Why is WWE turning some of their best babyfaces heel?

Over the last year, WWE has moved some of its most beloved protagonists over to the dark side. Is it a sign of creative bankruptcy?

If the last couple years have taught WWE fans anything, it’s that the company they patronize loves itself some turns, particularly of the heel variety. Sometimes, the writers don’t even bother scripting an actual turn to move someone over to the other side of the scale, as we’ve seen with the likes of Alexa Bliss and Charlotte Flair in 2019.

It doesn’t take much brainpower to figure out why both the main roster and NXT creative teams lean on these tropes like they’re a sturdy handrail: the right turn on either end can reinvigorate a character on their last legs, if not the entire industry. On the other hand, a promoter can do more harm than good if they jump the gun on a turn, wait too long to execute the turn, turn a worker too many times, or move a wrestler into a role that they aren’t nearly as effective in.

Which brings us to WWE’s recent trend of turning some of its most genial babyfaces heel for the sake of, other than the obvious shock value, freshening up their respective acts; in the last year, fans have seen the likes of Dakota Kai, Candice LeRae, Io Shirai, Kairi Sane, Johnny Gargano, and, most shocking of all, Bayley trade in their white hats for black ones.

In fairness, most of these choices garnered the responses WWE was looking for but they also speak to its ongoing issues with character development for its babyfaces AND heels.

Let’s start with the promotion’s failure to properly present true, white-meat babyfaces since most of these turns inadvertently play into the faulty premise that clean-cut goodies don’t work in 2020, a take that even some of WWE’s top stars have expressed.

Of course, glimpsing at almost any other promotion on Earth easily dispels that theory, but that doesn’t stop those in WWE from expressing the opposite. Look at this in-character tweet from  Gargano, for example:

What this all-too-familiar bit of lampshade hanging leaves out is WWE’s role in making some of their heels far more appealing than their foils. Far too often, the company frames its protagonists as either corny, dumb, feckless, or just as conniving as their adversaries while trying to project an air of altruism.

This makes the idea of asking the faces that actually come across as decent people to play a less scrupulous role to balance out the roster all the more frustrating, especially considering that the heel roles they often get aren’t that much more interesting than whatever they were doing as a babyface.

Take current SmackDown Women’s Champion Bayley, whose Two-Man Power Trip-esque alliance with Sasha Banks — who also turned heel not that long ago, but is a more natural fit in that spot than the others — has become the focal point of the Friday night show.

WWE took a character that should’ve made it loads of money as a babyface and turned her into a generic heel that only stands out due to the scarcity of interesting opposing babyfaces (outside of Naomi). She’s trying her best with the material, but there’s little to truly despise about her besides the Mad Libs heel lines that the creative team could’ve written for literally anyone else.

Same with Kai. The NXT crew severed her on-screen friendship with former tag team partner Tegan Nox, and for what? To position her as a cowardly heel who can’t win matches on her own (another WWE specialty)? To pair her up with Raquel Gonzalez in a union that seems more designed to build Gonzalez up as a monster heel, which they could’ve accomplished with squash matches? It seems like keeping her aligned with Nox as a much-needed fixture in the women’s tag team division would’ve made more sense in hindsight.

And what about Sane? Sure, her heel run with Asuka has produced plenty of GIF-worthy moments, but were they worth misusing a woman who would be a top babyface in any wrestling organization not run by a man who — when he’s not scripting heel champions to say that they all look the same — has historically pushed Asian wrestlers as either evil or a punchline?

This creative strategy has led to mixed results in the past, so maybe WWE will luck out and inadvertently strike gold with one of these turns. Maybe LeRae’s promising start to her heel run will lead her to the top of the women’s division. Maybe Gargano’s Seth Rollins-lite dialogue will make this new character work.

But if WWE doesn’t address the root issue behind these tendencies, it won’t matter how many times it turns people; it will lead to the same lackluster results.