9 Times WWE Killed A Popular Star In Less Than 60 Days
7. Emma
Incredibly talented in the ring, Tenille ‘Emma’ Dashwood was at one point one of the key faces of the NXT women’s division. She was having some of the best matches on the card, often with Saraya ‘Paige’ Bevis, and should have been going somewhere. Had she stayed in NXT a little longer, she might have been able to hitch on the train of publicity and popularity that launched the Four Horsewomen's careers.
Instead, Emma debuted on the main roster in comedy segments with Santino, which led into an on-screen role as his girlfriend. Kiss of death? Good god, yes. Part of the problem was that her supposedly bad dancing was over in NXT because it worked within the context of the character and the smaller audience’s familiarity with that character’s history. Transporting her to the main roster with the same dance in front of people who had no idea who she was just made her seem goofy, which made her comedy valet material, not a wrestler.
Emma went from tearing the house down at NXT and completely validating the tagline ‘submission specialist’, to being a plot point getting in the way of Santino Marella winning matches – a wacky jobber who thought his own hand wearing a sock was a real snake. It wasn’t even one thing following another: wrestler Emma was feuding brilliantly with Paige over the NXT women’s title and having a title shot on their equivalent of a pay-per-view at the same time as valet Emma was having a forty-year-old man with a bad Italian accent chase her around the ring on RAW and tweet about her ‘scrumptious little body’.
When Emma returned to NXT in January 2015, her new character was of a depressed, disillusioned failure whose dreams had been shattered and who didn't believe in love or hope or goodness anymore.