WWE: Abrupt turns are emblematic of a broken creative process
Recently, the likes of Charlotte Flair and Alexa Bliss have appeared on WWE television as babyfaces without any turn that explains their new attitude.
In roughly 20 years as a wrestling fan, the feud that has stuck with me the most was Rey Mysterio’s series with Eddie Guerrero in 2005. As two of the all-time great workers in this business, their matches were an obvious selling point, but aside from that, what always impressed me about this program was the slow burn to Guerrero’s eventual heel turn.
The seeds were planted in late 2004/early 2005, when Mysterio picked up several consecutive wins over his long-time friend, including one at WrestleMania 21. In between these singles matches, Guerrero and Mysterio won the WWE Tag Team Championships from the Basham Brothers at No Way Out 2005, which added another dynamic to the underlying tension between the two.
As the storyline progressed, Guerrero became more and more perturbed over his inability to best Mysterio in singles competition. This not only led to them losing the tag team titles to M.N.M, but also one of the most vicious heel turns my teenage eyes had seen at that point.
The followup was just as spectacular: Guerrero used the 10 minutes of promo time afforded to him the week after his turn to explain how Mysterio and the fans robbed him of his “Latino Heat” before advising Mysterio to not show up for their match at that year’s Judgement Day pay-per-view. The feud eventually took a weird detour, but everything that happened beforehand stayed within a logical framework and kept the audience waiting for the next chapter.
If you’re an older fan, more historically impactful moments like Hulk Hogan forming the nWo in 1996, Andre the Giant challenging Hulk Hogan to a WWF Championship match at WrestleMania III, Bret Hart and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s double turn at WrestleMania 13, Larry Zbyszko smashing his mentor Bruno Sammartino with a wooden chair, or Paul Orndorff compressing Hogan’s neck with a piledriver just to name a few.
Now imagine that instead of Hogan dropping the leg on Randy Savage to cement his alliance with Scott Hall and Nash, he merely showed up on a random episode of WCW Monday Nitro in black and white, side by side with them with no explanation. Or if Zbyszco went to one house show and praised Sammartino and on the next show said that he hated Sammartino’s guts.
How about if Hart worked the entire submission match against Austin at WrestleMania as a babyface and turned his back on all of his United States-based fans the next night on RAW? Would you have the same fond memories of these feuds absent a definitive turn? The answer is probably: No!