Nia Jax observes Alexa Bliss and Mickie James degrade her, unaware they’re being observed. / credit: wwe.com
Monday Night Raw’s behind-the-scenes segment. How do we even begin to unpack this?
It definitely had me feeling some type of way. I was sitting on the edge of my couch with my roommate when this all went down, both of us just continuously glancing at each other and going, “Are they really doing this?” I gave it a few days, to sit, reflect, weigh pros and cons because even in a shitstorm like this, it can be done. Even if the cons outweigh the pros.
Let’s break down the segment, like it’s something right out of the Divas era, for that’s what it was. We’ve got Alexa Bliss getting busted talking to Mickie James about how she’s manipulating Nia Jax, and directly playing off of the fact that Nia is a bigger girl and supposedly has had a history of being the outsider due to it.
Mickie isn’t dragging Nia, but she’s not defending her, either, so she’s complicit in this. Only when Charlie points out that the boom mic is on and everyone heard everything do they care, and only because they’ve been busted.
Naturally, Nia gets pissed and goes on a rampage, to which the crowd pops. Cheap heat, cheap pops. A way to get Nia over as the face and further cement Alexa as the top female heel of Raw, if not the entire women’s roster – a role she’s been fairly dominant in ever since her call-up from NXT.
First off, we’ve got revisionist history here in the form of irony: Mickie James in a fat shaming segment. As though most of the casual fans who have been watching for at least a decade at this point, if not longer, forget about LayCool ganging up on Mickie and coining the nickname Piggie James. Mickie was never a big girl, or what constitutes one (definitions will always vary though). Trust me, if you pop over to Wrestling Twitter and take a cursory glance – we didn’t forget.
Second, and the much more important, if not most critical, issue: using a cheap tactic such as weight to get Nia over as the face in this angle.
As I mentioned earlier, we could definitely consider Alexa the top heel in the women’s division. She can get heat with just a roll of the eyes. She rarely drops a bad promo. I’m not gonna say her in-ring abilities are the best, there are definitely others who have her beat, but she can work as the cowardly, ruthless heel in the ring with the best of them. For her character, her moves fit her. For a girl who came into the company with no prior wrestling experience, she has excelled. I love her, I honestly do.
But there are plenty of ways that Creative could have gone about this without pulling Nia’s weight into this. Alexa is the petty, manipulative mean girl who only has a use for you if you’re subservient to her. They had it right there, when she said that she’s been using Nia and has her right in the palm of her hand. If they wanted to play off a history, they could have gone with Nia never being too popular. They could have gone off her eagerness to prove herself as a capable athlete looking to prove she’s not cashing in on nepotism. (Remember, Dwayne Johnson is her cousin and by extension could be considered part of the Anoa’i family like he is, those loosely at this point.) They literally could have done anything else except go off of Nia’s weight.
Also, revisionist history hits here again because in case we all forgot, Alexa has had her struggles as well. She has been quite open about her battle with anorexia as a teenager and how bodybuilding played a vital part in her recovery. Obviously I can’t speak to whether or not all three women were honestly okay in playing this angle out, or just agreed for the sake of their jobs. But I have to wonder if this was a bitter pill to swallow. Surely it couldn’t have been easy to play this out if that was in the back of her mind. It’s something that definitely does not sit right with me.
I feel it’d also be remiss to not include Nia’s history as well. Maybe we could consider this revisionist, but it’s never come up on WWE T.V., only on Nia’s social media accounts. So it’s difficult to say. Nia is a larger woman, yes. Not saying that’s a bad thing. She is still fit, she treats her body right and genetics play a huge part in someone gaining despite those factors. However – and this is important – she also used to be a model. One quick search on Google will pull up her past modeling photos and show that this woman has always been smoking hot. The idea that Creative would write her as someone who has struggle with weight her entire life and has always been an outcast is disgusting at best, and absolutely ignorant at worst, when evidence clearly proves otherwise.
I get where Creative was going with this, and I’ll give them applause for creating sympathy for Nia. They want to see her taken seriously in this angle and there’s no better way to get people behind a character than to see them overcome detractors. But I can’t not call them out, especially when the women’s division has been on the rise for the past year. There’s an idea floating about Wrestling Twitter right now that men cannot properly write accurate, complex female characters in WWE and to that, I say that’s not true. The writer that helmed the Women’s Revolution was a man. A gay man, but a cisgender male regardless. He busted his ass, poured blood, sweat and tears into this and it’s thrived since his departure from the company.
I cannot say who all makes up Creative, but it’s a safe bet that a majority of the department are male. Can men truly understand the struggles of being a woman in wrestling, like in depth? Maybe, maybe not. But when there are common denominators in life, such as weight struggles and shit talking, yes, there is a level at which they can feel with us.
I know they can do better. WE know they can do better. We’ve seen it. They shouldn’t have to fall back to cheap tactics. It’s a step in the wrong direction.
It’s my hope after this they’ve learned their lesson and put all angles like this back in the history books, never to be used again.
