Alexa Bliss has had one hell of a rollercoaster ride during her time in WWE. The former WWE Women’s Champion is one of the few talents who didn’t win gold down in the developmental brand, but Alexa Bliss was an integral part of the women’s division as soon as she was promoted to the main roster. Despite not exactly being the best wrestler in the division, Bliss’s tremendous mic skills are what made her stand out from the pack. Despite being a part of one of the worst segments in recent memory with Bayley back in 2017, the WWE star has had more hits than misses and smoothed out the edges of her in-ring game as time passed. However, that all changed in 2020 when the company opted to change her character. Admittedly, the self-absorbed princess character Bliss was portraying grew tiresome as she was a heavy focal point of the division for a long period of time.
The character shift started when Bliss became involved in a storyline between Bray Wyatt and Braun Strowman. The evolution of “Little Miss Bliss” continued in the coming months and following her switch over to the RAW brand, Bliss was paired with the popular Fiend character. Going back to ‘The Fiend” Bray Wyatt, his character was cooling off because of WWE’s knack for going into supernatural non-sense. Granted, one of the most beloved characters, The Undertaker, is no stranger to being caught into WWE’s hocus pocus crap, but what the company did to “The Fiend” was a betrayal of what Wyatt was working towards. “The Fiend” was a violent alter ego of Bray Wyatt who dished out revenge on the ones who wronged Wyatt in the past. Somewhere along the lines, WWE lost sight of that ideology and transformed Wyatt into a horror movie villain. Originally, the idea of pairing Wyatt and Bliss together was intriguing because many fans deemed them the Harley Quinn and Joker of the wrestling world (minus the abuse, of course), but that’s not the direction the company decided to go in. Without any explanation, Bliss managed to gain unbelievable supernatural powers. She had the ability of mind control, could make people ooze black liquid, and has a demonic doll. These are all ingredients for an interesting horror movie, but the biggest issue is that the realism is completely gone.
Don’t get me wrong, the storyline itself is pretty terrible, but even if it made a lick of sense then it still veers away from the realm of unbelievability. Modern day wrestling isn’t what it used to be in the 90s or earlier, in that the world is well aware that the sport is heavily scripted and choreographed. Hell, there are times during programming that WWE themselves acknowledge this fact. One of the most recent examples stem from Ronda Rousey calling the sport fake and WWE using that as a storyline tool for her triple threat match against Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair. Here’s the problem with this notion, there still needs to be some type of believability when it comes to stories or characters. Movies are fake. So is television. Especially reality television. What if in the middle of Halloween, Michael Myers and his dead victims gathered in a circle and started signing Kumbaya? Or what if Tony Stark opened his eyes seconds after his death in Avengers Endgame and just walked off screen as the camera was still rolling? These moments would take you out of these films because it breaks the illusion that these events are really happening.
That’s what Alexa Bliss is doing. The supernatural stuff in WWE has never made sense, but it use to be few and far in-between. Even The Undertaker wasn’t shooting out lighting from his fingertips every time he stepped out to the ring. It’s hard to connect to Alexa Bliss’s character because she doesn’t feel real. WWE’s programming is mainly grounded in reality, so where her supernatural non-sense pops-up it completely contradicts the world that’s presented in as grounded otherwise. This was the same issues that “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt had as well. To make matters worse, she’s a terribly written character. WWE isn’t known for nuanced storytelling and her character is simply all over the place. It’s hard to suspend my disbelief when Alexa Bliss’s motivation flips and flops because the writers aren’t sure about the direction that they want to go in. The company would’ve been better off making her a Harley Quinn-type character. A bad girl who uses mind tricks and wild antics to get better of her opponent. Bliss herself is doing the best she can with the material that she’s given. In fact, Bliss is quite good in her role and she has a strong committed performance. It’s just a shame that her character a confused, jumbled mess that should’ve died a long time ago.Bray Wyatt
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