YMMV / Sasha Banks

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Judging by Bayley's comments a week after attacking her, did Sasha have a plan to betray Bayley in the near future? Later weeks often show Sasha in tears for what Bayley did and how she is angry over Bayley's betrayal after everything they had been through together, not the least being Sasha helping Bayley several times to defend her title for a full year. However, Sasha has a long history of betrayals with Bayley being a frequent victim of it as well as playing victim in order to get sympathy, not to mention her insistence that Bayley is nothing without her and her increasing frustration at not being able to keep a championship.
• Arc Fatigue: The 2016 Raw brand chapter of her feud with Charlotte. While there were a lot of start-and-stop moments and mini feuds with other competitors, the overall storyline was dragged out for the better part of a year (having started in January and only ending in December). It was a feud many fans had long grown exhausted of and waited for it to simply end and for both women to move on from each other. The feud had been continued by means of rematch clause after rematch clause because the two kept on trading the WWE Raw Women's Championship between each other like it's a hot potato with Sasha winning on Raw episodes and pay-per-views being treated like some odd unbreakable form of home field advantage for Charlotte. Between July and December, the two traded the title six times. This means that Sasha was a three-time champion and Charlotte a four-time champ, just over a year after both debuted on the main roster, before the belt itself was even a year old.
• Audience-Alienating Era: Her 2016 feud with Charlotte Flair killed a lot of the goodwill she'd built up with the IWC - and it's there that her detractors began to emerge. Despite still delivering good matches, the booking of her repeatedly losing and reclaiming the title mixed with some annoying segments like her fake retirement and numerous promos referencing Eddie Guerrero caused many to cry Badass Decay. As noted under Character Rerailment, she did recover some goodwill in 2017 but it wasn't until her 2019 heel turn that her character finally began to regain momentum.
• Awesome Music: Her "Sky's the Limit" theme, and her old theme, "Fastest Girl Alive".
• Base-Breaking Character: A downplayed example; while Sasha was still generally liked by the wrestling community, a lot of people criticized her main roster run as being highly underwhelming (specifically her run on the Raw brand from 2016 to early 2019); most complaints have gone to her promos (as a face) and her ring-work, the latter which had been so reckless that her first reign as champion ended early so that she could rest up and heal up a few injuries. Fans are also split on whether her Heel–Face Turn is a good idea — as The Boss character is essentially a heel and gets watered down as a face. Others argue that it would be impossible to book Sasha as a heel, which WWE tried to do at first but fans just cheered her anyway. Despite detractors, she is still beloved by the majority of fans for what she's done for women's wrestling in WWE (not to mention that a lot of criticism was mostly attributed to her booking that originated during her 2016 feud with Charlotte, so much so that it took years to get her character back on track).
• Broken Base:
  • Sasha's promo in which she seemingly led the crowd into thinking her injuries had worsened and she would have to retire only to attack an interrupting Dana Brooke and reveal she was just fine and was coming back for her belt. Some people think the promo was fine, and are happy that Sasha is back already in the WWE but others (including some actual WWE workers) felt it was tasteless, especially when just a few months ago WWE had a legitimate promo by Daniel Bryan being forced to quit wrestling due to prior injuries. For a heel (like with Mark Henry) this may have been fine, but Sasha is a face, making her look cruel for fooling her fans into thinking she was retiring. There's also the fact that much of the promo was a revolution lecture akin to the oft-reviled mistakes of the previous year which even fellow Horsewoman Becky Lynch acknowledges, and Sasha even praised heel authority figure and massive Hate Sink Stephanie McMahon as the one who "made the women's revolution a reality" when many feel Stephanie's personal introduction of the NXT women set the stage for said mistakes and thus held them back.
  • Another camp isn't exactly happy that Sasha herself has become the sole spokeswoman or mouthpiece for this change. It was the collective work of the Horsewomen (her, Charlotte, Bayley and Becky Lynch) that got women's wrestling recognition in the first place. Diva Dirt writers also took exception to Sasha's line — "no more bra and panties, no more two-minute matches, no more stupid butterfly title" — pointing out that Sasha herself had never wrestled in such matches or held the Divas' Championship. Others are fine with it, since WWE has historically had the champion or top face speak on behalf of the division.
  • Oh geez, her 2022 real-life Screw This, I'm Outta Here on WWE due to not liking how she and tag team partner Naomi were being booked. Opinions range all over the place from the two being completely in the wrong and unprofessional to applauding them for standing up for themselves to a more moderate line of thinking that suggests they had legitimate complaints but could/should have handled them differently. Combine that with conflicting reports on what actually happened that day ^note up to and including accusations that one of WWE officials used sexist and/or racially-charged language in the final argument that preceded the walkout and bringing it up openly on the internet is asking for trouble.
