YMMV / Bayley

• Adorkable: Quite possibly one of the biggest factors for why she got over with the crowd. As with the other popular females in NXT (Paige, Emma, Sasha Banks, Asuka), she's pushed as an actual character with a gimmick (in this case, a fangirl of wrestling). It helps that like the others, she also can wrestle.
• And You Thought It Would Fail:
  • The reaction when she first debuted her gimmick consisted of a lot of scratched heads. Little did they know Bayley would become one of the biggest stars on NXT and eventually main event a PPV.
  • Initial reactions to her heel turn in 2019 were mixed, since a lot of people at the time couldn't imagine super-happy babyface Bayley portraying a bad guy convincingly. She not only managed to pull it off, but is now widely considered a much better heel than a face, due to her character work, hammy obnoxious delivery and massively improved mic skills.
• Awesome Music: Her theme "Turn It Up" as of NXT Takeover II. Doubly so for her new heel theme "Deliverance" in mid-October 2019 after fully embracing the dark side: it's very reminiscent of The Rock's heel theme. Her stable theme for Damage CTRL in September 2022 "We Got The Rage" isn't half-bad either, featuring an aggressive battle rap that outlines the idea behind the group sang by The Baby Don who also raps Sonya Deville's theme.
• Badass Decay:
  • Her infamous 2017 feud with Alexa Bliss, where she was booked to look like a loser, ultimately culminating in a glorified squash match on Extreme Rules 2017, where she was "too nice" to hit Bliss with a kendo stick.
  • Comes back to a lesser degree after losing the SmackDown Women's Championship to Sasha Banks in 2020. After holding the title for a year, Bayley rarely won any more matches, seeming to put over weaker talents and had been reduced to non meaningful feuds and storylines, being the first person on her team in Survivor Series 2020 to be eliminated, and by Peyton Royce of all people, who is a jobber, and was not even involved in WrestleMania 37. Though this seems to be quickly eroding due to a post WrestleMania 37 title program with the new champion Bianca Belair. Sadly a torn ACL in July ended the feud prematurely, putting Bayley out for just over 12 months. Despite her return as the leader of Damage CTRL, Bayley still doesn't have much momentum in her and still loses most of her matches, including two attempts for the Raw Women's Championship as well as the 2022 Women's WarGames match though in Bayley's defense she wasn't pinned in any of those losses. Even a backstage brawl between her faction and Becky Lynch is in favor of the latter despite the 3-on-1 assault and the same goes with Liv Morgan and Tegan Nox a few days later. Turned around quite favorably in early 2023 as Damage CTRL combined eliminated half the field despite not winning the 2023 Women's Royal Rumble. Unfortunately came back hard during the group's feud with Becky, Trish Stratus and Lita, ultimately losing the tag titles to Becky and Lita entirely clean, and also lost a 6-woman tag to the trio at WrestleMania, only for Trish to turn heel on Becky shortly after WrestleMania, making fans question why Damage CTRL didn't win the match anyway.
  • In general her time with Damage CTRL. Besides being The Leader of the group, she was the only one of the entire team to never hold a title, won less than 10% of her matches in 2023, and was overall made to look weak on a weekly basis. If it wasn't for her amazing character work, she would be bordering a Big Bad Wannabe, but ultimately she led the group to a lot of success before they turned on her.
• Broken Base:
  • While everyone agrees her talent as a character and in the ring are great, Bayley's mic skills have received a lot of criticism during her original face run in NXT. Is she good? Bad? Awkward yet endearing? Her promo skills seem to have finally won over the majority of fans following her heel turn, with many applauding her work for being far more convincing and entertaining. Perhaps she just needed the confidence boost and freedom that being a heel often brings.
  • Her heel turn was well received, and praised for giving her character a revamp after a period of bad booking leaving her quite stale. But there are also fans who feel it is too drastically different from her initial persona, similar to how Lita became a Femme Fatale after her heel turn, and that heel Bayley is too reliant on shock factor. Plenty feel she simply suited face better, and the novelty of seeing her as a heel got stale quickly.
• Catharsis Factor: On the giving end. Her program against Alexa Bliss in 2019 completely reversed their roles from their 2017 feud, with Bayley beating Alexa at every turn no matter what she tried to pull.
• Character Rerailment:
  • While many fans (and, reportedly Bayley herself) were displeased with her abrupt split from Sasha Banks, Bayley's star has gone on the rise. She has become her own character on Smackdown, having excellent matches with fellow Horsewomen Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch, and managed to win Money in the Bank, cashing in on Charlotte the same night. She's gone from jobbing to any heel on the roster to first-ever Women's Grand Slam Champion in a matter of weeks. It would be infuriating if Bayley weren't so deserving.
