8 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2025

2. Guess Who’s Back (In The Title Picture)

WWE Royal Rumble 2025 Charlotte Flair
WWE

Charlotte Flair is undoubtedly one of the biggest stars in WWE, period.

The reality is that she also is a polarizing figure, being viewed as the female John Cena (circa 2006-2013) in that she either is wearing a title or is challenging for a title. In her last run, she returned in December 2022 and won the SmackDown Women’s Championship in her first match after a seven-month layoff. She lost the title at WrestleMania and would then challenge for a title four times in a four-month span before landing on the injured list in December 2023.

Then in her first match back, she punched her ticket to WrestleMania 41 to challenge for a title by becoming the first woman to win the Royal Rumble twice.

Again, this is not to say that Flair isn’t a huge star or doesn’t deserve to fight for titles, but this compulsive desire to immediately thrust the 14-time world champion back into the center of everything when she’s been away for a year is just going to lead to fans resenting her again.

Hopefully, she will turn in strong performances in the ring and on the mic in the coming weeks to temper this reaction, but if she’s just wooing and calling herself the Queen, it’s going to get old fast.

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Contributor
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.