Philjax Posted April 5, 2020 Share Posted April 5, 2020 Jobbers absolutely, but not Marko Stunt. That's almost management condemning him to death! So now this screams a Darby/Murderhawk final with similar results.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Statto Posted April 5, 2020 Paid Members Share Posted April 5, 2020 52 minutes ago, Linus said: I mean, he should start at the bottom. I actually quite like that he and Brodie Lee haven't come straight in to world title matches. I miss the days when new arrivals would have two months of jobbers on the B shows. WWE still take this approach sometimes, but whenever they do they tend to forget to stop doing it and it turns into 6-8 months of the same squash every week instead. Thinking the Viking Raiders when they moved to Raw, or Baron Corbin doing the same sub-10 second match on NXT every week for about 3 years when he first debuted. He was doing it so long I think he turned twice before having a competitive match. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrtrickio Posted April 5, 2020 Share Posted April 5, 2020 Don't think I've seen it mentioned here but Jericho said last night that they've got 6 Dynamites in the can... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Supremo Posted April 5, 2020 Paid Members Share Posted April 5, 2020 Listening to Brodie Lee on Jericho's podcast, his blind spot for this Vince gimmick couldn't be more obvious. To him, having put up with Vince for years, suffering through all his oddball shit, it's the ultimate heel character. To anyone who hasn't worked directly under Vince though, who just hears what a fucking weirdo he is from stories ex-WWE guys share on podcasts, it's not a heel character at all. It's just a weirdo stuck in a bubble. More a tragic or laughable figure than anything else. Hopefully he cottons on or someone tells him eventually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WyattSheepMask Posted April 5, 2020 Share Posted April 5, 2020 51 minutes ago, mrtrickio said: Don't think I've seen it mentioned here but Jericho said last night that they've got 6 Dynamites in the can... Yeah, apparently they taped shows on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week. There hasn’t been anything said about Double or Nothing 2020 as yet, so it looks like they’ve taped up till that and hoping to be back in front of a crowd for that show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Pitcos Posted April 6, 2020 Share Posted April 6, 2020 18 hours ago, Supremo said: Listening to Brodie Lee on Jericho's podcast, his blind spot for this Vince gimmick couldn't be more obvious. To him, having put up with Vince for years, suffering through all his oddball shit, it's the ultimate heel character. To anyone who hasn't worked directly under Vince though, who just hears what a fucking weirdo he is from stories ex-WWE guys share on podcasts To be fair, so far he’s only imitated stuff that’s been referenced on podcasts and is well-known on forums, Reddit etc. It’s unlikely that Harper himself has ever been in the production meetings where Vince makes the writers wait for him to eat. Surely the idea is more to pop the niche audience that AEW/NXT are targeting than it is to be a proper heel. Speaking of which, I’ve been wondering who the first proper AEW heel is likely to be. Not a wink-wink “great heel so funny I love him lol” like MJF and Jericho, but the first wrestler that the AEW fanbase will hate and want to see lose. It can’t be any of The Elite (except maybe Hangman) without the promotion itself turning heel. I feel like Swagger is the most likely candidate, I’m not at all sure how to reach that point with him though. Every hated WWE character in the last decade and a half or so has been that because they’re some kind of Vince/creative proxy. Even Jeff Jarrett in TNA’s early years was only hated because he was in charge behind the scenes and booked himself like reign of terror Triple H. Fuck it, it’s Randy Orton or nobody, isn’t it? The old fantasy booking of him from last year when he teased going. Turning up acting like he’s above everyone, playing nothing for laughs and doing his chinlocks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted April 6, 2020 Paid Members Share Posted April 6, 2020 (edited) We're in an era where the only real heels are completely boring bastards that no-one would miss. So by those standards, MJF and Jericho and the whole Inner Circle have been presented as proper heels. Jericho is clearly entertaining and obviously isn't despised but his job is to make people want to see him lose, and he did that against Cody and Moxley on PPV and in lots of other TV matches. Same for MJF. He's less entertaining than Jericho and does seem to have fans online for being good at being bad, but he gets a good negative reaction in the arenas and his big moments have gone over well. Nobody is getting booed out of buildings night in and night out these days unless they're completely useless. And no-one completely useless should be anywhere near the top of any card. It helps that their babyfaces are strong. You don't need a dull heel like a Sheamus or Corbin just to make your babyface seem a bit less lame if your babyface is great anyway. Edited April 6, 2020 by tiger_rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Pitcos Posted April 6, 2020 Share Posted April 6, 2020 Eh, that's saying that a character actually getting heat is useless and not necessary. I suppose it might not be - Kofi vs Daniel Bryan at last year's WrestleMania is a good example of fan sentiment being driven by the babyface even though the heel is popular. But even in that, Bryan was Vince's proxy. Jericho is more or less the same sort of villain that Eco-Bryan was, but lacking the meta element of Kofimania, nobody was desperate to see Ambrose or Cody beat Jericho. Everyone was up for him having another six months with the belt. Without a character to truly rally against, it's hard to imagine anything having that same urgency as stuff like Cena vs Punk, or Sting vs Hogan. Although by the same token, it's hard to imagine a dissension angle in WWE getting fans as invested as the Matt Jackson/Hangman Page stuff does, so AEW has got a different palette to paint with there. Shades of grey drama with the Elite and friends might make up for the lack of real baddies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted April 6, 2020 Paid Members Share Posted April 6, 2020 (edited) 18 minutes ago, King Pitcos said: Eh, that's saying that a character actually getting heat is useless and not necessary. I don't think I said that. They've done plenty of angles to put heat on the inner Circle and MJF. It doesn't make everyone hate them. It doesn't stop fans singing Jericho's theme song. it doesn't stop people online commenting how good MJF is at being bad. BUT, that also doesn't stop fans being rabid when Cody and his mates storm up to the executive box to attack the Inner Circle or when Page comes out to save his mates. I don't like the shades of grey bollocks because it's normally a defence for piss-poor writing but here I think it's applicable. Not everyone hates Chris Jericho. Not everyone loves Cody. But most people in the arenas do see Cody as the heroic babyface and Jericho as the dick heel, as they're presented, and it works. I think the Kofi example is a good one. There's no way everyone hated Daniel Bryan, and why would they when he'd been so beloved for yonks, but he was clearly positioned as the bad guy and Kofi's story was good enough to ensure it worked. 