  • Despite being in high caliber feuds and featured on almost every major show, she was treated like a Jobber for the entire year of 2023 with an extremely poor win-loss record. This made it even sweeter when she climbed back to the top of the mountain and became the WWE Women's Champion at WrestleMania 40.
• Continuity Nod: Many people have said that Bayley's road to WrestleMania 40 exactly mirror's Batista's road to Wrestlemania 21. Both feature them being a group (in the case of Bayley making the group), be talked down upon by the other members, win the Royal Rumble and then challenge one of the members for their title after overhearing how they are gonna betray them.
• Designated Villain: Was treated as a heel during her feud with Sasha in 2018 for abandoning her during tag team matches and attacking her. Does the commentators remember that it was Sasha who threw the first stone when she took advantage of their friendship and betrayed Bayley during the Royal Rumble and Elimination Chamber matches without even looking guilty?
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Following in the footsteps of Emma and Paige, Bayley became a very popular face at NXT. Her popularity only increased as time went on, and she's one of the few Faces who can get cheered going against Sasha Banks. Her call-up to the main roster was met with standing ovations - and there were legions of fans in a 'Bayley Section' at Survivor Series 2016.
• Evil Is Cool: Received a lot of praise for her excellent heel work in short order — a surprisingly successful career transition considering she'd long been positioned as the female John Cena.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some like to call her The Doctor of Huganomics.
  • "Grand Slam Bayley" also caught on for obvious reasons after Money in the Bank 2019.
  • After her heel turn in 2019, fans have run with calling themselves "Bayley's Bitches" due to her now iconic first heel promo where she completely severed her connection with the fans after 7 years of being their hero. Bayley herself even retweeted fan pictures of Finn Balor holding edited crowd signs with the title, making this one of the quickest Approval of God nicknames ever!
  • Also around that time her new hairstyle led to her getting called "Karen", even by other wrestlers.
• Fountain of Memes: Her face gimmick lent itself to numerous hug-related puns and memes.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Gets showered with the "Heeeeey Heeyy Bayley" chant every time she wrestles in the UK, no matter if face or heel.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Her feud with Charlotte Flair got the ball rolling but it was her title matches against Sasha that really showed what a ring general Bayley could really be. Before she was viewed as decent enough in the ring, with her gimmick as the main appeal. However those feuds showed that Bayley is a damn fine wrestler as well. She only solidified it by bringing newcomers Alexa Bliss, Carmella, and Nia Jax to lengthy good matches.
  • Her heel run towards the end of 2019 initially garnered mixed reviews; while her performance was still praised, many were critical of the fact that her character came off as deliberately stoic and bland in order to contrast her Kid-Appeal Character babyface persona. She later was able to find her mojo again, using the same energy that made her Huggable character work and transferring it into an egotistical obnoxious troll, and her heel work is widely acknowledged as having flourished since.
  • After returning in 2022 from a year long injury, she drastically improved her mic skills and became extremely confident and charismatic in her promos. It is hard to believe how completely different her face and heel personas are, they sometimes feel like two different people.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A video from a promo class saw Paige dressing up like Bayley to try and earn her friendship, only for Bayley to get weirded out and back off. This is amusing given that not only that would be exaclty what Bayley would end up doing to other women on NXT as part of her fangirl gimmick, but also seems oddly prophetic of the feud Paige would have with A.J. Lee on the main roster.
• Hotter and Sexier: Proving that this trope can be worked into a character in the subtlest of ways, the overwhelming fan consensus is that Bayley became instantly more attractive after shearing her hair short to suit her all-out loner heel persona, even though her ring gear actually became ever so slightly more modest.
• Les Yay:
  • She appears to be a Morality Pet for Sasha Banks — as she's the one who brings out Sasha's softer side on screen. A post-match video of Sasha's women's title win had her Skyping Bayley. Even in the midst of their summer 2018 beef, Sasha admitted to loving Bayley the whole time they were apart — and yes, she used that exact word. It didn't take long for fans to begin planting Epileptic Trees and voice hopes that Sasha's statement was a sign of the arc taking a lesbian turn. Considering how thoroughly the line between friendship and something deeper has been blurred — Bayley's official responses to the statement didn't help — it was enough for fans to lose their minds. Considering Bayley's shocking Face–Heel Turn comes off as if it's caused by Sasha's Toxic Friend Influence, it wouldn't be a huge leap from there to Love Makes You Evil, and in fact if a degree of Fanon was to be used here, the common acceptance is that both of them are indeed in a form of romantic relationship (in Kayfabe of course, in real life both of them have been in established long-term relationships).
  • For Charlotte Flair as well, considering she was able to bring about Charlotte's Heel–Face Turn on NXT. And for her NXT Takeover match against Asuka, even though Charlotte was a heel on TV at the time, she still appeared in the crowd to support Bayley — and hugged her after the match.
