9 Ups And 10 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (May 6 )

4. Wacky Tag Partners Trope Strikes

AJ Styles Seth rollins
WWE.com

One of the worst tropes is when an authority figure forces two at-odds wrestlers to team up in a tag match. Nothing good ever comes of this sort of thing. Either the team manages to co-exist and then defeat an established tag team, or one person stabs the other in the back, or there’s a miscommunication to further the rivalry. If you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it 100 times.

The only saving grace is when they add a stipulation that they have to get along or lose a title shot – or something like that. But that wasn’t the case with AJ Styles and Seth Rollins. They were jawing with each other, and Vince McMahon decided to just stick them in a match together.

They were doing well against Bobby Lashley and Baron Corbin, but Styles missed Corbin with a Phenomenal Forearm attempt and hit Rollins – and then walked out on the match. Shocking! Rollins, the WWE Universal Champion, then ate an End of Days and was pinned by Corbin.

Because we needed the wacky forced tag partners cliché to further this feud. Because WWE.

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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.