How WWE Turned Heel

It felt at one point as if WWE wouldn’t know a good babyface if one hit them in the face. That isn’t quite true, as of this week; an outstanding babyface was hit in the face on Monday, and it might, per this week’s Wrestling Observer, result in her being awarded, in a rare meritocratic gesture, with the main event of WrestleMania.

Becky Lynch is a babyface now. She always was, but in the fiction of WWE, following her embrace of Charlotte Flair on this week’s SmackDown, she is recognised as such. She reportedly impressed Vince McMahon by grabbing that elusive brass ring, and did so by grabbing the zeitgeist. Savagery is in. In a world in which everybody has a voice, a take, and there are so many bad ones, there’s little sweeter than an expert takedown.

And Becky Lynch is a savage. She bantered off Edge for having the temerity to suffer a broken neck. She beat the p*ss out of that entitled thief—that b*tch—Charlotte Flair. She tore strips off Ronda Rousey—Ronda Rousey!—by calling out her weak psyche and weird, alienating millennial-bashing.

At WrestleMania 34, Ronda Rousey, one of the most prominent sports stars of the 21st century, debuted and won over tens and thousands of people with an incandescent performance. On the same show, Becky Lynch was dumped out of the Women’s Battle Royal to make way for a finishing sequence that highlighted the totally ruined Bayley over her.

Fast-forward to now, and Becky is so over, so deservedly over, that we may see a belated end to this era of gleeful oppression.

In Becky Lynch, WWE has the opportunity—and apparently the willingness—to turn babyface again.