Get rid of Heels / Faces, you don't need them! Agreed?

[Alastor]

Wrestlers can adjust their actions according to who they face in the ring for one night, but ultimately he must have a clear identity and the easiest way for fans to identify with him is to make a distinction of whether he is a good guy or bad guy. Take away that and you are basically forcing every fan to follow your product every week or don't bother watching. Sure the ideal thing is every fan is loyal to the product every week but that isn't reality.

Good triumphs over Evil is what people pay to see in theatre. Take away the roles and all you have is just 'sports' and we see how far that concept went in pro-wrestling. If all you want to watch is sports and fighting, MMA/Boxing will appeal more to you than pro-wrestling. Why should WWE make a product to cater to people like that who will always deem it as a inferior when they can make their own brand of 'fighting' which the fans will regard as the best?

 

[SaveUsCMPunk]

I cheer for whomever I want, regardless of alignment. Guys like Chris Jericho and Kane are living legends and I find it very difficult to boo them even if they're heel. They're kind of like Ric Flair in that they've reached a point in their careers where most long term fans will cheer them regardless because they respect what they've contributed to the business.

Back in the Attitude Era, there were a lot of guys that weren't distinct faces or heels. You had LOD 2000 feuding with DOA, Owen Hart feuding with DX, (pre-Nation), the Corporation feuding with the Ministry of Darkness, Chyna being aligned with a heel Triple H while at the same time feuding with a heel Jeff Jarrett, etc. Some of it was a bit confusing but it was all pretty interesting. I don't know if I would do away with heels and faces, but more tweeners could be interesting.

 

[BillAlfonso]

You want to know why Floyd "Money" Mayweather acts like a dick? It's the same reason that "Iron" Mike Tyson acted like a psychopath against Lennox Lewis, or why Quinton "Rampage" Jackson acts like a jackass. In order to effectively make people care about a match, there has to be a bad guy. The most important thing in a sporting event or even a simulated one like sport entertainment/pro wrestling is the championship but that would only be important to those involved consistently. To make people emotionally invested, there has to be the "struggle between good and evil." It even happens in team sports, look at the Pittsburgh Steelers, they're my favorite team but the general consensus around the AFC North is that we're the bad guys yet we could really care less about the division(we're not going to take too many losses though) we have our eyes set on the Superbowl and our bad guys are the New England Patriots, Steelers fans will watch any game where we have a shot at Tom Brady, it's the same with teams like the New York Yankees or the Miami Heat.

There will always have to be a face or a heel to create effective drama, otherwise you just have two guys wrestling and no real emotional investment.

 

[TWJC: The Beginning]

You don't have designated faces and heels but you have guys who do good guy things and bad guy things.

John Cena does good guy things and gets boos and cheered. Punk and Ziggler do bad guy things and get booed and cheered.

You need guys to have a dynamic to play off of thoug, you cat abandon that.

 

[TWJC: The Beginning]

I cheer for whomever I want, regardless of alignment. Guys like Chris Jericho and Kane are living legends and I find it very difficult to boo them even if they're heel. They're kind of like Ric Flair in that they've reached a point in their careers where most long term fans will cheer them regardless because they respect what they've contributed to the business.

Back in the Attitude Era, there were a lot of guys that weren't distinct faces or heels. You had LOD 2000 feuding with DOA, Owen Hart feuding with DX, (pre-Nation), the Corporation feuding with the Ministry of Darkness, Chyna being aligned with a heel Triple H while at the same time feuding with a heel Jeff Jarrett, etc. Some of it was a bit confusing but it was all pretty interesting. I don't know if I would do away with heels and faces, but more tweeners could be interesting.

fuck tweeners. That's just a snarky way of saying "bad boy good guy". In the Tude era, the good guys were good guys. Cussing and being rude doesn't change that.

 

[It's...Baylariat!]

It doesn't work. It's been tried and it simply doesn't work. The simple age old concept of good vs. bad is and always will be a key element in pro wrestling. Without some distinct conflict between the characters, and without different personalities to said characters, it all gets stale. The smark fans who cheer for the heels and boo the babyfaces, thankfully, don't represent the majority of wrestling audiences.

Back in the Attitude Era, the concept of good guys & bad guys was pretty much done away with. As a result, pretty much every character on the roster became a morally ambiguous tweener. As a result, you had a very lackluster roster packed with characters who didn't have their own distinct identities. You can't have an entire roster full of, for all intents & purposes, anti-heroes. Whether it be movies or television, hell even comic books, every character can't be someone who walks in a world of gray. That's why there were far more traditional heroes in Westerns back in the day rather than Clint Eastwood's morally ambiguous "Man with No Name" character.

Heels are supposed to be morally questionable people who often twist aspects of reality to suit their own personal philosophy. For instance, is The Shield truly delivering "justice" to WWE? Of course not. But their insistence that's what they're doing by viciously attacking people who haven't committed any injustices towards them or anything else naturally makes them look like hypocrites. Nobody likes a hypocrite, especially if said hypocrite is attacking someone "innocent" in the name of justice. That gives fans a reason to boo against them and rally behind whomever they happen to be feuding with.

