#3 Bayley’s main-roster career is disappointing
When you think about it, it’s quite strange how WWE management always feels the need to mess around with a superstar’s character after they received a promotion from NXT to the main roster. Surely the reason why they were called up is because they have proven themselves worthy of entertaining crowds and holding championship belts just as they are.
If there’s still a need to re-think them, maybe they shouldn’t have been called up initially.
Sometimes the change is fairly extreme, as was the case with Bo Dallas, but mostly it's pretty subtle. Enzo and Cass, for example, have gone from having a fresh, off-the-leash gimmick where they could freestyle their way around the microphone, to becoming a bit of a novelty act that says the same thing each and every week. But perhaps the most interesting case recently has been Bayley.
Bayley is now written into NXT folklore. Her matches with Sasha Banks, in particular, will always be remembered, and her title reign helped cement the NXT Women’s Championship as a belt worth having. Part of the reason for her success down on NXT was her likeability factor.
Bayley comes across as a genuine fan of the sport and is able to connect with fans of all ages – not something a lot of people can brag about in 2017. But her transition to RAW hasn’t been an easy ride. It’s almost like Bayley has gone from being endearing because of her genuine, at times, innocent nature, to basically just playing the role of a 12-year-old child.
It makes sense for her opponents to play off her childish persona, but most of her feuds with Alexa Bliss, and Charlotte before that, look like some kind of scene from a school-based drama where the bigger girl is bullying the smaller one. It doesn’t help that Bayley’s mic skills are almost non-existent. It was never her mic skills that brought over in the first place, but sooner or later wrestlers do need to be able to string a sentence together without fluffing your lines.
This week, the feud between Bayley and Alexa revolved around whether Bayley is ready for an extreme rules match. Again, on the surface at least, this narration makes sense. But Bayley just ended up coming across as somebody who shouldn’t be in the WWE. It’s absurd to be saying this, considering we’ve seen the woman go through iron man matches and take hard-hitting bumps from Asuka and Charlotte.
Things got really strange when Kurt Angle came to visit Bayley in the trainer’s room like a concerned headmaster, asking whether she wanted it to just be a regular wrestling match. Thankfully, this will probably lead to some kind of evolution of the Bayley character when she gives it her all in a kendo stick match, because lord knows she needs something right now.
