10 Wrestlers WWE Made You Hate (Thanks To Awful Booking)

At its core, professional wrestling is all about crowd manipulation. The performers' job is to compel the fans to root for them if they're a babyface, or jeer them when playing heel, thus building investment in their characters and compelling the audience to tune in the following week.

It's a difficult job, and countless wrestlers have seen their careers collapse through their inability to connect with the fans. Crowd reactions must be earned. Audiences are going to root for or against performers at their own discretion, and while WWE would love us pesky fans to fall in line, accept their decisions without question, cheer the wrestlers presented to us as heroes, and boo the bad guys, it doesn't always work like that.

Making an audience cheer a performer is difficult, but building hatred isn't such a tall order. Unfortunately, this often comes in spite of WWE's booking rather than because of it, and while the company will tell you that "any reaction is a good reaction," this certainly isn't true for the cases within.

Though their rejection levels vary, each of these performers built sizeable clusters of haters through no fault of their own, but because the audience resented the way their were booked.

Prime Kane is one of the best monster characters in wrestling history. He entered WWE with a great backstory, made an incredibly memorable debut at Badd Blood: In Your House, and was generally presented very well throughout his first few years with the company, which made him a key character through the Attitude Era.

Old Kane, unfortunately, is quite the opposite.

By 1999, WWE were already devaluing the character by having him say "suck it" with DX, and he was hit with the motherload of bad ideas in the early 2000s. The infamous Katie Vick angle happened in 2002, and WWE totally botched his unmasking the following year. In 2004, Kane fell victim to a horrendous romance angle with Lita, killing the final traces of his once ferocious aura.

These events nuked Kane's intrigue levels, and made it impossible to see him as a legitimate threat. Unfortunately, WWE continually presented him as such, and while later years brought a handful of highlights (Team Hell No, for one), Kane gradually became an unwanted presence.

Though he's not as widely hated as some of the names on our list, Kane's late career has largely been characterised by groans whenever he's onscreen, and if he returned tomorrow, this would still be the case.