Are we missing characters?

[Supremo]

My biggest thing in WWE isn’t that the characters aren’t there, it’s that nothing ever comes of them. They’ll usually put a tonne of effort into building a character’s backstory and hyping up their debut but once they arrive nothing ever evolves or goes anywhere.

If the pretty boy model comes in he should be having feuds over someone ruining his looks by breaking his nose, stealing a big contract, gatecrashing a fashion show to attack him or chucking paint over his new custom-made, million dollar coat. He should evolve from just being a pretty boy model to maybe stealing someone’s girlfriend or trying his luck and failing at being a rock star too. Maybe he launches his own clothing brand specialising in wrestling gear, but then goes bankrupt. You know, stuff. If he just comes in and wrestles some wrestling matches then it doesn’t matter what character he came in as. He’s just another wrestler wrestling some matches now, with the only things differentiating him being his look, his entrance music and whatever Michael Cole is scripted to lifelessly shout when said music hits.

As downhill as NXT has gone, and as much as @BomberPatis spot on about them lazily bringing everyone in as the next,”Hottest Free Agent,” I still think NXT is leagues ahead of Raw and Smackdown in at least doing some experimenting and allowing guys to flesh their characters out, play on them and evolve. On modern-day Raw or Smackdown there’s absolutely no way Cameron Grimes would suddenly get rich and start emulating Ted Dibiase. He’d have remained exactly how he was when he came in, rinse and repeat until the end of time.

[Guest]

Whatever we are missing, we don’t need more long dark haired guys with thick beards wearing black. Character building comes from uniqueness, and too many guys look happy looking like each other than trying to stand out 

[DavidB6937]

7 hours ago, Supremo said:

My biggest thing in WWE isn’t that the characters aren’t there, it’s that nothing ever comes of them. They’ll usually put a tonne of effort into building a character’s backstory and hyping up their debut but once they arrive nothing ever evolves or goes anywhere.

If the pretty boy model comes in he should be having feuds over someone ruining his looks by breaking his nose, stealing a big contract, gatecrashing a fashion show to attack him or chucking paint over his new custom-made, million dollar coat. He should evolve from just being a pretty boy model to maybe stealing someone’s girlfriend or trying his luck and failing at being a rock star too. Maybe he launches his own clothing brand specialising in wrestling gear, but then goes bankrupt. You know, stuff. If he just comes in and wrestles some wrestling matches then it doesn’t matter what character he came in as. He’s just another wrestler wrestling some matches now, with the only things differentiating him being his look, his entrance music and whatever Michael Cole is scripted to lifelessly shout when said music hits.

As downhill as NXT has gone, and as much as @BomberPatis spot on about them lazily bringing everyone in as the next,”Hottest Free Agent,” I still think NXT is leagues ahead of Raw and Smackdown in at least doing some experimenting and allowing guys to flesh their characters out, play on them and evolve. On modern-day Raw or Smackdown there’s absolutely no way Cameron Grimes would suddenly get rich and start emulating Ted Dibiase. He’d have remained exactly how he was when he came in, rinse and repeat until the end of time.

My main problem is the in-between. Where NXT has done a fairly decent job of building someone up. they get successful, they get called up and then.. oh, they're suddenly some random wrestler that has appeared. No real mention of their NXT successes. No real mention of what their character actually is or why they are who they are. Why anyone would want to call them up. They're just thrown out there and that's that. I hate it. I hate that they don't get that chance to get themselves over to the new audience because there's that horrible assumption that everyone already knows who they are. It really wouldn't take much to have a highlight reel or a quick build up or something but they rarely do it. Fair enough if they're calling them up and changing them but if it's just take xyz from NXT and plop them onto Raw or SmackDown then it's rarely done right.

[Supremo]

I think the scripting of the promos has a lot to do with it, too. No matter the character they all end up saying the same thing in exactly the same way.

If Ultimate Warrior or Undertaker came around today, rather than mumbling threats of burying people alive or screaming absolute bollocks to the heavens, they’d be standing in the centre of the ring, staring at the hard camera, calmly reciting their lines, using the exact same cadence and vocabulary as everyone else. Pro-wrestling is stupid and daft at the best of times, but when everyone feels identical other than their clobber it ends up coming across like nothing more than a forced fancy dress party in the office. The same bunch of boring bastards, just in whacky costumes.

Lars Sullivan is a good example. I know everything outside the show ultimately lead to his downfall but the writing was already on the wall. Portrayed as this crazed maniac, literally nicknamed The Freak, but put a microphone in front of him and bar a bit more grunting than usual he didn’t feel any different to anyone else. Same delivery. Same structure. Same weird words that no-one would say in real life.

It’s why Brock Lesnar feels so much larger than life compared to everyone else. Fucker doesn’t speak. Script him to say the bizarre Word-of-the-Days you do everyone else and his novelty and momentum would plummet.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Supremo

[cobra_gordo]

I think that's why your Moxleys and Kingstons feel so special. Their character for the most part is just Man What Wrestles but they're interesting and engaging so they can get away with it. There needs to be an everyman as much as there needs to be wrestling dinosaurs, dentists and cult leaders.

[BomberPat]

I agree with everyone saying NXT isn't as bad for character development as I'd said; I don't watch it enough these days, so my criticism was based largely on a pre-Covid NXT of indie darlings, where admittedly they've reverted back to having a welcome bit of silliness and character work in recent months.

Absolutely agree that the main problem is the scripting of promos - or, rather, that they're all scripted by the same one or two people, and that the people doing the scripting simply aren't good enough. If one person is writing for everyone else, everyone else is going to sound like that one person. If that one person is, ultimately, Vince McMahon, no one is going to sound like a real human being. 
It's like the "WHAT?" chant that used to be the blight of every promo in WWE. The only reason that chant was able to take hold is because every promo had the exact same rhythm, leaving dramatic pauses in the exact same places - every now and then, someone would just speak normally, or just a little quicker, and it killed it straight off. It's one of the reasons why Samoa Joe always came across as legitimate in WWE compared to almost everyone else - his pace and his delivery don't have the same stop-start rhythm as everybody else, so he sounds like a real fighter, not a character.

 

There's a real cursed monkey's paw dynamic to what's going on with modern WWE, though - people online complained for years that there was too much talking, too many gimmicks, and that wrestlers should be allowed to just go out and wrestle for twenty minutes and play the same characters they played in ROH or PWG. It turns out that when you do that, it's usually fucking boring. What works for a live crowd - which, Covid aside, is still the bread and butter of most non-WWE companies - isn't what works for TV. 

Like everything else, though, it doesn't come down to a lack of character so much as to WWE homogenisation and micromanagement. You only have to watch the recent documentary on Big E, or watch Daniel Bryan's promos on Talking Smack, to see that they have plenty of compelling characters, but the vast majority of them just aren't allowed to show enough character on TV. It's like Moxley said on Jericho's podcast - you get to WWE by showing that you can put together creative and dynamic matches, and come up with promos that hook people and make them want to pay to see you fight, then when you get there they say, "don't worry, we have people to book the matches and write the promos for you". It's madness.