If I were booking the local wrestling show, I’d build the entire narrative around the female referee at this point. She’s a whole narrative universe. On the surface of it, she is a damsel in distress; in the subtext, she is a professional woman facing a moral dilemma foisted upon her by the men who depend on her.
Lady Stripes found herself reluctantly thrust into the spotlight a couple months ago when her beloved babyface boyfriend proposed in the ring after he finally won the championship. It was a beautiful shoot moment but a jarring wrinkle in the kayfabe. The audience immediately began to muse about the conflict of interest of the ref getting engaged to the wrestler she just confirmed as champion. And indeed, at the next show, the dashing, brooding monster heel pursuing her man’s belt grabbed her hand in a suggestive way to make a creepy point about the appearance of impropriety that now surrounded her, despite her track record of professionalism and neutrality.
This is, by the way, a huge narrative milestone at that place, where the promoter is an adamant Aubrey Edwards hater. Lady Stripes has become a character; she has subverted that antiquated mindset that says the referee should be invisible (especially if she’s a woman). This storyline, in which her integrity is under duress, is an important opportunity for her to be more than just another chess piece in some played out carnival allegory.
If I were booking the local wrestling show, I would allude to the time Lady Stripes botched an ending, and it was a match with her beloved babyface. She counted to three on a weird looking pin, but nobody could tell she counted three. The bell ringer didn’t see it, and neither did I (I was ring announcing at the time). So she had to signal again for us to proceed with the match ending rituals. Subsequently, the audience didn’t know how to respond. It was a painful learning experience for her; the kind of mistake every ref probably has to make once. She really beat herself up about it. But if I were booking the local wrestling show, we would cultivate this circumstance into a story arc about a woman facing a moral quandary she didn’t ask for.
If I were booking the local wrestling show, the next match would be one in which Lady Stripes struggles to maintain impartiality. The dashing brooding monster heel, who has laid a powerful mind game on her babyface fiancé, should push her to the breaking point. He should pay her too much attention in the match, which would then agitate her beloved babyface and create an untenable amount of chaos between the two competitors. Lady Stripes’ every attempt to regain control of the wrestling match will be seized upon by the monster heel. She would DQ him on something that doesn’t really warrant a DQ, like relatively minor cheating. Or perhaps she should DQ him for being a creepy asshole, for treating her with enough disrespect that she can’t not do something about it.
Then she would really be compromised. And her attempts to reestablish her neutrality would only geminate more chaos. She would be forced to confront a moral dilemma when the dashing brooding monster heel continues to be a creepy weirdo but ultimately beats her babyface fiancé a couple months later. She should find herself having to count to three for the monster heel when morally he don’t deserve victory, but by the reluctant rules of the game, he wins. Maybe she even botches a count, but then the monster heel wins clean and she can’t deny it. His existential crisis finds some catharsis and his character evolves. Meanwhile more resentments build for the beloved babyface; a chip on his shoulder builds toward a productive heel turn somewhere in the future.
And Lady Stripes herself will have to figure out what to do about all this. She didn’t ask for this mess. She was just trying to do her job. But her job has turned into a moral quandary. What does a female authority figure do when the men around her muddy the waters this egregiously?
Lady Stripes and her beloved babyface should be embattled. (Kayfabe embattled, I do wish them well. This blog post is, in fact, me wishing them well!) Babyface should lose his title fairly quickly, and have to persevere, really prove himself, to get it back. If his title reign is such that he faces temporary challenges but lives happily ever after every month, it’s a tiresome story. His character needs to face adversity, to develop more original complexity.
Imagine how much more interesting all this would be than yet another series of safe, formulaic tropes about the tedious conflicts of men.
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