The last WWE Monday Night Raw of 2019 was the bookend of a decade in WWE that might have been better forgotten. Wrought with questionable booking decisions and storylines, WWE really failed to bring their brand into a modern era. While other promotions built stories on brotherhood, tense rivalries and focused on quality matches, WWE's running stories included cuckolding, Natalya Neidhart's chronic flatulence and a working relationship with Saudi Arabia. What better way to cap off this decade than with one of the most tired tropes of the decade: the wrestling wedding.Keeping true to form, the wedding of Lana and her boyfriend Bobby Lashley was also a terrible mess. Like the televised professional wrestling weddings of the past, the ceremony was repeatedly interrupted, several people were beaten up and the bad guy, Lana, was left wearing wedding cake. Alls well that ends well, right? Wrong. People were upset. They weren't as upset as the fans that sent Lana death threats, but they were upset. They were upset about sloppy, decades-old writing. And yet, still, it was trending on Twitter.
Very rarely, if ever do wrestling weddings go as planned. Miss Elizabeth was attacked by a snake when she married Randy Savage. Stephanie McMahon couldn't marry Test because Triple H already married her in Las Vegas. Teddy Long couldn't marry Kristal Marshall because he had a heart attack. Lita had to marry Kane, a demon, because Matt Hardy lost a match. As would be expected, Matt attacked Kane during the wedding, ruining the whole affair.
And while Lana's wedding, of course, went horribly awry, where it most went wrong was with that Twitter trend. Fans spent many tweets comparing it to the previous "worst" wrestling storyline. As a result, #KatieVick, which referred to the infamous angle in which Triple H accused Kane of being intimate with the body of his deceased girlfriend, was trending as well. That storyline is now notorious for ending in a segment where Triple H filmed a video of himself recreating the alleged crime with a mannequin. Today the angle is a joke among wrestling fans, and WWE only references it in off-hand on rare occasions.
Using it to push a lesbian angle between Lana and a returning Liv Morgan did not sit well with many people, either. Fans were quick to point out how tasteless the angle was. This included Impact Wrestling star Joey Ryan, who called out WWE for keeping inappropriate stereotypes alive.
The use of a gay character for shock value is something that is better left in the past. The shock value of "HLA," Adrian Adonis, and Billy & Chuck did not age well in their own right, and to continue pushing this angle once again points out how stagnant WWE is in the changing cultural landscape of today. As WWE and the wrestling world move forward into the 2020s, it's now more important than ever to try new things and represent all facets of people on television, but it must be done the right way.