10 Most Effective Wrestling Heels Of The 21st Century
Restoring a lost art.
The heel dynamic has shifted seismically since the 20th century.
The destruction of kayfabe caught so much in its backdraft, and the heel role was firmly in the crosshairs. The Midnight Express caused riots in the 1980s, even during a time in which very few didn't know something was up - but once wrestling officially gave up on the ruse, in 1989, it became incredibly difficult to generate genuine heat. The bad guys were just pretending to injure your heroes and laugh at their pain and your anger. The emotion just wasn't there anymore. Mainstream wrestling had to completely reinvent and refer to itself to evoke proper emotion. Mr. McMahon was the first truly effective meta-heel. But the new Authority Figure trope - now the norm - has brought with it an eye-rolling number of diminished returns.
We are expected to hate somebody like Stephanie McMahon - who does not warrant inclusion here because, though detestable, she has failed to provide the audience with the pants-p*ssing catharsis her father did - simply because she places obstacles in front of the people we are expected to cheer.
The heel role isn't redundant, even if it has been further compromised by a knowing audience at odds with itself and its hobby; the very best modern villains have reset the mode - or learned how to subvert the new paradigm.
10. Sasha Banks
Sasha Banks in NXT was cool; she captured the bling and bombast zeitgeist of modern urban culture to carve out her unique, vicious and crowing Boss character.
But she wasn't a continuation of the cool heel device popularised in the 1990s. Fans in the midpoint nadir of that DayGlo, antiquated landscape were alienated by the WWF's attempts to position Shawn Michaels as a doe-eyed dreamer, and WCW's beat-for-beat recycling of Hulk Hogan's passé American hero schtick - so they clung to the black-clad antiheroes of the New World Order.
As entertaining as that faction was, the purpose was self-defeating. Fans didn't want to hate them; they wanted to be them. Their nominal role of generating sympathy for babyfaces was, with a few rule-proving exceptions, undermined. The angle unravelled after just two years, painting it more as fad than revolution.
Banks in her 2015 pomp was too vile to endear herself to audiences. Her most famous rival, the inherently loveable Bayley, did much to help her cause. Banks, a member of the Four Horsewomen, channelled the Four Horsemen stable after which they were named by attempting to break Bayley's hand in an ultra-heated match at TakeOver: Brooklyn. In that match she also vaulted over the referee to drill Bayley with a suicide dive - fusing modern athleticism with classic cheating. She arguably bettered that heel performance at TakeOver: Respect, during which she ripped the headband from young Bayley superfan Izzy to massive jeers.
Banks is floundering as a babyface on RAW largely because fans know what she is capable of - mastery of a difficult and elusive skill.