8 Wrestling Gimmicks That Wouldn't Work In 2016

1. The Face Of All Faces

The Mountie Wwe
wwe.com

2016 is a strange place when it comes to good guys in fiction and media. Ever since the late 1990s, the anti-hero has taken the place of the hero as the one we want to root for, the one that crowds will get behind. We no longer want our heroes to be good, peace-loving, law-abiding, do right by all types. We want them to be flawed, full of self-hate, and most likely dealing with some deep-seated personal issues.

As such, the vanilla babyface is dead in the water in professional wrestling. WWE has known this for a while, and it may play a part in its overbalanced attempts to make the good guys 'edgy'. A guy like Tito Santana would fall flat today, purely because a cynical audience refuses to believe that a 100% good person can exist.

This cynicism is accurate. Even the greatest of individuals has a dark side, and as we hurtle deeper into the rabbit hole of fiction our desire to mimic real life as much as possible in our characters has overrun our desire for story. The pure babyface, more so than any other, is a wrestling gimmick that doesn't work in 2016.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.