WWE: NXT Needs To Tread Carefully With Lacey Evans’ Character

Lacey Evans and her ‘Lady of NXT’ character has proven incredibly divisive in terms of the way fans perceive it, and it’s fascinating to see the sheer polarity of the debate, especially on Twitter. Is Evans’ heel work highly effective satire, or is she going too far in her quest to push buttons?

As tends to be the case, there’s no clear answer to this question. The type of character Evans portrays will necessarily be imbued with the baggage and beliefs of those perceiving her.

We are in an era of wrestling in which the lines between character and individual are incredibly blurred. We can no longer be sure whether a wrestler’s conduct on social media is purely representative of the character, or an indicator as to the real-life socio-political beliefs of the performer.

Now we know more than ever before about the personal lives of the performers, it can be difficult to disentangle the two, leading to speculation as to how exactly their real-life stances and beliefs feed into the character they portray.

What muddies the waters even further is the fact that, at least in WWE where gimmick micromanagement remains king, any given character is infinitely more likely to be parroting a script than expressing any personally-held beliefs.

When we see Sami Zayn appear in a segment which manages to be transphobic and racist in one horrible blow, how do we reconcile this with what we know about him, both as a character and as a real-life person?

At whose door do we lay the responsibility for the content of that segment, and how much is it reasonable to blame the performer? With the fundamental change in how we consume and interact with media, can we continue to separate the fictional actions and beliefs of a character from the person behind the metaphorical mask?

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These questions are particularly pertinent in the case of Lacey Evans. Her gimmick has proven genuinely uncomfortable for many fans – undercurrents of racism in her rhetoric (‘cleaning up the division’) are unquestionably (if unintentionally) present, especially in a division in which non-white performers such as Kairi Sane, Bianca Belair and Dakota Kai play a prominent role.

Here, the writers must tread incredibly carefully if they’re to roll with such a contentious persona while avoiding the worst of the unfortunate implications which may arise from it. It’s clear that Evans’ gimmick is still evolving, and the need for fine-tuning is apparent – this is, after all, the point of NXT as a ‘developmental’ brand, and ‘developing’ a character will often involve making mistakes and errors of judgement.

How ready we are to forgive errors of judgement may depend on the nature of the error. The depiction of Candice LeRae as ‘Johnny Gargano’s Worried Wife’ was quite rightly met with anger, but recent episodes of NXT have made efforts to move away from it.

It seems clever to me to have Lacey Evans draw attention to this piece of characterisation – hanging a lampshade on LeRae’s problematic presentation by aligning the ‘worried wife’ persona with Lacey’s regressive attitude towards marriage. When Lacey Evans opines that Candice should go back to ‘looking out for her man’, we are supposed to take this as an absurd notion, and this acknowledges the unsuitability of LeRae’s prior depiction without literally spelling it out in big red letters.

I think Lacey Evans’ heel persona is beginning to hit its stride, and her feud with LeRae has allowed an exploration of one of the more interesting elements of Evans’ character: her blatant hypocrisy.

Evans touts herself as a self-made, self-sufficient ‘Lady’: she’s ex-military, which means she’s tough and disciplined, not to mention patriotic. She’s a single mother, which means she’s family-centric. She’s slim and blonde, dressed like a classic 1950’s pinup: just the right side of ‘sexy’ whilst remaining demure enough to be ‘decent’. So far, so cliché.

But what’s fascinating to me about Evans’ portrayal of all these characteristics is that none of them are enough to make us like her. She’s got all the right ingredients to be an all-American success story, and in another era these qualities would surely have made her the beaming, white-toothed face of the Women’s Division.

She’s the anti-Liberty Belle, and from a British perspective it’s fresh and interesting to see a character so manifestly “American Patriot” (usually seen pulling in the cheap ‘USA! USA!’ pop) being portrayed as, well, as awful.

So what is it about Evans that makes it so easy to dislike her? Well, that’s where the hypocrisy comes in. Where Evans dictates rigid standards of decency and properness for the rest of NXT’s women’s division, she is very ready to make allowances and exceptions for herself.

