dog, so they’ll boo him no matter what.
When Emma was first building up steam, her character was a precursor to Bayley, who succeeded far better when it comes to connecting with the audience. By no means was Emma’s act of the clumsy but cute babyface who pops bubbles, a true prototype of Bayley’s uber-positive hugger, but it was still a more wholesome gimmick.
Tenille Dashwood—the woman behind the Emma and Emmalina characters—seems to be a rather sweet girl in real life. One look at her former YouTube cooking show will give you a glimpse of someone who is more likely to browse Pinterest boards than anything this Emmalina character seemed to be interested in doing.
Rumour has it the reason this was scrapped is because WWE saw what she was trying to do and simply felt it wasn’t clicking like they had intended. Well, when it comes to acting, not everybody is good for every role, and WWE wrestlers aren’t exactly the best thespians, to begin with, so they are already working at a deficit.
Tenille’s strengths are similar to Cesaro’s, where her in-ring skills far outweigh her talent on the microphone, so WWE should be looking for ways to accentuate that and bring out the best in her rather than trying to force her into a gimmick she won’t be able to pull off.
#4 Laziness
It’s easy to take a beautiful woman and to make people hate her by having her act stuck up because she knows she’s beautiful. It bugs the men in the audience who know they’d never be able to get her and it bugs the women who are jealous of her looks and how she flaunts them.
The fact that it’s so easy to do this is why it’s been done so many times in all sorts of different media, not the least of which is sports entertainment. We’ve even seen the male equivalent of it done more times than can be counted with people like “The Narcissist” Lex Luger and “The Masterpiece” Chris Masters.
In an age where people praise television shows for being new and innovative, why does WWE not realise that it comes off lazy to retread on familiar ground so often?
Granted, a good staple foundation of a character such as vanity or pride will never go away in fiction, but if it’s something the fans have seen before, it definitely won’t elicit a response of shock and awe.
Mankind was a fantastic character that broke barriers by being strange in ways never before seen. Can you remember any other psychotic self-abusing lunatics who required lullaby music to calm them down after winning a match by ramming his fingers down his opponent’s throat? It’s doubtful.
On the other hand, can you remember a woman who was positioned as a sexy heel who continually didn’t show up to wrestle?
As mentioned before, we can even go back as recently as Eva Marie and you’ll see the same exact thing with some minor details changed.
Now, there are even rumors circulating that Kelly Kelly is coming back to WWE to pick up the remains of this character and portray it herself, meaning the creative team really wants to have this throwback to the Sable and Sunny days and are willing to risk the fans seeing right through the facade in retconning Emmalina, just to try it again with another returning star.
If you go to the well too many times, you taint the water.
#5 Not rolling with the punches
Everything previously said has already happened and there’s nothing WWE can do about it. The Emmalina experiment has failed and it’s time to make a decision of where to go from here.
When they came to the conclusion that Emma wasn’t the right fit for this type of character, what course of action did WWE take? They had her come out to say the idea was scrapped and to tell us to forget about it.
Basically, this equates to waiting 17 weeks to hear “nevermind.”
Why not try to turn into the skid? Why not try to build something out of this? Spending all that time setting something up just to have it yield nothing is a poor work ethic.
Some of the most basic day-to-day products we use all the time were birthed out of failures. Bubble wrap was supposed to be a wallpaper texture, but nobody wanted it and it was then sold as a packaging material. The Slinky was created to stabilise instruments on boats and turned into a childrens’ toy.
Why can’t WWE take this and get something good out of it, instead of throwing it away and just reverting back to what seems to be the heel Emma character from before, who wasn’t really connecting with the audience all that much anyway?
If WWE treats this more like a job interview and says Emma didn’t prove herself able to do the job, so she’s not hired for it and is back to square one from before the whole interview process, it shows the character archetype is more important to them than the performer, who in the end is the actual person making them money.
People wanted to see Chris Jericho when he was The Liontamer, The Ayatollah of Rock ‘n’ Rolla, the suited quiet heel and more. He was allowed to adapt to whatever would work and if the same courtesy isn’t given to Emma, she will be stuck in limbo.
All of this combined resulted in 17 weeks being spent promoting something that will not actually pan out, so neither the WWE itself, nor Tenille Dashwood, nor the WWE fans will end up getting anything out of it but wasted time watching those cheap vignettes.
Send us news tips at [email protected]
What makes Sting special? His first AEW opponent opens up RIGHT HERE.
