Willow Nightingale is genuinely a woman whom you could build an entire division around. She is fantastic in the ring, has a great character, and is adored by virtually everyone who sees her wrestle. She literally has the ability to be the ace of any women’s division on planet earth and the fact that she hasn’t even come close to winning the AEW Women’s World Championship at all is a crime against wrestling.
Of course, not everyone can be a world champion at the same time, and the fact that Kris Statlander is finally getting her chance to showcase what she’s made of at the top of the card is great. With that said, the fact that Willow is not only nowhere near the AEW Women’s World Championship scene, despite having such a long and personal history with the champion, but is now getting involved with what FTR and Stokely are doing is a real shame.
Dax Harwood, Cash Wheeler, and Stokely arrived on the September 24 episode of “AEW Dynamite” to explain why they put Beth Copeland in the hospital at AEW All Out following a Spike Piledriver. They were booed by the fans in attendance, which was expected and the fact that the rare 2300 Arena heat seems to have followed FTR and Stokely is great for them, but once they started describing what they did to Beth, Willow’s music hit and everyone in the arena went “erm, what has Willow got to do with this?” Obviously, this could always be the start of a new story that leads to something down the line, but Willow coming out to basically lavish Beth with praise and let the world know how inspirational she is to other female wrestlers just seemed a bit odd.
There’s nothing wrong with intergender wrestling, and the thought of Willow actually getting to mix it up with FTR does seem like an interesting path to go down, particularly if it results in Willow vs. Stokely, because who wouldn’t want to see that match? However, bringing Willow out to tell FTR that their apology wasn’t very good, knowing full well that neither Dax nor Cash could really do anything to her, was a bit pointless in the grand scheme of things. To make it even more puzzling, it was JetSpeed who came out to give Willow some back-up, which makes very little sense, as you would think that the members of The Conglomeration who weren’t wrestling tonight could have made the save instead.
Overall, Willow Nightingale is a future AEW Women’s World Champion who, for whatever reason, is being booked terribly. Yes, it’s fun to see her get involved in the guys’ business, but she could be the woman that everyone in AEW strives to be, and she simply can’t do that if she’s constantly involved in storylines involving people like FTR. Someone please tell Tony Khan to book Willow like the generational ace everyone knows she can be; it’s really starting to become a problem.
Written by Sam Palmer
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