I'll give Brock his due, he can be amusing when we wants to be. But the thing with Brock is that he does at least look like a guy who could kill most people with his bare hands. Jade is the same, what typical woman is going to step up to Jade? But I agree, she is not smooth in the ring and it is a problem.
Brock is a lot better today than he was for the majority of his career, in terms of personality and even mic work (although they're careful not to give him very much of the latter even now). But you get around that with stuff like Paul Heyman, right? It's possible that Nattie would have risen to greater heights if WWE had seen enough in her to give her that mouthpiece to boost her up and billed her as a legit female Bret Hart that can just beat the ever living piss out of people. I'd have paid to watch that, for sure.
but if you go to a WWE event you might be happy to see Natalya but I doubt too many folks would leave disappointed if she wasn't on the card.
That's it. But I think it's important to note the ebb and flow of that. If Roman had remained a face, he'd be wrestling for GCW right now. Hell, Shawn Michaels wouldn't be the absolute star that he is if the machine hadn't decided to get behind him and figure out a way to make him a star. You can prove that by looking at Shawn 2.0 - Dolph Ziggler, that WWE basically wasted.
WWE could make people care about Nattie. They've just chosen not to. And people can make the argument that WWE would have done that if Nattie had gotten over at some point just on her personality, but I disagree based on all the times people were punished in WWE for getting over WITHOUT WWE's support; I.E. Zach Ryder/Matt Cardona or Bryan Danielson/Daniel Bryan.
I agree, she probably gets called out too strongly but I also think she is still limited. I'd like to see her succeed and her look is impressive, but in-ring flow is really important and she needs to work on that. (I should note this is different than botches or being reckless)
100% There's a certain level of hate for some performers that just transcends whatever the legitimate criticisms are. But it's also exhaustingly stupid when legitimate criticisms is conflated with mindless Internet performative rage. And yes, the ability to perform smoothly and know what you should be doing at all times is incredibly important to how a match looks and how it works, but it's not necessarily a matter of being unsafe. Again, that award goes to Nia on the women's side. But she's related to Rock, so we're stuck with her forever and all the women are basically told to shut the fuck up and never admit publicly that they got hurt just by wrecklessness and a shitty attitude.
Jade is just not a good wrestler. I want to see her improve before she takes up valuable TV time. Nia is actively dangerous to the roster and I'd honestly love to see her gone forever before she kills someone.
HHH has managed to have the tag division sort of meander I feel, and the Wyatts being in the mix isn't helping.
Ugh. I was so hoping that HHH, especially with his pedigree ( har har, get it?! ) would value tag teams more than he seems to. The hatred of tag teams was always known as a Vince thing, but HHH hasn't done a lot to elevate the division since Vince left. And that's a real shame. And yeah, it makes a lot of the teams seem less than they are, because they're working with what they're given. As you said, we're STILL getting the bullshit 'I dunno, throw these two guys together' teams. I hate that. Worst part of tag wrestling except in rare, special cases.
Wrestling is all about story. You can have truly great tag teams, but if you don't give them great stories then no one is really going to care.