• Character Rerailment:
  • A lot of detractors emerged for Sasha in 2016 during her feud with Charlotte — thanks to questionable booking, Sasha's character getting watered down, numerous promos referencing Eddie Guerrero and a downright bizarre segment where she pretended to retire to pull a sneak-attack on Dana Brooke. In the summer of 2017 when she feuded with Alexa Bliss, she was back to winning most of her matches, subverting Good Is Dumb and managing to come across as edgy without being bitchy.
  • After a disappointing 2018 in which her face character had largely become irrelevant and uninteresting, it's widely agreed that Sasha's run on the main roster finally kicked into gear after definitively returning to her heel character in August 2019. Then for those who felt as though she was being treated as Bayley's sidekick, Sasha recovered from Bayley's treacherous attack in September 2020, took the SmackDown Women's Championship, and established herself as a distinctive tweener atop the women's division.
• Designated Hero:
  • Sasha's face turn in 2016 begins with her attacking Becky Lynch following her loss against Charlotte, before attacking the Flair. Before this, Sasha was an Alpha Bitch who is similar to Charlotte who treated everyone around her like shit and was allied with fellow heels, Naomi and Tamina. In addition, she retained her Alpha Bitch tendencies and is not above using Eddie Guerrero's tactics against even Face opponents.
  • As mentioned above, Sasha announced a retirement after an injury before revealing that she was faking it to ambush Dana Brooke. While this normally works for a heel like Mark Henry did in 2013, remember, Sasha's a face.
  • Her feud with Bayley throughout 2018. It was Sasha who threw the first stone by betraying Bayley during the Royal Rumble and Elimination Chamber. During the latter event, she even smiles smugly when she does it. Yet it was Bayley who was often portrayed as the villain of the feud, having abandoning Sasha during tag team matches, commentators calling her out for her for her childish grudge and Bayley who after being mocked by Sasha for the last time, throws her temper against her.
  • Two years later, Bayley and Sasha feuded again with the same reason. After a year of being heels, Bayley attacked Sasha after they failed to reclaim the Women's Tag Team Championship. Like in 2018, the story portrayed Sasha as the one who cherishes friendship and Bayley had broke it for her selfishness, but ignored all the times Sasha had betrayed Bayley. Furthermore, Sasha played a role in Bayley's Face–Heel Turn the year before and didn't seem guilty at all in her role. After her feud with Bayley ended, Sasha continued being a smug and arrogant person despite being a nominal face, and in fact became more of a tweener, being prone to antagonizing fellow faces such as Bianca Belair and Shotzi Blackheart. While she was the one who first directly attacked Bianca and thus turned heel for their program, the opposite was true of her mini-feud with Shotzi, yet in both cases Sasha routinely appeared as the more arrogant or callous personality.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Because of how Badass Adorable she is, her quality of work and moments of pure emotion, and the breath of fresh air she represents for female wrestling in WWE, it is SUPER EASY to forget that this chick plays one of the nastiest, most arrogant, most malicious heel competitors in the entire business.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Was a huge favorite among the NXT women's division in the mid-2010s. Despite not being in the title picture upon her main roster call-up, she had gained a enormous fanbase to the point where she was arguably one of the most popular people in all of the company, male or female. "WE WANT SASHA" comments became so incredibly common during any Diva's match not featuring her that Sasha herself pinned a tweet on her Twitter page that read: "Be so good they can't ignore you." This pop alone shows how well-liked she is.
• Ethnic Scrappy: A leaked video from a promo class in the early-2010s saw Sasha playing a snobby character that talked in a ghetto accent — which would have raised a lot of eyebrows given WWE's long story with racial characters.
• Fan Nickname: "Ratchet"^note urban slang for a woman who thinks she's high class when in reality she's seen as trashy from the NXT crowd, often chanted at her during matches.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: "SASHA'S RATCHET!" ^note "NO, SHE'S NOT!"
• Growing the Beard: While regarded as a good worker and one to watch from the moment she debuted on NXT, Sasha truly came into her own in the year 2014. 'The Boss' had previously just been a Beta Bitch to Summer Rae and then Charlotte, only getting the occasional win for herself. Here, she started getting more wins, developing an effective Bank Statement finisher, improving her promo skills, and ended the year having an incredible match against Charlotte at Takeover. It was around this time the NXT crowd started cheering her.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The 'ratchet' chants came from Full Sail fans mocking Sasha for how cheap her gear and hair extensions looked. These comments have become incredibly uncomfortable once Sasha revealed how poor her family was growing up and how she was frequently bullied over it.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Sasha's first match against Bayley - right after she turned heel and joined the Beautiful Fierce Females - was apparently named by the Undertaker as his favorite women's match in ages. Two years later, Bayley and Sasha have a match that's named Match of the Year by Pro Wrestling Illustrated, and they become the first women to main event a WWE PPV.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • She claims she was homeschooled — as in went to school online. So it's rather interesting that a homeschooled girl ends up getting corrupted by an evil blonde and turning into NXT's biggest Alpha Bitch. Sound familiar?
