10 Things WWE Regrets About Backlash
3. The Beginnings Of A Deeply Damaging Feud
Kevin Owens almost had to turn babyface in 2019. The story didn't demand it; he was simply beaten like a drum in an abysmal, one-sided and cruel storyline with Braun Strowman, who also suffered through its appalling, incredibly WWE scripting.
What happened, reductively, is that what WWE values as decent character attributes are so deranged that they effectively penned an inadvertent double-turn angle.
It started at Backlash - well, it didn't, it started on RAW in a superior prequel, which is another problem entirely - when the hapless pair of Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn were annihilated by Braun Strowman and Bobby Lashley. Owens was barely given a damn thing; the vicious, indiscriminate prizefighter, who's hardly f*cking Sunil Singh in the size department, further devolved into a chickensh*t heel.
And thus the theme of their subsequent, internecine conflict was formed: Owens was the lamentable villain unable to draw heat, because he was just scared sh*tless all the time, while Strowman was the gigantic a*shole who with no real rationale covered Owens in sh*t and half-killed him via table bump from the top of a steel cage.
It was a tale of bully versus wimp, promoted by the B a STAR guys, in which the bully was the hero.