One of the biggest complaints fans have about today’s wrestling is the lack of characters. Since the end of the Monday Night Wars, pro wrestling has shifted more to a realistic sport based style with WWE leading the charge.
The WWE has made a point to promote their product as more of a legitimate sports show than not, hence they’re focused on the competition angle.
WWE Needs Characters
It’s reasonable to think this is why we get a hundred and one matches between the same wrestlers.
While the matches may be great, there’s no story or substance beyond what’s happening in the ring most of the time.
In other sports, feuds like these work because we know the outcomes aren’t predetermined and anything can happen during a game. So it only goes so far.
AEW leans more toward the competition angle, but they embrace characters a little more than the WWE, while Impact Wrestling leans more toward characters.
Fans want characters. We want the Undertakers, the Stone Colds, the Rocks, and so on. They draw us in an make us care about what’s happening.
To test this we just have to look at the two most popular WWE superstars from the last couple of years — “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt and “The Tribal Chief” Roman Reigns.
Back to basics
With Reigns being the best thing to come out of the WWE the last couple of years, it gives us hope they’ll move more back to having a more character driven product.
But there has to be a certain nuance about it instead of just saying one week someone’s a heel. The Rock talked about the nuance of his character turning heel in 1999 in his The Rock Says book, as well as staying true to the basics.
Special thanks to @awrestlinghistorian for the excerpt.
“Regardless of what people say and how the industry has evolved, I think there are some basic tenets to which you must adhere. One of them is this: People want to boo somebody and people want to cheer somebody. It’s that simple. And it was becoming increasingly clear that when The Rock met Stone Cold, the fans were spending all of their time cheering.
“Rather than allow the act to grow stale, we decided to have just one more Pay Per View match at Backlash. Once again, I put Steve over in the middle of the ring. One. Two. Three! He held onto the WWF Championship with a clean victory, but that was only one function.
“Equally important was The Rock’s continued slide towards babyface-dom. I had been talking with the writers and the office about how to handle this transition. To me, it was vital The Rock remain The Rock. I was completely opposed to a 180 degree turn from heel to babyface. It had to be gradual, subtle, genuine. And in the end, even a babyface version of The Rock had to exhibit all, or at least most, of the vile characteristics that made the heel version of The Rock so compelling.”
We want someone to love and believe in as the face, and someone to hate as the heel. The characters wrestlers portray do that. They draw us in and make us care whether they win or lose.
The WWE has struggled with their creative department for years from lack of logic, consistency, and quality.
Will that change and will we get more characters? Let us know in the comments below.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5y_bOQM1K8
