Greetings.
Like many of you, I wasn’t impressed with Charlotte Flair’s illogical and somewhat contrived heel turn on Ronda Rousey last week at Survivor Series.
Back in the day, when a mainstream baby face (or “face”, as they’re referred to these days) was switched to heel, it was a rare occurrence and, as such, it would elicit a pronounced reaction from the fans, usually of shock and outrage, because the fans had invested their hopes and dreams into the perpetrator and felt justifiably betrayed.
In most cases, the betrayal came as a complete surprise and the traitor or turncoat and the victim had been long standing friends – usually tag team partners, who had gone to war together in the past, which made the betrayal that much more shocking and hard to accept. Such was the case when Andre the Giant double-crossed his friend and comrade, Hulk Hogan, or when my brother Owen turned on my brother – which set the stage for their celebrated brother vs. brother feud back in 1990.
As a rule, there are a number of things to keep in mind when a promotion is planning to have a popular face turn heel, First off, that individual needs to be really “over” or beloved as a face, so when the switch is perpetrated, the pendulum swings back all the way in the other direction – from love to hate.
That certainly wasn’t the case here, as Charlotte’s been stuck in neutral for some time now – having been cast as a heel, then a face and so on and so forth, to the point where the fans aren’t sure whether to cheer or boo her. That tended to be the case here, where fans weren’t really all that shocked or reactive to the whole charade.
Beyond that, because there hasn’t really been much of a friendship or longstanding relationship between Ronda and Charlotte from the get go, there wasn’t much sense of outrage or shock when this was perpetrate, which should have been the desired effect.
Aside from that, it doesn’t help that Ronda tends to come across, herself, as an emotionless, cold-blooded assassin, so there wasn’t much outcry or empathy for her when the double-cross transpired.
Aside from all that, in the past few months, the WWE has already seen fit to have Nikki and Brie Bella, Asuka, Becky Lynch, Daniel Bryan among others switch from face to heel – in most case, for no discernible reason, so this latest transgression hardly even elicited a response.
Having said all of that, both Ronda and Charlotte are decent workers and they both seem to have pretty solid fan followings, which might enable the WWE to salvage this ill-conceived angle or storyline. Hopefully that will prove to be the case, but those pulling the strings in the WWE creative department need to stop throwing proverbial shit against the wall and hoping it will stick and start coming up with better, more compelling schematics.
On that note, I’ll call this a wrap but will look forward to catching up with you all next time, for more picks and pans.
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