Carmella Can Be A ‘Diva’, But She Can’t Win At WWE SummerSlam 2018

With SmackDown Women’s Champion Carmella wearing Charlotte Flair’s “Diva” criticism as a badge of honor, it might be time for her to lose the title.

When WWE booked Carmella to cash in her Money in the Bank briefcase and beat Charlotte Flair for the SmackDown Women’s Championship last April, the company knew what they were going to get out of the second-generation wrestler.

They knew that she wasn’t going to have catch-as-catch-can classics. Frankly, expecting an average championship match out of Carmella would have been asking too much. No one expected her to turn into a credible top women’s wrestler the second she scored the title-clinching pinfall. She had a simple job: troll the audience by being annoying as possible while playing on the fans’ perception of her as a worker. So far, it has worked.

Months of portraying an obnoxious, aggravating, Staten Island Princess finally manifested itself last Tuesday on SmackDown Live, when the reigning SmackDown Women’s Champ stood face-to-face-to-face with the two women who will challenge her for the title at SummerSlam: Flair and Becky Lynch.

Photo by WWE’s Twitter

While the Flair/Lynch subplot got some shine in the opening segment, the exchange between Flair and the Carmella toward the end became an interesting talking point.

Flair’s soliloquy began with the usual babyface bullet points: she derided Carmella for winning her matches using underhanded means, noted that she couldn’t hang with anyone in the women’s division (a bit of a stretch, but not entirely inaccurate), criticized her for digging up James Ellsworth to help her beat Asuka, and stated that those transgressions were why the fans don’t respect her. Flair, however, saved the sharpest barb for last:

If you didn’t click on the video, Flair said that Carmella was “a ‘Diva’ living in a women’s era”, playing on the idea that Carmella exhibits many of the characteristics that were commonplace among female wrestlers prior to 2015 (at least on the main roster). Of course, being the image-conscious villain that she is, Carmella embraced the criticism during the segment (and later on Twitter) while implying that she was more attractive than Lynch and Flair.

I thought that this was a good way for Carmella to build heel heat for SummerSlam. It makes perfect sense that her character would insult her opponents with that sort of jab. After all, Carmella, in-storyline, is obsessed with the aesthetic value of things, including her championship reign.

Carmella is also far from the first wrestler to have an act based around his or her looks. Heck, Impact Wrestling is somewhat doing the same thing with Scarlett Bordeaux as “The Smoke Show”. However, I will echo what my colleague Chelsea Marcus penned about Bordeaux’s gimmick several weeks ago: WWE needs to tread lightly with this. The simplest way to avoid controversy would be to have Carmella lose the title to either Flair or Lynch at SummerSlam.

In storytelling, no matter how long the narrative takes, the hero(es) triumph over the antagonist(s) with few exceptions to the rule. Unfortunately, WWE far too often frays from this path; their history is littered with storylines where the dastardly heels get the last word.

Remember in 2003 when Triple H suggested that Booker T couldn’t win the world title because he was black and pinned him with a Pedigree and a 10-minute tea party in between? How about when Michelle McCool made fun of Mickie James’ weight for months back in 2009? Guess who won that feud (spoiler: it wasn’t James)? What about Alexa Bliss calling James old or teasing Nia Jax for her size? All of those feuds ended the same way: the heel went over and was proven right in the end.

Carmella using Divas-era tropes to draw the crowd’s ire is fine. However, WWE has to make sure that a character that subverts the strides that the women’s division has made while taking potshots at her contemporaries’ perceived lack of beauty (which is inconsequential in a wrestling match) receives her comeuppance. Furthermore, WWE can’t let a character like that participate in a featured match at Evolution, a show meant to illuminate how far women’s wrestling in WWE has come, in October.

WWE has gotten as much as they can out of the first Ms. Money in the Bank’s inaugural Women’s Title run. It’s time that they cashed in on that equity this Sunday with a title change.