YMMV / Paige

• Adorkable: Demonstrated in spades on the Stone Cold Podcast. Fans were quite amused at Paige talking a mile a minute, and gushing over Austin and her other idols.
• Audience-Alienating Era: In early 2016 Paige turned face again after being too over to boo against Charlotte. Unfortunately, at the same time she was demoted to being totally out of focus during a Brie Bella vs Lana feud of all things, and doing precisely nothing notable afterward until the brand split happened, when she was quietly taken off TV to have neck surgery. It's possible that Paige was intended to be used as the 2nd most prominent face on the Raw Women's division later in the year (a hole which Bayley would eventually fill), but the way she was used in the first half didn't benefit anyone.
• Awesome Music: Her entrance theme as of NXT Arrival, "Stars In The Night".
• Badass Decay:
  • Her call-up to the main roster saw a notable lack of fire or aggression that she was known for in NXT. This is partially because she was a Wild Card in NXT but a straight-up babyface on the main roster - and many fans wished to see the return of the old angry Paige. Things didn't really change when she turned heel, as her second title reign ended prematurely and she was Demoted to Extra.
  • It got worse in 2016 as she began wearing more makeup, acting more girly, rarely appearing on Raw and SmackDown and mostly being used as a jobber when she does. Not only that, but she doesn't even look to be putting any effort into her matches. Fortunately, her more recent gigs on RAW seemed to show her return to form.
• Base-Breaking Character: She was pretty much universally popular in NXT, but opinions have divided on her since she joined the main roster in 2014. She's either a talented performer, great character and an iconic Diva in the making, or she's overhyped, average in the ring and has a cliché gimmick. And that's not getting into the growing contingent of fans who feel that she's gradually shifted from the former to the latter and accuse her of caring more about reality TV and Instagram modeling than about wrestling ever since her push tapered off.
• Creator's Pet: An odd example in the year 2015. While not particularly hated by crowds, WWE essentially pushed her and only her for the Divas' Championship. Notably the only time another was pushed for the title was when Paige had to be Put on a Bus to film a movie. Likewise despite losing each and every title match, she was continually given more. What's more is that she was the only Diva consistently pushed as a face, with literally the entire division going through a Face–Heel Revolving Door to accommodate her. ^Ironically  she would later cycle through the same revolving door to match the main roster storylines of her PCB teammates and NXT successors, but yeah. She was also still pushed when she couldn't appear on Smackdown — due to acting as a judge on Tough Enough. As such her universal popularity from NXT gave way to extreme Base-Breaking Character status. While she receives good reactions from fans in the arenas, online she sparks a polarizing reaction. There seems to be very little middle ground involving her.
• Designated Hero: The lady herself described herself as this on Talk Is Jericho. She says that she's better suited to being a heel because she tends to look fake whenever she smiles. Critics of her persona on Tough Enough and Total Divas would agree with this assessment.
• Designated Villain: Despite the above, Paige has had trouble getting heel heat on the main roster. While in storylines she did some pretty nasty things since turning on AJ Lee, she didn't come across as that villainous — especially since AJ often came across as a Designated Hero. Most fans were on her side during her late 2015 heel run (apart from the Reid Flair comments that weren't even her fault) so Charlotte eventually turned heel and Paige seemed to have turned face again after her 2016 return. Basically, she comes across as more of a Wild Card than a straight-up hero or villain.
• Ensemble Dark Horse
  • Of a sort. The Knight Dynasty were welcomed into SHIMMER by the fan base but so quickly and effectively turned that reception into heel heat they were spat at. It took a grand total of two days for them to surpass both incarnations of The Home Wrecking Crew and The Canadian Ninjas as the most hated heel group in the promotion's history. CWF Mid-Atlantic actually sent them an invitation afterward, promising the duo a police escort since CWF crowds tend to be much more rowdy than SHIMMER's, who are considered the gentlest of the ROH-WWN "family".
  • Swiftly became this for WWE's Divas division among smarks long before making her debut on the main roster, rivaling only Sami Zayn among NXT stars. When she finally made her debut on Raw and won the Divas title, WWE.com uploaded a video showing Paige in tears backstage, expressing her disbelief at the crowd's reaction.
    "I can't believe it. They're not supposed to know me."
• Fan-Preferred Couple: A lot of people liked to ship her with The Shield boys, especially Seth Rollins. Similar tastes, looks, and it helps that Seth and Paige were supposed to have a romantic storyline in FCW that never materialized. When she isn't shipped with Seth, she's shipped with Roman Reigns, as a shipmate to the popular pairing Ambrollins (Dean Ambrose/Seth Rollins).
• Girl-Show Ghetto: A Diva that broke out of it. Before she'd even joined the main roster, she tended to be talked about on various news sites (at a time when Divas were usually ignored) and had a lot of male fans. How much of this is because of the Anti-Diva image and how much is simply respect for a hard worker from the indies is entirely up for debate.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Depending on one's perspective regarding the name change of Paige's trio in the Divas Revolution. The trio was originally titled the Submission Sorority, but this was quickly axed after Google searches revealed that this is already the name of a porn series, leading to the name change to PCB (combining each women's first initial). Fast forward a couple of years and the release of certain videos and... well, it's ironic.
  • At one point in Fighting with My Family documentary, her brother talks about the injuries he's built up since he started wrestling at such a young age. This is putting him in comparison to her - who would ultimately have to retire at 25 due to the injuries she had acquired.
