Again, Bayley, in singles matches, has a far superior record to Sasha. The number one contender matches in August 2014 are especially interesting: after losing the first, Sasha demands a rematch. A "prove it" moment. And Bayley goes over again.

Why were they building Sasha—the heel—as the one who is failing? Her looks of exasperation, the failure of arrogance—what was this saying, in story, about Sasha Banks?

It was saying that she's not the finished product. She mocks Bayley but loses to her. She carries herself with such overconfidence and poise—a legitimate aura and presence—that it masks her own failings.

Think all the way back to Sasha's first story as a face, the secret admirer story. Sasha wanted to be loved in the most naive, eager, almost pathetic, sense. She was attacked from behind in that feud, and though it never really had a conclusive finish—she lost in singles to Audrey Marie, but the feud more or less ended in a tag match in which Sasha's team went over—that betrayal/aggression stuck with her. Audrey Marie thought Sasha had "taken her spot," like how Sasha felt Bayley was receiving opportunities that should be hers (despite losing in the #1 contenders matches—the willful blindness of the heel, to a tee).

What Is A Face?

I keep feeling like I'm selling Bayley short and denying her agency (and I kinda am). I struggle with a philosophical question: Is playing a straight babyface—again, an actual babyface—less nuanced than playing a shaded character, or a heel? It appears so, definitionally. But you can show the struggles of someone good, their battles with morality—not just their battles against opponents who seek to belittle or berate or degrade them. The best faces demonstrate internal struggle but always fall on the side of justice, even if it continually hurts them.

One thing I loved about Sami Zayn's journey was how his unwillingness to take shortcuts (e.g., hit opponents with the belt) continually hindered his progress toward the NXT Championship.

In a way, it's the sense of playing a too-perfect character. No one in real life is a straight babyface. But we can accept them in our stories because all humanity knows of those internal struggles, and that we know that always being wholly pure and righteous is often a path to failure and pain.

It's the classical morality play. Good faces make you want them to succeed. But great faces hurt you, inside; they hurt your very core of wanting to be a decent and upstanding and virtuous human being when they inevitably fail, and fail, and fail. They make the viewer struggle with the nature of goodness, of whether justice is worth all the pain and heartbreak. Bayley is unbelievably brilliant at making you feel devastated for her.

When Charlotte slaps her and joins the BFFs, Bayley sells the physical pain of the slap well. But it's the emotional pain and heartbreak she sells that makes you invested. Sitting on her knees, holding her face and covering her eyes with her hand, waiting for the final blow of Natural Selection as if she's Ned Stark awaiting the "king's justice."

Maybe grey characters or heels are more nuanced. But sometimes what we all need is a hearkening of the classics: can goodness triumph in the face of adversity? Is goodness a virtue of its own, rather than a means to an end?

For a company that historically is a face-dominant territory, it's shocking how very, very few decent faces WWE produces and has on the roster. Bayley, Zayn, Bryan. In fact, in the traditional sense, those are not just the only decent faces the WWE has recently put forth, they're nearly the only real faces, period.

That is not to say there haven't been or aren't great characters. There most certainly has been. But clean, legitimate, contextually appropriate faces center your program. They are the arbiters of truth and goodness that other characters either strive for or openly reject (and, frequently, with failed striving leading to the rejection).

Faces sell merchandise by the buckets not because they're forced down our throats, not because they're booked as superhuman, but because they're actually good people and fans like rooting for actually good people.

Imagine, for example, a very successful businessperson who, through a mixture of hard work, a lot of luck, the active support of powerbrokers and kingmakers, and a favorable institutional system, rose to the very pinnacle of their industry. That person, while on the very top of the world, believes they're an underdog, that they currently face such hardships, that they are oppressed and have to overcome great challenges. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Millionaires and billionaires who think they are the underdog are not just wrong, they're not just deluded—they're sociopaths. (Oh yeah, they also make sexist insults.)

In a meta-sense, if this type of character in a work of fiction is presented by self-aware creators, it's an incredible statement on the gullibility of humans, how disturbing bandwagoning effects can be. Claiming to be inherently virtuous simply because of your identity is tautologous to the extreme—and even more so when your actions are not in any way virtuous.

Legitimately believing that described person is an actual representation of goodness—that they are a face in the real sense of the word—is a special case of insanity.

Bayley is nothing like that, though. One complaint is that she's simply too sweet. But she isn't saccharine; she's real. She's a good person, full stop. She's what we all want to be, and like to think we are. Sasha Banks, however, isn't a bad person: She's what we sometimes become in pursuit of of our goals. Ruthless, arrogant, and yes, successful—but at what cost to yourself?

