#2 Fans are more critical than they used to be
Perhaps it’s the increasing influence of social media on professional wrestling, but when the WWE puts out a segment the fans don’t like, it feels like fans can’t help but continuously and mercilessly shoot it down at a more intense rate than they used to. This week, the WWE attempted something different with their women’s division on RAW, placing Alexa Bliss and Bayley in an ambitious ‘This is your life’ segment, similar to the ones we have seen involving Mankind and The Rock.
And it’s safe to say the segment was not well received.
It’s fine for fans to voice their opinion when they think something is bad, but judging by the sheer amount of hatred towards this, you’d think it was the worst thing the WWE have ever done. Whether it was Dave Meltzer lambasting the segment on a podcast appearance or the droves of internet fans commenting and sharing their disgust; the WWE really took a hammering, and it was all just a little too unnecessary.
The segment did drag on a little, but at least it was relevant to the story they are telling with Bayley. The basic idea, for those who haven’t seen it, was that Alexa wanted to prove to everyone that Bayley is just a sweet innocent girl incapable of going extreme.
To show this, Bliss brought out people from Bayley’s past who claimed she couldn’t do anything without her father being there and was far too innocent in her approach to life. Some fans were even arguing that Alexa was going too far, and this was an example of the WWE promoting bullying. I’m not sure about that one myself, as Alexa was clearly being portrayed as the heel in this, and the point of a heel is to garner this exact kind of heat on themselves to help get the babyface more over.
In terms of the WWE’s all-time worst or most distasteful segments, this wouldn’t even make the top 100. Think about times in which superstars have fondled corpses, or when the boss made Trish Stratus strip and bark like a dog in front of the audience.
The WWE fanbase is obviously very different from the days of the Attitude Era, and many won’t have been alive to see the more R-rated product; but take it from us older fans, this really wasn’t that bad of a segment.