18 minutes ago, King Pitcos said: nobody was desperate to see Ambrose or Cody beat Jericho. Everyone was up for him having another six months with the belt. That's fair, there was debate on here about whether Jericho should lose but that was all from the "we could book wrestling" angle that we all come at it from. On the shows leading up to and on those PPVs, the fans were for the babyfaces. Which is the goal. I'm not convinced we'll ever get a purely hated heel again. Who was even the last one? You give Cena/Punk as an example of having a character to truly rally against but the guy to rally against was the promotion's #1 babyface. Edited April 6, 2020 by tiger_rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Pitcos Posted April 6, 2020 Share Posted April 6, 2020 5 minutes ago, tiger_rick said: That's fair, there was debate on here about whether Jericho should lose but that was all from the "we could book wrestling" angle that we all come at it from. On the shows leading up to and on those PPVs, the fans were for the babyfaces. Which is the goal. I'm not convinced we'll ever get a purely hated heel again. Who was even the last one? You give Cena/Punk as an example of having a character to truly rally against but the guy to rally against was the promotion's #1 babyface. The last one was Rollins. Before that, Reigns. Before that, Cena. Which again comes from the "we could book wrestling" angle - the most hated heel is a babyface "being shoved down our throats" when there's another babyface who is "buried" but would (in our fantasy booking) draw more money than the one who actually has the belt. In terms of actual heels, there's Corbin and Miz, but even with them it's the meta thing of not doing flips and never wrestling for NJPW, and being pushed ahead of guys who do flips and worked for NJPW. Of course there's Shane McMahon, and the Authority before him, but both of those were about the bookers booking "burials" and putting themselves over the talent etc etc. I don't see a hated heel happening without the meta element, and I don't know how that's achievable in AEW because the company/fan dynamic is still Kool-Aid rather than toxic. Even when MJF is being a right bastard to Cody, we know that it's Cody who has booked it to be this way - so it's nowhere near as upsetting as Daniel Bryan getting screwed out of a title shot by Triple H, the creative head who (we assume) doesn't rate Bryan like we do. And so you never get the WrestleMania 30 moment of pure catharsis, or the WrestleMania 31 moment of Rollins saving the day from Roman Reigns. I guess that's my point - WWE can work fans into getting apoplectic by using history, Internet gossip etc, and those fans then treat the big match result like it's life or death. How can AEW do that, and who do they have who is viable as the target of the rage? Is it even important that they do it? I'd probably say it isn't right now, but it will become so once the new car smell has worn off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted April 6, 2020 Paid Members Share Posted April 6, 2020 13 minutes ago, King Pitcos said: I don't see a hated heel happening without the meta element, and I don't know how that's achievable in AEW because the company/fan dynamic is still Kool-Aid rather than toxic. To have a hated heel, you need a really beloved babyface. That's better in theory than practice as we saw from Randy Orton just a couple of months ago. But it's possible. If they get Adam Page into a top line position still being as popular as he is now and someone fucks him over, that person should get mega heat. It would be lovely to see someone actually manage that these days without the need for any insider aggro. They did it with MJF but they weren't really going with him afterwards so it didn't have the gravitas. It is hard though. Your last three hated heels were all babyfaces. Your actual heels were hated for being shit, though Miz has got better. I can't think of a really hated heel who wasn't an authority figure since Triple H. Though he was pretty much an authority figure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Chris B Posted April 6, 2020 Paid Members Share Posted April 6, 2020 Ciampa, for a while. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UK Kat Von D Posted April 6, 2020 Share Posted April 6, 2020 Guys like Jericho and MJF are heels that fans do want to see lose, but not heels that make fans switch off their tele. Wrestling should be about generating emotion and excitement, not pissing the fans off as much as possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Supremo Posted April 6, 2020 Paid Members Share Posted April 6, 2020 They’ve really got something with this guy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Pitcos Posted April 6, 2020 Share Posted April 6, 2020 4 hours ago, tiger_rick said: It is hard though. Your last three hated heels were all babyfaces. Your actual heels were hated for being shit, though Miz has got better. That’s the thing - you’re never going to get a proper heel in this day and age who has Internet points, and that applies more to AEW and NXT than it does to the big boy shows, because AEW and NXT have 0% normals in the crowd 100% of the time. (Raw and SmackDown at least have a chance of being in Bumblefuck, Alabama on occasion.) And in AEW, wrestlers can’t yet lose internet points for the same things that wrestlers can in WWE. So the only near future option I could see is by having someone be “shit” and wrestle like a heel, without doing flips and such. Like Cactus Jack in ECW when he was doing his pro-WCW rest hold gimmick. But even that would potentially be turned into a semi-babyface comedy thing pretty quick, even as I think of it now I can already see it being funny against Orange Cassidy. The more I think about it, the more I think it won’t matter for a while yet and something might fall into place by the time it does - like a turn on Hangman. But there was a spell of about fifteen minutes the other day where I was trying to work out who’d be easiest on the roster to make a proper top bad guy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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