If WWE Was Being Honest About The Shield

It’s all too selective to avoid suspicion. Ordinarily, this dynamic is incredibly stark. Insultingly stark. In WWE, heels are almost invariably unable to win via conventional means. They walk away from matches when the challenge becomes too much. They intentionally disqualify themselves in acts of cowardly desperation. They rely on the interference of their associates to scrape victories. Babyfaces, in cartoonish comparison, are honest to a fault, and to an extent that depicts them as hapless, more often than not. This is the narrative world WWE has created. Anything else feels alien to it. Anything else feels as contrived as the original contrivance. The centre cannot hold.

We are beaten over the head with this rule. When it is broken, we pay attention, and it is telling that Roman Reigns, once again, was afforded the luxury of becoming a singular case. The lines are drawn with such permanence that any blurring becomes too difficult to accept as a logical development. The Shield’s reformation wasn’t a mere shock; it was a glitch in the matrix.

It makes some sense from a character perspective. Roman, Dean and Seth share the same roads on the RAW brand, and as babyfaces, they’re headed in the same direction. They are united by their history and a renewed friendship forged through testing experience. They are brothers, and brothers look after their own. But must we rely on head canon generosity? This is The Shield. They were once beyond reproach as an act. Even questioning or bargaining the brilliance of WWE’s biggest creative triumph of the PG Era feels like a diminishment of it.

They are also reunited on Monday by the original mission statement, not that this helps, really. Their sense of justice was always warped. Ultimately, as heels, they were vultures ready to serve their own needs. And, on RAW, as babyfaces, they did just that, contradicting their own character arcs a week prior as a result.

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