(I mean, I'm giving you Sasha's eventual face turn—a story that can and should be slow-built for years. It's a story that, if done right, will be viewed not just as a great wrestling angle, but a great American work of fiction, period. There's no doubting that Kaestner-Varnado would fulfill her end of the bargain: in her Talk Is Jericho podcast interview, her and Jericho discussed how her favorite wrestler, Eddie Guerrero, was so good because he could be both loved as a face or absolutely hated as a heel. Though she's not yet turned, she will someday, and much like her idol, she'll be the most beloved wrestler on the planet.)

Fantasy Booking

No, Sasha is not yet shaded this way. There is yet to be any moral conflict, any inner turmoil—she turned heel and has been The Boss ever since. I've not seen one iota of remorse or regret on her face or in her actions—and trust me, I've looked really damn hard. But review her character arc: there are so many little things about overcoming adversity or silencing the critics or making it on her own. These are distinctly face characteristics and will inevitably be part of any future turn.

Why does Sky's the Limit, which some say doesn't fit because the lyrics especially are too face-like, work for Sasha Banks? Sasha is a heel, and a damn good one at that: but she is not destined to always be a heel. Her redemption arc has all-but flashed in front of our eyes.

Everyone of us has fantasy booked the women's division on the main roster in our own minds. I keep shooting this idea down in my mind, but it keeps popping back up: Are they going to turn Sasha, if not "face," tweener? The comparisons to The Rock are blatantly obvious, except that Sasha, unlike The Rock, is an in-ring master.

I'm not saying I want this to happen, or that I think it's the best idea. But it's a coherent idea and one that Kaestner-Varnado could absolutely rock. So often, talented members of the roster face the dreaded "creative has nothing for you" status that is utterly career-crushing. Performers need to be on TV and in entertaining arcs or interest will fade—it's the simple nature of the business.

This story even works for Sasha failing to quickly win the women's championship on the main roster, and is a sort of continuity that is sorely lacking in WWE.

I would love, love, after Bayley goes over (leaving myself open to a swerve here, but, come on) at TakeOver: Respect, to have Sasha offer a meek handshake and walk off slowly, head down, with her long-buried doubts written on her face. I would completely trust Kaestner-Varnado to pull this off compellingly.

(Again, this hasn't been teased at all, so I'm almost certainly miles off here.)

The above section is more-or-less a liveblogging of my internal narration. I don't know what's going to happen, which, frankly, is utterly terrifying. Because we know how good Sasha can be, how good Bayley can be—we've all seen it firsthand.

I'm not trying to be a debbie downer. But God if it doesn't make me more than a little scared. I care about Sasha Banks. I care about Bayley. And here's a sure sign of a total mark—I'm absolutely worried about the future of the characters. But this is the cruel twist of the Reality Era. I'm not worried that Sasha Banks or Bayley won't succeed because of storyline obstacles. I'm deathly afraid they won't be ever given the proper chance to succeed and reach the heights they can—and already have—because they're women. Somehow the biggest heels, whether it be through incompetence or malice, have become real-life ownership and backstage voices.

I'm scared. Really scared. But honestly, is there any possible better sign of how invested in these characters—and by extension, enormous fans of the respective performers—I've become?

Maybe we're all just being worked, really damn hard.

(Nah. I'm legit terrified.)

Fairy Tales

In the last month or so, Sasha has again and again said that "fairy tales don't have a happy ending," and that she would teach all the little girls what a "real role model is." One could discount this as simply Banks running down her rival—but as we've seen, Sasha's attitude toward Bayley is not so black-and-white. Sasha is being mean, yes. But she's not, from the character's point of view, lying. She legitimately believes herself to be the best, and she only reached that status by abandoning her naivety, by willingly discarding her innocence, and becoming cold and calculating. It is not that Sasha Banks is mocking the idea of role models for little girls. She's mocking the idea of Bayley being the ideal role model, rather than herself, the champion (or, post-Brooklyn, the soon-to-be-again champion). It should be noted that since Brooklyn, Sasha has told Bayley she earned her respect—but that she's still not The Boss.

(Also not The Boss: this dude dancing in the background.)

Martinez recently expressed hesitancy toward an eventual heel turn for Bayley. Done right, this could be a masterful piece of storytelling. What's more, the groundwork—already being laid—can easily be established for a double turn. (Actually, a Bayley heel turn can probably only be done by including Sasha in some way, as the chemistry between the two is otherworldly.)

