After Ronda Rousey and Becky Lynch had a viral exchange that broke WWE’s fourth wall on Twitter, should WWE Raw use this new development to further their feud?
WWE Raw has a bit of a dilemma on its hands, and all because of Twitter no less.
Recently, Ronda Rousey and Becky Lynch traded some major barbs on Twitter. While that in and of itself is fairly typical for WWE rivals these days, the fact that they’ve broke the fourth wall more than a Deadpool comic in the process isn’t.
Actually, this whole situation now puts WWE in quite an interesting position as far as building this likely WrestleMania main event match.
While the company seemingly used to be collectively aghast at the thought of acknowledging it’s own pre-determined nature, those days have been long gone.
In recent years, we’ve seen CM Punk drop his infamous pipe bomb promo, Brock Lesnar refuse to show up for work, and the personal lives of wrestlers like John Cena and Nikki Bella constantly dragged on to TV as just a few prominent examples of WWE’s willingness to embrace the breaking of the fourth wall it created.
In spite of this recent history however, Becky Lynch and Ronda Rousey’s Twitter war may prove to be its own unique case.
WWE has practically never been willing to call its wrestlers’ own moves fake, nor has the company typically approved the breaking down of on-screen storylines in the manner that Ronda Rousey has done on Twitter.
That makes the question at hand easy to parse out. Is WWE willing to take this next step in acknowledging the staged aspects of its production, or will the company try to largely sweep these recent comments under a rug?
Personally, I believe there’s a far greater advantage to embracing this tumultuous Twitter feud than trying to pretend it simply didn’t happen.
No matter how you feel about the content of their exchange, Rousey and Lynch have attracted a significant amount of media attention with this online feud. If their rivalry had taken a back seat recently to Kofi Kingston’s WrestleMania push or Batista’s WWE return, they’re now firmly back at the top of the mountain when it comes to talked about angles.
While admittedly some of the content of their Twitter exchanges may prove too NSFW for WWE’s on-screen tastes, there’s really nothing stopping WWE from capitalizing on the waves those exchanges made by having either Rousey or Lynch address them on WWE Raw.
The only element which would prevent the company from using these new exchanges for their own benefit is an antiquated loyalty to some concept of kayfabe.
At this point though, kayfabe has largely died off. If the notion was still alive and well today in the same vein as it was in the past, than all those previous fourth-wall breaking angles wouldn’t have existed, nor would they have been some of the more memorable angles in recent wrestling history.
Protecting a concept that simply doesn’t exist in the same fashion that it used to at the cost of building massive momentum for WrestleMania’s biggest rivalry seems like it would be a losing proposition for WWE.
Now, there is a case to be made on how placing these Twitter insults into an on-screen rivalry could harm the perception of every other major WrestleMania angle on a theoretical basis. The notion being that acknowledging what’s real and what’s fake as a way to sell one rivalry would be in some way diminishing the value of the other rivalries.
To an extent, that could be true. However, it’s crucial to realize that WWE arguably wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for the audience’s capability of understanding the reality of what they’re watching.
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Having two superstars simply talk about some controversial social media posts that broke wrestling’s illusion a bit on WWE Raw would likely be a level nuance that could exist without eradicating the entire basis on which the pro wrestling industry was built.
In other words, now that the alleged Pandora’s box has been opened, why can’t the company embrace it?
Fans aren’t going to turn away from the entire product just because two superstars revealed a little more than some feel they should have on social media and it became a part of an on-screen storyline. It’s just not going to happen.
WWE has become too adept at blurring the lines of reality throughout the years, and any of the more questionable aspects of the Twitter exchanges that could hurt the match itself, or any other WrestleMania match for that matter, could easily be subtly tweaked through simple storytelling.
WrestleMania then would likely continue along with the same level of hype and excitement that it always brings this time of year. Fans won’t suddenly become numb to Kofi Kingston’s pursuit of his WrestleMania dreams or indifferent to Batista’s explosive return for example, just because of some decisions that were made in Becky Lynch and Ronda Rousey’s rivalry.
At the end of the day, WWE and its fans can handle the amount of nuance this new development could bring. It would behoove the company to use the press generated by Ronda Rousey and Becky Lynch’s Twitter exchanges on WWE Raw to build even more hype for their biggest show of the year.