10 Most Rebellious Anti-Heroes In WWE History
These aren't your conventional white knights...
Professional wrestling has a longstanding obsession with protagonists who defy traditional heroic qualities like valour and honour, yet retain immense support from the crowd. The sport’s anti-heroes aren’t traditional knights in shining armour, but complex characters who operate in moral shades of grey and go beyond conventional ideals of “good” and “bad”.
Wrestling was built on straightforward battles between easily identifiable heroes and villains, but the business evolved throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the need for edgier “heroes” went hand-in-hand with the business's shift towards the risqué and provocative. Clean-cut do-gooders were well and truly out of fashion by the time the Attitude Era came around, and in came the anti-heroes.
The trend kicked off long before that, however. While wrestlers like the Von Erichs and Bruno Sammartino were the pure, moralistic heroes fans expected, competitors like Bruiser Brody and the Road Warriors blurred the lines. Anti-heroes grew in prominence as the years progressed, exploded in popularity with Steve Austin’s rise to the top, and are now commonplace throughout the business.
Straightforward good guys like Sami Zayn are now a minority, and in WWE the anti-heroes reign supreme. But who stands tall among these unorthodox, amoral and deeply flawed set of rule-breakers?
Here are the 10 most rebellious anti-heroes in WWE history.
10. Dean Ambrose
Dean Ambrose is far from perfect.
Unhinged, out of control and more than willing to use his fists to solve his problems, the current WWE World Champion is one of the company’s most popular competitors, but he’s far from a straightforward hero. Ambrose a scrappy, pragmatic fighter who’s more than happy to get his hands dirty when the time comes, and he’s remarkably self-aware too.
Dean’s called himself a “scumbag” on countless occasions, and shows no real desire to change his ways and adapt to a more conventional set of morals.
From his scruffy appearance to his wild, loose fighting style, it’s clear that Ambrose isn’t wired the same way as many of WWE’s babyfaces. While his ambiguous “craziness” is often used to explain his actions, Ambrose often comes across surprisingly intelligently on the microphone despite regularly moments of madness.
He’s as unpredictable as they come in WWE, and his recent feud with Dolph Ziggler proves that he’s not afraid of being the bad guy if it means getting ahead of the competition.
While not as loudly anti-authority as Steve Austin, Ambrose has spent much of his post-Shield career battling Seth Rollins, the McMahon family’s apparent “chosen one". Going further back, The Shield themselves were a highly subversive group that laid waste to anyone who stood in their way, regardless of alignment.
The Lunatic Fringe's character has a tendency to slip into goofy comedy territory from time to time, but when he’s completely focused, Ambrose’s anti-hero character is one of the industry’s strongest.