She insists that Candice LeRae concentrate on homemaking and being a good wife while she herself focuses her attentions on rising to the top of the women’s division – an ambition surely not compatible with having one’s husband’s dinner ready every night by 6pm.

She touts the virtues of ladylike behaviour whilst trash-talking her opponents – her aggressive, highly physical ring style is at odds with notions of ladylike grace and restraint.

She has the nerve to name her finishing manoeuvre the Women’s Right whilst espousing a regressive attitude towards women’s liberation, ambition and equality. The internalised misogyny runs strong in this one, and the result is an outdated set of conservative values which Evans notably applies to every woman but herself.

So when Evans tweets backwards garbage about looking after your man, it’s pretty apparent to me that we’re not supposed to take this as a sincere indicator of the performer’s attitude. Hell, the character doesn’t even seem to sincerely believe in it, except as a means of keeping the women around her down.

Her character comes with a pretty unambiguous message: she is a morally superior example of modern womanhood, and her competitors are beneath her. Those old stereotypes she leans into are designed to rub the modern audience up the wrong way, and so far she’s been successful at it – arguably the entire point of a heel character.

Here’s where the cracks start to show, though. Because it’s arguably not Evans herself that’s the problem so much as two far broader concerns: how she’s received by the audience, and how far a character like hers can be taken by a company still carrying the baggage of decades of legitimately repressive attitudes towards women.

A heel is only ever as effective as the audience which receives them. For Evans, there’s considerable ire: she pushes the buttons of the modern female audience in exactly the way she’s written to, and in that respect she’s doing the job she’s been sent out there to do.

But there’s a very real risk in America’s fraught political climate that there will be those who see Evans instead as an icon. An anti-hero, perhaps, telling the ‘truths’ others are ‘too afraid’ to speak aloud. It’s depressing to contemplate, but there are those in WWE’s target audience who won’t even consider that what Lacey Evans stands for could be considered wrong.

While Evans is quite clearly being presented as a bad guy, that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is going to see it that way. NXT need to tread very carefully in the way they present Evans – it’s not enough to say ‘this is a bad person with bad opinions’. There must be measurable consequences.

This is an integral part of the heel/face narrative transaction: there must be retribution for the heel’s bad behaviour. Otherwise, it all feels a little bit flat. It’s very well to say someone is bad. It’s another thing to show us that bad behaviour being challenged, and ultimately leading to that person’s downfall.

The problem is, Lacey has been pretty successful so far. That’s not to say that heels should never be successful. Another integral part of the heel/face dynamic is the chase – the building frustration and tension that comes when the face character is repeatedly thwarted, culminating in the euphoria of their eventual victory.

With Evans, it all feels a bit one-sided. She’s had little trouble racking up wins against most of her opponents. Even Candice LeRae – she of thumb-tacked boot to the face fame – struggled to get one-up on Evans despite being a comparative veteran with an impressive list of accolades to her name. And while this feeds into the greater story – LeRae lost her cool, which lost her the match – it still lends Evans an aura of hypercompetence antithetical to the notion of her being in the wrong.

There are signs that creative know what they’re doing: as Joe Soriano points out, the ‘Women’s Right’ is a deliberately anticlimactic finisher, destroying any sense of momentum or achievement, the kind of finisher nobody wants to cheer for – but even here they have to take care not to accidentally turn it into an unstoppable superpower.

If NXT want to drive home Lacey’s behaviour as gross and un-aspirational, then we need to see that it has consequences. We need to see her arrogance and moral superiority demonstrated as her undoing. We need to see her hypocrisy thrown back in her face. We may well get to see that should the feud with LeRae go further than just this one match – and it’s always prudent to be patient, particularly where developmental is concerned.

NXT is still a WWE product, and while there remain significant problems in the booking, handling and writing of their main women’s division – just this week we’ve seen ‘top babyface’ Ronda Rousey slut-shaming her rivals – it’s hard to have faith and patience while the company irons out the details of a gimmick that has the potential to go awry very easily.