3 Ups & 9 Downs From WWE Raw (May 24)

1. Soooo… Is Rhea A Heel?

Rhea Ripley
WWE.com

Can someone please tell this writer how he should feel about Rhea Ripley? Cheer? Boo? Sit there in quiet awe?

Perhaps the biggest criticism facing Ripley is that neither Rhea nor WWE knows what her character is. She’s all about brutality… and that’s about it. Sure, not everything fit neatly into a face/heel dynamic, but usually you should know something about the wrestler and their motivation, and that informs how you react.

But Ripley vacillates between heel and face, with no rhyme or reason. On Monday, she blasted Charlotte Flair for insulting Nikki Cross, saying no one likes the Queen because of how she talks down to everyone (total face move). She then fought Cross (a face) in a beat the clock challenge, where she spent the match mocking Nikki and pointing at the clock as she didn’t take her seriously (a heel move).

And then Rhea lost the match because she couldn’t focus on the task at hand. So tell us WWE: How should we feel about Ripley? Because this writer has no damn clue.

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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.