  • Maybe this or Harsher in Hindsight depending on your perspective. Her excitement about being the face of the Women's Evolution, how there would be no more Bra and Panties matches and the women would all be serious wrestlers now, etc., culminated in the historic first Women's Hell in a Cell match between her and Charlotte Flair for the Raw Women's Championship…in which the face-in-peril/stretcher spot booking Sasha received was widely panned as starkly inferior enough to some of the same spots in previous men's Cell matches that it did more to play on her "injury prone" reputation and make her look bad than to add drama to the main event, the numerous failed attempts at table breaks marred the flow of the match as well as its finish, and Sasha was increasingly wedgied (no pun intended) into an accidental Ms. Fanservice as her tights got pulled up as the proceedings went on whenever Charlotte needed to pull on her tights for a throw.
  • Sasha once had a mixed tag match in Beyond Wrestling where one of her opponents was her future husband Mikaze.
• Les Yay:
  • With Bayley who since their feud on NXT has become something of a Morality Pet for Sasha. In contrast to the grudging respect Sasha has for Becky, Bayley is the one who can easily bring out Sasha's softer side. Sasha sincerely hugs Bayley in tears after her Women's Championship win, and the two hug enthusiastically when Bayley appears at Battleground to help her out. Once Sasha admitted after beefing with Bayley for at least half of summer 2018 that she still loved her the whole time, many fans took it as a sign of the arc taking a lesbian turn.
  • Even Becky and Sasha had this during their Team Bae days, from celebrating Christmas and their own version of the Slammy's together to suggesting they get couples counseling after Sasha won the NXT Women's Championship because Becky had been avoiding her phone-calls.
• Mis-blamed: Sasha had to go on record to say that despite her disdain of the 'Diva Era', her dislike was entirely of the booking and degrading things the women were forced to do — and not the women themselves.
• Narm:
  • The period of time in 2016 when every Sasha promo seemed to mention Eddie Guerrero to the point people had dubbed it Eddiesploitation 2.0.
  • There have been jokes made about how the bottom half of her wrestling outfit looks like a diaper.
• Never Live It Down: In 2017, a mistimed kick from her worsened Paige's neck injury and forced her to retire. Sasha is not fully responsible, but outrage ensued on social media about it and Banks, the deliverer of that kick, has basically become a pariah. For what it's worth, Sasha was probably more upset about it than anyone else.
• Rooting for the Empire: Despite being a blatant heel, Sasha had about half the NXT crowd in her corner due to their admiration for her in-ring talent. There were just as many people (if not more) who wanted Sasha to win the NXT Women's Championship as there were who wanted Charlotte (who was playing the role of the face in the feud) to retain.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Her reigns as Raw Women's Champion. Having held it four times, each one of them never lasted longer than 27 days. Many have criticized the Raw creative team for being lazy and not knowing what to do with Banks. Even Sasha herself has outright stated her frustration of the short reigns (even saying that she'd rather be on the Smackdown brand).
  • EVERYTHING about her 2018 storyline with Bayley. With the conflict between the two having been drawn out from the spring of 2017 to the summer of 2018, fans were not happy to say the least that it never escalated into a full-blown feud (at least until the fall of 2020).
  • She never got to feud with Summer Rae - the woman who corrupted her and brought about the creation of The Boss in the first place. Summer even said that Sasha kept pitching to work with her when they were both on the main roster, but nothing ever came of it (besides a couple of matches on Main Event).
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: To a degree, her Heel–Face Turn in 2020 when Bayley attacked her following their failed attempt to reclaim the Women's Tag Team Championship. For the next several weeks, Sasha would speak often of how Bayley destroyed their friendship after everything they had been through together while Bayley continued to attack her. The issue was that Sasha has a long history of betraying her friends, often in rather cruel ways, and that she had a direct hand in corrupting Bayley; the beatdowns, while harrowing, still largely looked like a rod Sasha made for her own back and was finally being punished for. It didn't help that Sasha kept her Alpha Bitch heel personality and showed no remorse or even hinted that she felt any guilt for making Bayley into a heel.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Her new ring name, Mercedes Moné. She pronouces "Moné" as "Mun-nay" (as in "money") as opposed to "Mo-nay", the typical pronouncation. Needless to say, this has confused a lot of people.