WWE Releases Three: Emma, Darren Young, Summer Rae

Happy trails and good luck, Emma
Photo Credit: WWE.com

WWE released multiple wrestlers yesterday in a stunning move, not so much for the people released, but because of the timing. Emma, Summer Rae, and Darren Young were given pink slips. The most surprising was Emma, who had just gotten out of a two-match series against Asuka where she was given a lot of offense against the debuting RAW superstar. However, it felt like the writing was on the wall with her for awhile. The company's refusal to utilize her talents, which are immense, was one of the most baffling personnel decisions of the last five years. Her final gimmick, a geek who only cared about trending, was incredibly frustrating and hypocritical because it set her up for humiliation by a company that has spent the last decade about wanting all the plaudits of social media and wanting its talent to be extremely online.

Young and Summer were hardly utilized over the last few years. Young had a fun gimmick where Bob Backlund coached him, but an injury derailed that run, which had gone nowhere by the time it happened. Summer had been off television for a long time outside of a silhouette appearance on the Fashion Files. Of the three, she seems like the one least to continue on wrestling, as she's become an Instagram model in the interim, which I hear is quite lucrative. She had been suffering from lingering injuries anyway.

Honestly, both Emma and Young should do well on the indie circuit should they choose to continue their careers there. It's just frustrating to see the biggest and most lucrative wrestling company in the world squander wrestlers' talents like that. It's also frustrating to see WWE adopt so much of a pat-yourself-on-the-back mentality to activism that it just ignores its own LGBTQ+ wrestlers. Young was left in some slimy midcard haze while WWE courted, pushed, and embraces open homophobes, whether it be through making Warrior the public face of its breast cancer activism or pushing AJ Styles despite his public comments about homosexuals.

The fact that it happened on a Sunday is both surprising and distressing. I thought the Friday afternoon news dump was bad, but doing it on a Sunday just as NFL games were about to start feels like a new level of low, like WWE wanted to sneak it under the rug on a day people generally are supposed to enjoy. Regardless, it's not a good look for WWE.

It sucks to see anyone lose their jobs though. WWE needs to do a better job creating channels for people outside the main event, especially women, to develop characters. I mean, the Attitude Era had people getting mad reactions with shitty booking, but they were on screen and were attempted to be portrayed as important. Imagine if WWE had that wherewithal today with the current infrastructure and roster, which is leaps and bounds better by any conceivable metric with the exception of top talent star power. But you won't see any big shakeup in that department until the revenue numbers go down, and judging by the last financial call, it's not soon on the horizon.