#HWETW Top 10 – Heat

5. “Why can’t you be what we want you to be?” Heat – Vickie Guerrero

The love we have in the Palace of Wisdom — the legal name for JMS HQ —  for Vickie Guerrero is well known. In fact, The N1ckster wrote about about this for Vickie’s last episode of Raw:

While your correspondent’s affection for Vickie is somewhere between “off the charts” and “fanboy”, this segment showed how much in control she was of the reaction to her, playing off of Stephanie’s wickedness (which we’ll get to later) to turn herself face on a dime, not by invoking her husband’s name — Stephanie did that — but his spirit. Part of what made Vickie such a great heel was to never genuinely engage the audience as a direct conduit to Eddie. She never felt like a Guerrero, in large part because she knew doing that would not let her get the crowd to react to her the way she wanted — and WWE needed — them to. She is an all-time great genuine heat magnet, up on the same level as Heenan, willing to do anything (which we’ll get to later,) to give the crowd the pay off it wanted. And because of that, she’ll likely be joining him in the Hall of Fame one day.

Wrestling is, above all else, an exercise in wish-fulfillment and when someone intentionally goes against that, it’s so infuriating that we literally don’t know what to do with ourselves. In fact, wish-fulfillment is so ingrained into the fabric of the medium that the Vickie Guerreros of the world end up almost functioning as faces in terms of the long-term payoff. Which is what makes them so wonderful.

We miss you, Vickie.

Other examples: Virgil, Owen Hart, Literally any “Will They or Won’t They?” relationship on any show 

Join the Kayfabemetrics Institute on Patreon!