LogFAQs > #914063654

scarletspeed7 posted...

NBIceman posted...

This argument is really good evidence for why the outdated conceptions of face and heel characters need to be done away with entirely.

Write compelling, logical, three dimensional characters and stories to surround them. Then let the audience decide who to cheer for and go from there.

Hey, another reason why bad writers are killing WWE!

You don't even need to necessarily get rid of faces and heels so much as provide consistent, logical booking and reasoning to the characters. It's like how characters like the Horsemen became faces during the NWO era when they were against the NWO and remained heels against the rest of WCW. Just find natural progression. I will always argue that the character of Lex Luger in the latter half of the 90s is one of the most nuanced characters in wrestling, and it's because he eschews the normal role of a heel and develops microrelationships on the roster that have grayer histories.

To me, the problem is that unless you're making a concerted effort to move away from face/heel, it's impossible to truly commit to layered characters, because two things are pretty much always going to happen.

First, from a booker's perspective, the temptation for shaking up a stagnant character is always going to be switching them towards the opposite alignment. If they're written as generally heroic and people get bored with them, the natural inclination is to make them more "heelish," even if you're not technically thinking in terms of a "heel" character or necessarily intending them to be booed. If you free yourself completely from that way of thinking, you'd be more open to instead making them a different kind of hero. Remember the Depressed AJ Styles storyline in TNA, where they tried to make him into a heel by just having him grow his hair out, ride a motorcycle, and be a loner? That didn't make any sense. He could've still been a face with all those characteristics. But because accepted wrestling logic dictates that a character shakeup can (usually) only occur by an alignment swap, the whole thing ended up just being laughed at.

The second, and more important, point is that fans are always going to get caught up in inane arguments like the one we just saw. If no one was concerned with what alignment Becky was, everyone would've just agreed that the segment was effective. As an outsider, I have no idea what's actually going on with Becky or that segment, but the whole thing was caused apparently by semantics born out of the binary face/heel dynamic and the extent to which people even think it exists or has to exist.

I also remember that Samoa Joe vs Sami Zayn 2 out of 3 falls match in NXT. I loved that match at the time because Joe was showing some face tendencies in it and I thought it was actually a clever way to get to a more nuanced Joe character. Instead, they completely ignored it afterwards because "well, he's a heel, we've gotta get him booed, better make him an unrepentant asshole still." What was a MOTYC for me fell way down my list because of the internal logic inconsistencies. So the face/heel dynamic can even bleed into matches sometimes.

I'm not saying that there's not already a bit of a sliding scale in some companies, but I think that until bookers are willing to cast it off entirely they'll still be hamstringing themselves by a natural instinct to abide by some of its conventions.
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