5 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (10 Aug - Results & Review)
DOWNS…
6. Which Is It?
There’s reason to praise the budding rivalry between Becky Lynch and Stephanie Vaquer, but one thing The Man said during her promo deserves a quick dissection.
Lynch called out Women’s World Champion Liv Morgan, accusing her of “taking the title on a fast-track time machine back to the mid-2000s.” The allegation was clear: Morgan was dragging women’s wrestling back to the divas era of non-wrestling eye candy as champions rather than women who were wrestlers first.
While there’s a modicum of truth to that statement – Liv has wrestled less and has been more of a valet to Dominik Mysterio – Becky pointing this out belies WWE’s own talking points. The company loves to lavish praise on Trish Stratus and Lita as trailblazers, when they were staples of WWE women’s wrestling in the 2000s, along with Mickie James and Michelle McCool, two more divas they’ve trotted out as legends.
It really is a minor gripe, but someone wrote and approved that line bashing an era of WWE’s past that they at other times have treated as a groundbreaking period. Calling Morgan a glorified valet who is setting women’s wrestling back decades would have accomplished the same goal without nailing it to a specific era.
It’s just such a strange choice when WWE tries to present stars from that period as legit greats who can hang with the superstars of today. You can’t have it both ways – especially since Lynch is apparently a babyface again.