WWE: Abrupt turns are emblematic of a broken creative process
A sign of bigger issues
To reach WWE’s current creative rut, it takes more than scripting a couple of mercurial characters into roles that fans aren’t accustomed to seeing them in; it’s symptomatic of a more malignant malaise.
The fact that WWE thought they could get away with skipping a few bits of character development speaks to how little McMahon and the writers believe even the most minute details of a story are meaningless in the macro.
We see it whenever the company advertises a match and fails to deliver on what they promised. Or whenever they erase an entire chapter of a storyline on a whim (see: Merick Rowan) or when a storyline is forgotten about for weeks and resurfaces without notice (e.g. the Mike and Maria Kanellis story that belongs in the 1950s).
It shines through whenever a wrestler loses a bunch of innocuous matches or gets stuck riding the 50/50 booking Ferris wheel before WWE puts them in a high-profile feud and wonders why the crowds react with indifference to the proceedings.
All of it paints a portrait of WWE’s hubris: their apparent belief that their narrative methods are beyond reproach and that they can get away with cutting corners on supposedly unimportant story threads.
This isn’t even the first time WWE has tried pulling the phantom turn trick. As recently as 2015, this company had the likes of Nikki Bella and Alicia Fox flipping their character alignment at the rate that Two-Face flips a coin. That, too, was part of a larger issue surrounding how the company presented their female wrestlers — an issue they still struggle with — but this strategy would’ve sucked no matter who the writers would’ve tried it on.
Much like those “turns” from four years ago and those other missteps, Bliss and Flair’s newfound babyface characters undercut the journeys those characters have been on and send the message that whatever time fans have invested in following their arcs was a waste of time. And if the fans feel that the stories are a waste of time, it won’t be long until they feel the same way about the entire show.