Simply going around and having wrestlers seemingly attack one another at random without any sense of moral compass to their characters is chaotic. Vince Russo tried doing this and it led to some of the worst content to ever make it onto a wrestling television program.

I'd like to thank Jackhammer here for pretty much saying what I was going to say.

But to elaborate on what he says about Vince Russo... he wanted to turn the WCW into 'reality television', which included talking openly about stuff like scripts, booking, jobbing, etc. The one thing that wrestling has that no other form of sports or entertainment can offer is the element of good vs. evil.

Trying to do away with good vs. bad takes a lot away from a wrestling event. Imagine Superman and Lex Luthor toeing the line of good and evil all the time. It doesn't work long term, because there has to be a protagonist and an antagonist.

So long story short, your idea of doing away with face/heel characters in wrestling is in a word... stupid.

 

[New Hot Fed]

More than any other times, wrestling is at a crossroad, especially the WWE where you have guys like Punk and Ziggler that are cheered, fans like the Shield and so forth. Cena has been booed for ages yet they keep trying to book him as a hero. With Impact Wrestling doing their weekly shows on the road you'll see more and more wrestlers that are usualy portrayed as faces but won't be liked on a national stage, same as guys like Aries and Roode and Daniels that are bad guys but will likely be cheered. It already happened.

Here's the thing, the secret of heels and faces in wrestling was always done to generate heat, cause in the old age you had say a heel champ that people would pay to see his butt kicked. Wrestling was a gate-driven industry back then, more than tv or PPV and you had to create this rage into people that they would make them mad enough to go to the local arena and pay to see these shows. It doesn't matter anymore cause people come to see the brand whether it's WWE Raw or Smackdown and now TNA. We are in an era where people pay for what they like and it doesn't matter if it's good things or bad things. People love certain wrestlers cause of the way they wrestle, the way they look, their characters, being bad or good doesn't matter to them. Look at Punk, he's a sensation regardless of how WWE book him. And WWE created this when they decided to not hear the crowd boo Cena, kept him the hero. And now the floodgate have opened and people are rooting for who they want.

 

[mancini999]

the heel/face thing can never truly go away. Tweaners have and will always be in the mix. It takes someone who the fans actually care about to make it work though. They have to have a cool factor that most performers just don't have.

 

[#tamale]

The reason people are getting fed up with Cena, I think is not because he is a "face" they want to turn "heel" it is because his character feels pushed or false.

Jericho is a good example of bad and good heels (in the context of them being bad at being bad, or good at being bad) Before he left pre dancing with the stars etc. He was annoying and not entertaining, and nobody cared that much, he'd come out and do the old, really old, heel move of trying to mock the crowd to get lame heat, he'd try and just generally be annoying to get a reaction.

First off, Jericho a bad heel? You're kidding right? Jericho from 2008 to 2010 is probably the best heel to come out of that entire decade. After his heel run, people tried to copy his exact heel form. People HATED Jericho. You know why they hated him? Because he lied, he was condescending and hypocritical, he felt he was right and everyone else was wrong, he cheated to win, etc. He wasn't the cool, cocky, funny heel. He was the guy you loved to hate.

Next, Cena is probably the most natural character in the WWE because Cena is himself. He's not a gimmick. He is who he is. Some will love him, others will hate him, but by God will you talk about him.

Look at Batman in the Nolan films. He wasn't a beloved hero. In fact, people had mixed feelings about him. But he always did what was right, even though people hated him for it.

What you fail to realize and the people who support your opinion is that faces and heels is what has made this business thrive for so many years. People think Austin was a tweener. No, Austin was a face. He was the blue collar worker who drank beer, kicked ass, and hated his boss. He represented millions of people. Vince McMahon was the heel. The evil corporate boss. The Man if you will.

Same face/heel formula. What changed? The dynamic. It was more contemporary, and Austin was natural. That's how he was. The problem was forcing that same concept on other guys who weren't the same. That's one of the reasons Mankind became such a huge star. If you look at his character towards the end of 98 and 99 when he won the WWE Championship it was the complete opposite of Austin, but it worked because it was different.

Always keep the face/heel formula. It works. Just make sure you change the dynamic. Keep it with the times, which I feel WWE has done well in some cases. Also, this whole notion of fans cheering for who they want because that's how it is now is crap. Fans have been doing that for as long as I can remember. They did it with Razor Ramon. They did it with the NWO. The list can go on and on. I'll tell you, even though they may have cheered for NWO, when Sting finally attacked them they were cheering harder for Sting.

 

[Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D.]

No babyfaces or heels? That doesn't jive. There's this thing called "the finish", and it needs someone to "go over". You need someone to be the face and someone the heel.

 

[RebeccaLockHeart]

Might as well get rid of Wrestling in general. Even back in the day there was Heels and Faces. The point of Pro Wrestling is to tell a story.. You could categorize Pro Wrestling as a Drama.. So you would need good guys and bad guys and well guys who are just plain awesome that we really don't care what they are!