Imagine that Bayley faces failure and failure and heartbreak and heartbreak in the coming years. All the while she sees her greatest rival, the one person most antithetical to her worldview, standing tall and dominating the women's division. It slowly eats away at Bayley—she is human after all—until one day she cracks.

Sasha Banks would see this as the ultimate victory—she corrupted Bayley. Bayley.

But Sasha isn't evil. She's cutthroat, ruthless, and callous. She's not evil. There are limits, even for her. As Bayley wreaks havoc on the division, and crushes the hearts of her most devoted fans, Sasha begins to wonder, have I done the right thing?

Bayley's heel turn would need to be relatively short and ABSOLUTELY VICIOUS. She needs to be booked as a monster heel, like she had a demon inside her all along—and it needs to bring her unmatched dominance, but at the cost of her identity.

Here's the thing: a Bayley heel turn wouldn't be all that different from Sasha's heel turn, only that it would be shorter (Banks will almost surely stay a heel/tweener most of her career—she's so malicious that I constantly find myself wondering whether she's grinding the hell out of her teeth as a character trait). Wrestling is like all fictional mediums: you can tell largely the same stories, if they are told well and with established, sympathetic characters.

And it would be an absolute treat to see Martinez, so skilled with facial expressions and body language, enraged and tormented by a vitriolic heart.

The Best There Is

You build a company on engrossing rivalries between layered characters. This has always been true, but after the raft of nuanced, smart, engaging stories that American pop culture has produced in the 21st century, it's even more necessary.

People are not good or bad. They're people. They approach different situations and different peers in disparate ways. Witness Sasha running down Bayley versus her co-opting Becky versus her initial fear of Charlotte and then overcoming that fear through success.

Long-form television drama is the great American cultural medium of the early 21st century. The representation of the world as it is, not the halcyon ideas of the way we used to pretend it was, fits perfectly a cultural zeitgeist of emphasizing reality—hell, emphasizing reality even when it's fake—as the hallmark of storytelling.

We love anti-heroes like Walter White, people just trying to scrape by in a post-modern, uncaring world. We root for those, however flawed they may be, working to make sense of rigid and unjust systems—and we feel distress when those systems inevitably win, as the death of Stringer Bell proved.

If you present legitimate, consistent motivations for your characters, they will win the favor of viewers. They may be "good," they may be "bad." What's important is whether they keep people coming back to see their growth. The Cold War is long over, and the idea of All-American Goodness and taking your vitamins and saying your prayers has been exposed as an utter sham to the whole world.

I'll put this out there: There's a large part of me that doesn't think they can top Brooklyn. Really. And that's nothing against the performers (clearly: I've been a blubbering idiot ever since the final video promo on yesterday's episode of NXT, which, holy shit). But that night was just so special that it's impossible to envision something topping it ... until of course they go and do just that.

Everyone said there was no way Brooklyn would be better than Unstoppable. No way.

Well, in our stupid fucking faces.

I suppose we all should have learned our lesson by now: Never underestimate these two.

When Kaestner-Varnado was growing up, her mom was absolutely not OK with her interest in wrestling. And it's not hard to understand why: in the United States, women in professional wrestling were treated as eye candy and nothing more.

But it is because of the work of people like Martinez and Kaestner-Varnado that no little girl with dreams of becoming a wrestler will ever again be forced to ignore all women as possible role models. No future young mark will have to tell her mom to ignore the degrading bra and panties matches or the necessary Playboy spreads to get any sort of company attention.

Moreover, Bayley and Banks are heroes for countless little boys, too—one already sees plenty of evidence of this in their respective Twitter feeds—demonstrating that if you give performers the freedom and opportunity to do their best, they can put on incredible shows and more importantly, change the perception of what it means to be a wrestler. Never again can anyone claim that "women can't wrestle" or "they're not as good as the men." Never again will women's matches be the designated "bathroom break" of the show.

They each just released childhood essays of theirs on Twitter overnight, about their respective dreams of becoming a pro wrestler. Reading them is so incredibly special—to be given a glimpse into two wonderful people chasing and reaching their dreams is enough to make anyone cry.

But the two of them aren't just wrestlers in the WWE. They're not just stealing the show, they're not just putting on great matches. They're not just the main event.

They are the best.

They are trailblazers, and legitimate cultural icons for a company always desperately in search of that. (Are you reading, Vince?) It's not just that the story of Bayley and Sasha Banks can be a future foundation for the biggest wrestling company in the world.

It's that the story of Bayley and Sasha Banks should be the future foundation for the biggest wrestling company in the world.

Wrestling is best when it recognizes the cultural zeitgest it operates in and plays to that effect. In 2015, that means giving us Bayley and The Boss.