Wednesday, September 9, 2015

"Divas Revolution"

There's a "Divas Revolution" going on in the WWE right now, but I hate that term and let me tell you why. See, when I think of a "revolution" I think of something so huge that it brings about change and gets everyones attention. While NXT is part of WWE, it seems to be an entire entity of its own. If you watch the two shows, you can see a stark contrast and for all the right reasons. NXT has a more indie feel to it. The talent is more conneced with their audience. Booking is almost 100x better and you can actually understand what is going on as opposed to the main roster. Now you may not be a big wrestling fan and don't understand half the terms I'ved used in this blog but I challenge you to watch an episode of NXT and then watch an episode of Raw or Smackdown and just compare the differences. The main difference is how the women are being treated and used.

In NXT, you have storylines, compelling ones, and you have believable feuds. You have women outdoing the men sometimes and main eventing. You have women who are seen as wrestlers and not just crass sex objects or someone to prance around the outside of the ring. It is refreshing! There are four women who have really changed the game to be exact; Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, Bayley, and Charlotte. Night in and night out they have proven they can main event, they can put on matches that don't end after five minutes. Then you go to the main roster (Raw and Smackdown) and you see the "divas" as they are called having horrible matches, the crowd doesn't seem interested in most of them, they are seen as just filler on the show. You have the Bella Twins, Naomi, Tamina, Alicia Fox, and you just don't instantly fall in love with their matches because they fail to have many good ones. Now the whole idea was to put the two together in order to show how the women work as a unit to outwrestle the men and show they aren't just bathroom breaks but the whole point was missed during this plan. 

Whenever you have something old and you have something new, you have to ease into joining the two together. Of course, WWE doesn't seem to know what they are doing lately and decided to just throw all the women together and have one big "revolution." Except, majority of us can see it is just one big diva fail. There's still no storyline development, there's no cohesion. It's just 9 divas being thrown together in order to, I guess, show that women can wrestle. We know this, we've been watching NXT. But NXT women have just always put on better quality matches than those of main roster, it's a fact. You want to know why? Because they are WRESTLERS first. They don't have to try to focus on the physical aspect as much as the actual wrestling aspect of the company. Also, booking is just much better on NXT because there's a man and a team who know what they are doing. So, I hate that it's being called a "divas revolution" each and every night because the fact of the matter is, there is no revolution. The players have changed but the game has stayed the same.


Here is one of my favorite matches and possibly the best divas match in WWE ever. It is at NXT: Takeover in Brooklyn and is for the NXT Women's Championship. The match was made after Bayley won a #1 Contender's match and earned her right to face Sasha for the belt. What you see here is storytelling, in-ring psychology at its finest, and just all around great wrestling. The match was almost 30 minutes, almost half an hour of two women battling it out, which if you're a fan you know it's surreal to even watch. It was the best match of the night, even outdoing the actual main event which was right after it. This is a real revolution.