12 Ups And 16 Downs For WWE In 2021

4. Can They Co-Exist?

Shayna Baszler Nia Jax
WWE.com

WWE has been into this whole self-own thing lately, where they try to take a negative and make it their thing. Witness the company’s recent tongue-in-cheek tweets of “Can they co-exist?”

That all stems from the countless matches where wrestlers at odds were inexplicably stuck together as a tag team. In some cases, these odd couples actually won their respective brand’s tag titles. Charlotte Flair and Asuka, Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler, and RK-Bro all are slapped-together tag teams that captured gold, but one of WWE’s biggest tropes has been to stick future opponents together in a tag bout and then wonder if the wrestlers can co-exist.

This happened numerous times throughout the year and was a lazy trope for WWE to repeatedly fall back on when they needed to get through another week of programming. The fact that they’ve turned it into a meme of their own doesn’t make it better – it just proves they know they overdid it… but don’t expect them to change anytime soon.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.