Initially this was just supposed to be a puff piece: one of those image-centric, easy to write-easy to read listicles that everybody says they hate but just can’t stop themselves from reading. But, you know, I’m me, and I’m really truly terrible when it comes to distilling things I’m passionate about into tiny blurbs. The thing is, it’s very easy to fantasy book existing rosters, especially if you’re me and you just want everything to turn into wacky road trip adventures and eighties-style teen movie-meets-Rodney Dangerfield shenanigans without the misogyny and unfortunate racist bents. Everybody has their ideas about what would ‘fix’ what they see as being wrong with any wrestling company, and you’re lying if you say you don’t have an opinion on what you wish wrestling could do to be better. All of these things lead to a very sad truth when it comes to women in WWE: we’re not going to get what we want.

If you’ve been paying attention to recent signings, or Brandon’s Best and Worst of NXT columns (you should, they’re great), you can see a growing trend in the kind of future we’re to have, and it’s covered in glitter and the canonical height of Hello Kitty (three apples, for those of us who aren’t my friend Chris Sims). When you start to realistically think about women who could potentially work in NXT and eventually go on to graduate to the hellscape that is the main roster, it mutates your brain into this unexpectedly hypercritical monster. Looking at women through the WWE lens proves more than anything just how flawed that view is.

Go ahead and try it. Think long and hard about the women you love to watch wrestle, and then put them into the context of televised wrestling. Ignore, for a moment, their actual wrestling talent; I think we’ve seen beyond a shadow of a doubt that’s not what gets you there. It’s easier when you realize just how irrelevant that is, whether it’s because of the track record of women not being given a chance to really wrestle, or the very real examples of women starting out slow, then working hard and forcing themselves into the NXT spotlight. Starting green and training and improving isn’t a bad thing – quite the opposite, in fact. But you really have to think long and hard about where they’re training to go.

When you start thinking about the criteria for women to be successful in WWE, you have to consider what they want women to be: trainable, beautiful, athletic but not too boyish, and most importantly, someone they can mold into a brand. All WWE Superstars are a brand. John Cena is the most immediate example, but all of them are wrestlers second, personalities first. Can you be put into a movie? Are you someone TMZ would care about? Are you subversive enough to appeal to the “internet fans” without alienating a more casual demographic? How would they look on the cover of a fitness magazine? Would I like you, but more importantly, would my mom like you? Nobody is going to be the next Rock or Stone Cold, but standards are low enough for someone else to be the next Kelly Kelly.

Are you still thinking about who you want to see move out of the indies and into developmental? How many wrestlers have you eliminated? Now why have you taken them out of the running? Are they too old? Too “big”? This one would need to tone up more. That one has a weird snaggle tooth. This one isn’t “TV pretty.” Those two are great and have loads of potential but are in shape to the point of looking like Sexy Lady Scott Steiners (my new dream tag team FYI). Things that wouldn’t disqualify anyone from being conventionally attractive in the real world prove to be untenable in the fundamentally broken criteria of the entertainment industry. We want Sleater Kinney, but our future is Candy-era Mandy Moore.

Now think of everything you love about the women of NXT, or better yet, go back and read about why I love them. Sasha Banks is so important to me for so many reasons. If Bayley constantly tweeted about how amazing Ice-T is on Law & Order: SVU and adopted a plant-based diet she would be Me: The Wrestler. I can never be anything that Charlotte is, but I’m constantly in awe of what she started out as, and what she turned into. Becky Lynch is basically a gender-swapped Sheamus highschool AU character who’s going through a rebellious stage and can’t seem to fit in anywhere, and it’s flippin’ fantastic. But none of these things we love are what they were supposed to be. NXT gets to be this magical place where we think wrestling matters and personality rules, but like any developmental arena, accidents happen. Play-Doh was invented to be a wallpaper cleaner. Listerine went through three or four uses, from cigarettes to dandruff treatments, before being that thing I always buy but forget to regularly incorporate into my daily dental hygiene routine (don’t judge me, you know that statement is real as hell). We love what we have, but what we have was never supposed to happen.

Like I said in the beginning, this was supposed to be a simple list: here are five women I would love to see in a Full Sail ring. As I tried to narrow down my list, that lizard brain went into overdrive, and couldn’t stop thinking about why they wouldn’t work. The more I thought about it, the more frustrated I got because these superficial reasons are so intensely stupid. I would kill for someone like Evie to be on TV every week. Veda Scott is a Total Package in my book, both from my incredibly biased viewpoint and the perspective of how well she already works on a TV show that few people actually get to (or care to) watch. Jessica James is the size of an orange pip but is a shoot black belt and could probably kill you with her thumbs if she wanted to. Candice LeRae is a tiny little powerhouse who is gorgeous as heck and can hang in the ring better than most dudes on the indies, and she proves it every chance she gets. If WWE’s goal is to sign girls the size of Ariana Grande to feed to our future ideal Diva of Alexa Bliss, where does that leave someone like Vanessa Kraven? Or the still incredibly tiny but incredibly strong Kimber Lee? Better yet, what kind of future belongs to the women we already love?

Women like Alexa Bliss are important – let’s not discount that. When we start discounting people who do fit the mold of what WWE wants, we remove both their agency and their worth, and that’s counterproductive to the conversation we should be having. Removing Bliss’s glitter was devastating enough. But we also know that having one kind of woman be the definition of a Diva does not work. Who do you think of when you think of a “bad Diva?” I’ll bet you anything that she’s that WWE ideal. I am also willing to bet that most people’s opinions are the result of never being given a chance to be more than the person on the cover of Maxim. They were never looking for someone to be the next Moolah, or the next Alundra Blayze, and you sure as hell know they were never looking for the next Luna Vachon.

But they should be.

Anyone with a modicum of real-world sense knows that diversity is important. Look at the popularity of comics like Gotham Academy, Ms. Marvel, or Lumberjanes. People of every identifiable gender are flocking to books like Bitch Planet, where non-compliance and strong, diverse women are the norm. The world is changing, and our paragons of pop culture are slowly starting to play catch-up, despite sometimes overwhelming backlash from people with terrible world views. My entire pull list has books with at least one female creator. Do you understand how unfathomable that still is? Kamala Khan is a voice for teen girls, for Muslim girls, or for anyone who has had a responsibility thrust upon them before they were ready. Any one of those as a central concept is amazing. And the numbers are there. The money is there. So what does it take to make that bleed into other things that I love?