Buffalo Rumblings
What might “the script” call for?
Lately there’s been a lot of speculation about Kansas City winning football games with a little help from their friends. Which friends exactly? The NFL’s own officials. This has many fans crying foul and making statements that the game we all love has become like the WWE. This isn’t a new phenom either, with Li’l Skarekrow growing up hearing similar accusations from his dad after each Buffalo Bills Super Bowl loss.
That got me thinking. What if the NFL really is like the WWE? What might “the script” have in store for us?
When it comes to professional wrestling and story lines, it’s incredibly important to know if a character is a face or a heel. For the uninitiated, a “face” is slang for a hero while a “heel” is code for villain. What makes the designation so critical? There are two major reasons this is important that I want to discuss.
In reality, both faces and heels win. Heroes and villains both must be successful and winning is highly dependent on being “over” or popular with fans. However, the timing of wins can be a bit formulaic.
For many wrestling story lines, the idea is that the face should win in the end. Wrestling is not intended to be high art and a basic rule that is nearly always followed is that good prevails.
That last word is critical. The hero beating a bunch of jobbers (unpopular wrestlers perceived as “weak”) is not satisfying nor is it “prevailing.” The bigger and badder the villain, the better the eventual victory is for the face. Or in other words, the face has to go through tribulations (heel victories) for that story of “prevailing” to land.
One last thought on the labels, a wrestler can shift from face to heel or heel to face. That’s because...
There are some complexities to this, but in general faces and heels have codes to live by. A major reason is that fans need to know which one is which so we know who we want to prevail. Are Geralt of Rivia or Roland Deschain the hero or the villain? That’s highly dependent on the moment with these complex characters and neither Sapkowski nor King seem to want a simple answer.
In wrestling though, complexity can kill a character, so rules establish who you’re looking at to make it easy. Faces usually can bend the rules such as wrestling outside the ring for a short duration (but always mindful of sliding back in before the count). Heels are identified by their willingness to break the rules, such as deliberately sliding out of the ring to get a breather or to look for a weapon.
Skare, you just said it’s critical to know who is who, so then... who is...