  • A filmed moment backstage after her return showed Paige joking about being "injured" and needing another month off because she broke a fake nail. Within a month, she received her career-ending injury.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The part of the documentary where she tearfully says goodbye to her parents before heading off to Florida. It's heartwarming now that she became the first NXT Women's Champion and has become a star already. Having to leave her family was all worth it after all. In the same documentary, while training at FCW, she expresses a slight disappointment about the emphasis on looks in women's wrestling. She says she hopes she can get people to appreciate the actual wrestling a lot more. The NXT women's division eventually became an Ensemble Dark Horse for the company and is routinely praised every week. So she ended up becoming part of a division that is very much appreciated for the quality of its wrestling. Up to eleven once she became the Divas' Champion on the night of her debut. With one main roster show under her belt (no pun intended) and at age 22, she is, for all intents and purposes, (almost) on top of the women's wrestling world.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A video from a promo class features her trying to befriend Bayley by dressing exactly like her and imitating her, only to be infuriated when she gets weirded out and rejects her. Already funny, the scene became hilarious with the knowledge that her feud with A.J. Lee went exactly like that.
  • In a darkly hilarious way, the reveal of new NXT title belts occurred a few weeks after the 2017 leak, as if to suggest that WWE rushed to get rid of the old women's belt design after it appeared in one of the leaked tapes as the center of a sexual act.
  • During the first years of AEW, Chris Jericho mentioned Paige as one of the names in his "Lexicon of le Champion". Years later, the wrestler formerly known as Paige makes her official AEW debut.
• Ho Yay:
  • With Emma.
  • With A.J. Lee, done on purpose as part of Paige's plan to get the Divas title based on AJ's own propensity for this. It worked, then backfired.
  • With pretty much any Diva she does her own version of body scissors on. Yowza.
  • One of her signature moves definitely counts: she crawls over and on top of a Diva like she is going to ravish them...then WHACK. WHACK. WHACK.
  • Lesser but still there with her Absolution protegees Mandy Rose and Sonya Deville. Possibly fueled in fans' eyes by Paige and Sonya being respectively openly bi and lesbian. Adding more fuel to the fire, during the Women’s Battle Royale at the Wrestlemania 34 Kickoff, Paige admitted that she played favorites with Absolution and that Sonya was her favorite.
  • In 2015 after she burned her bridges with Becky and Charlotte, they turned to Natalya to join them in a three-woman tag-team match against Team Bella. Paige was shown watching the match, and her behaviour and overall demeanor throughout the segment reek of Clingy Jealous Girl with a side-order of "pining ex-girlfriend". This was only strengthened when she was asked for her thoughts afterwards and candidly said that she didn't like Natalya being around "[her] girls".
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Paige here! ^Explanation During WrestleMania weekend in 2018, Paige promoted the Fighting with My Family biopic, and to say her delivery of introducing herself was awkward is kind of an understatement.
    • Paitch Face◊.
• Mis-blamed: She caught a lot of heat from fans for mocking the death of Reid Flair, but it wasn't her call. WWE was trying to garner sympathy for Charlotte Flair after her face character failed to take off opposite the much (at the time) better-liked Paige. They also failed to ask permission or even inform Ric or Reid's mother, which was even worse.
• Narm: When she was stripped of her NXT title, she was initially angry, refusing to give up the title she fought for and rightly won. All of a sudden, her reaction changes to "OK, if it's for the good of NXT, I'll do it". Not only is it a 180 that comes out of nowhere, it's also very out of character, especially since she just said that she was refusing to give up the title. (The acting wasn't exactly top-notch, either.)
• Never Live It Down: The Reid Flair line was primarily this at first, but the 2017 leak eclipsed it. To Paige's credit, she has made many a public effort to move on from the events and turn them into a positive lesson for the public.
• Nightmare Fuel: To some, the fact that heel Paige in 2014 seemed to have No Sense of Personal Space could be really freaking creepy. For example, see her match with AJ at SummerSlam, where she gets noticeably affectionate with AJ (who was basically unconscious and helpless at the time). To be fair, she hadn't gone any further than kissing AJ on the cheek, but it was still pretty fucked up. Just to drive home how scary this was (or should've been) when you actually think about it, that combination of love-hate behavior, discomforting suggestiveness and vicious aggression towards opponents was predated by another immensely popular developmental graduate. Bray Wyatt. Interestingly enough, when Paige was still in NXT and the subject of her debut was brought up, there were many who postulated that this debut would see her as a member of the Family.
• No Yay: Internet fans were not happy about her real-life relationship with Alberto Del Rio.
• The Scrappy: To Tough Enough fans, who found her to be harsh on the contestants, rude to the other Hall of Famer judges, and generally insufferable. Many people held her to this just over the Reid Flair controversy.
• Testosterone Brigade: As she's an attractive young woman who dresses like a sexy goth (and has no problem throwing some Les Yay into her matches), she has a substantial male following.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The decision to remove her from position as Smackdown GM as part of the McMahons' "fresh start" shakeup in December 2018 resulted in widespread criticism, as many saw Raw as the weak link in the company and applying this sudden change to what many saw as one of the best elements of SD currently as fixing something that isn't broken.
• Vindicated by History: Her Face–Heel Turn and feud against Charlotte Flair was near immediately followed by Charlotte's Face–Heel Turn and feud against Becky Lynch, leading many fans to conclude this about her actions and claims towards Charlotte in kayfabe with the exception of the classless remark about Reid. "Paige was right all along about Charlotte" is a strikingly common sentiment among followers of the storyline. Naturally, Paige turned up as a face a couple of weeks later.

---