  • To a lesser extent with Becky Lynch. Becky first appeared in a video where she was dubbed a 'Bayley Friend Forever' going against Charlotte (not long after the latter had turned heel on Bayley) — making it look uncannily as if Becky was the Replacement Goldfish. There there was her reaction to Bayley siding with Sasha during Becky and Sasha's feud in 2019 (which Bayley demonstrated by hitting Becky with a chair), where Becky flat-out admitted that Bayley broke her heart.
  • She has an out and out Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with Carmella who so far is the only friend not to have turned on her at some point.
  • A.J. Lee is not left out as well. AJ made a guest appearance at NXT and Bayley hugged her from behind, and excitedly said she had followed her from her car. To that, AJ enthusiastically said "I do that all the time!". The conversation only turned sour when talked about beating AJ in a match — and not so much because of that as because Bayley uttered the word "crazy".
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: By all accounts is highly beloved off-camera.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Her catch phrase "Hug Life" spawned all sorts of memes.
  • Her Snickers commercial, where she uses "Hug" for a non-friendly word to the point where many comments can basically be summed up as, "What the HUG did I just watch?!"
  • "Bayley's gonna hug you!"
  • "Hey, bitches..." And thus, Bayley's first promo as an all-out villain prompted her loyal fanbase to unironically change their name from the Hugger Section to Bayley's Bitches.
  • After the Important Haircut, there are fans that equated Bayley with the "Karen" meme, up to and including Becky Lynch.
  • "What about me? What about Bayley?"
  • After her ACL injury that sidelined her in mid-2021, people joked that it was actually a back injury caused by her carrying the entire women's division for over a year.
  • After ring announcer Samantha Irvin mistakenly announced Bayley as representing The Judgment Day at Money in the Bank 2023, fans began jokingly referring to Bayley as a member of the stable.
• Moe: Huggable? Very much. Well, at least until she did a complete heel turn in October 2019.
• Moral Event Horizon: These are a rare sight in wrestling, considering the fluid nature of the storytelling, but even card-carrying troll and heel shill Corey Graves was speechless when Bayley not only turned on Sasha Banks, but seemingly attempted to kill her, on the 09/04/2020 episode of SmackDown.
• Narm Charm: Oh so very much. And we love her for it. Her All-Loving Hero nature is not undermined beyond kayfabe because by all accounts, that is who she is (obviously tweaked up to eleven for the sake of the gimmick) and that's what makes it lovable. Only she can make saying that she doesn't even want a hug be something so shock worthy apparently.
• Shocking Moments: Her heel turn on the September 2nd, 2019 edition of Raw was considered an absolute shock as many had believed that she was going to be feuding with the newly-villainous Sasha Banks; nobody had anticipated Bayley aligning herself with Sasha.
• Signature Scene:
  • Cashing in her Money in the Bank contract on Charlotte Flair to take the SmackDown Women's Championship, making her the first women's Grand Slam Champion.
  • Her stunning and completely unexpected Face–Heel Turn on 9/2/2019.
  • The destruction of the Bayley Buddies and Evil Costume Switch fully solidifying her new persona as a heel at the October 11th SmackDown before swiftly regaining the SmackDown Women's Championship from Charlotte in brutal fashion just mere days after losing it.
  • You knew it was coming when they lost the Women's Tag Titles, but the absolute brutality with which Bayley turned on Sasha Banks on the September 4 2020 edition of SmackDown (incidentally just after a full year of her original turn) was absolutely terrifying to watch. And heartbreaking if you were a fan of the team, which many were.
  • Winning the 2024 Royal Rumble from the number 3 spot, setting a new longevity record in the process.
  Bayley: "Michael, listen real close: 63 minutes and 3 seconds! Ding Dong, hello!.”
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Her hugger gimmick was arguably marred by horrible booking choices and questionable decisions once she debuted on RAW. She went from being one of the most over wrestlers to getting booed regularly within six months.
• The Woobie: Early on she was picked on by just about everyone and considered an annoyance by the rest of the Face female wrestlers. She Took a Level in Badass to become an Iron Woobie. Her Woobie status would come back INCREDIBLY hard following her Heel–Face Turn in 2024 on the road to WrestleMania XL as after winning the Royal Rumble, her teammates in Damage CTRL would kick her out, all except for Dakota Kai. Bayley believed that despite her reservations she could trust Dakota despite her prior history. Then it crosses right into Tear Jerker territory when even Dakota herself reveals on the March 1st 2024 episode that she was working with Damage CTRL all along and betrays Bayley as well, leaving the former ultra-confident Role Model a heartbroken mess, all alone with no allies with the biggest match of her life weeks away. Someone needs to give that poor girl the biggest hug...