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Nowhereman said:
I totally disagree on the HBK thing.
HBK should be a heel,its something I have always felt,but because he has been a face for so long,it was always gonna be hard to turn him & have it accepted by the fans.
The best & only way to do that was have him blindside Hogan.

One thing wrestling needs is heels & faces,just like superhero comics need heroes & villains.

Yes,I agree Jericho should be a tweener,kinda like Stone Cold,but you still need those guys who are 100% face or 100% heel.

At this moment in time HBK had grown incredibly stale & boring as a character,and the way I see it is he had to turn heel.
WWE actually did this in the best way possible.
The only thing I take issue with in this angle is why would Piper defend Hogan?


One thing you have to realise is that WWE does need to decide who is & isnt heels/faces because thats the way to keep characters from going stale.

Just about every character has swapped from one side to the other,at some point in their career,and this is usually when either they have become stale in their current role,or to even up the balance of heels & faces.
It doesnt always work,but quite often it does.

Ultimately the fans decide who they accept in what role.
Y2J,for instance,has rarely been accepted by the fans as a heel.
Eddie Guerrero was not accepted as a heel when he beat up Tajiri,as nobody gives a shit about him,but when he turned on Rey (who people do give a shit about),the fans turned on Eddie.
This alone proves that the decision to have HBK turn on Hogan,was the right idea!



Presactly. Heel turns have to be very carefully orchestrated to work well. Otherwise, it just doesn't work (ala WCW's wretched and best forgotten attempt to make Sting a heel which only lasted a few weeks).

Excellent examples of proper and brutal heel turns:

The Road Warriors spike Dusty Rhodes ('88). Quite possibly the only person in the NWA more popular than the Warriors at that time. To make the fans boo them, they had to turn, and turn brutally. And they did. The Roadies went hardcore heel and become more brutal than they'd ever been. And even then, a lot of the fans still didn't want to boo them.

The Horsemen turn on Sting ('89). Something that people should've seen coming, but still didn't. Sting was a Horseman. He had allied with Flair and Anderson and they seemed to have bonded. Wrong! Flair and the Andersons took umbrage at Sting's decision to accept a World Title match with Flair and told him to back out. He refused. They beat the crap out of him and left him laying. Setting the stage for the next year's worth of feuds.

Hogan joins the Outsiders ('96). This turn is a perfect example of using your fanbase to work a story. WCW fans had never accepted Hogan as the big megahero and didn't like him to start with. So turning him heel and teaming him up with two other "WWF" guys in an invasion angle was sublime. It paid off big time. But it would've never worked for the WWF, whos primary fanbase was raised cheering Hogan.

So having Michaels turn on Hogan (while really cliche, it's practically every other big Hogan feud) is also one of the really few ways to make him a full heel. Plus, it gives them a big "Icon" match to promote for SummerSlam. The strategy is sound, whether or not the execution is.