Do You Have One More YES In You?
A bunch of words say it all.
Daniel Bryan is actually pretty good as a heel. I enjoyed his first major heel run in WWE when he cashed in on big show, but he’s actually impressing me thus far with his skills. Is there any way he can get someone else to his WM30 level as a face? I guess the only option is Styles. Daniel Bryan’s build build was well in progress by this time.
I can answer this in….well in several words actually.
No. No no, no no no, no no.
Here’s the problem: Bryan’s face run was one of a kind. It was lightning in a bottle with the fans wanting to cheer for Bryan. Not someone like Bryan, but Bryan himself. I mean, if it was just someone like Bryan, why wouldn’t they do the same thing again? Look at how many times WWE has tried to recreate Steve Austin vs. Vince McMahon. It’s a great story, but it’s only really worked that one time because A, it was the right people at the right time and B, everything that comes after it looks like they’re trying to recreate the same idea.
As for now though, Bryan is still trying to find his footing as a heel. I’ve liked a lot of what he’s doing and he’s going to be great at it (again, because he’s done it before) but building him up to that level by Wrestlemania isn’t going to happen. That Wrestlemania was a years long process (you could easily argue that it was started all the way back at Wrestlemania XXVIII, if not earlier) and had the right people with the right stories and the right precision with the right people involved. And a great story which I still think was a complete work from the start (yes, I think the 2014 Royal Rumble was WWE’s plan all along).
Overall though, Bryan’s title reign can be a great story that can have an awesome finish as someone finally shuts him up to take the title and become a big star in the process. However, it’s not going to be the kind of story that takes over the company, at least somewhat because Bryan is on Smackdown and that’s just not how something like this works in WWE. It’s going to be an awesome angle, but not the kind of game changer that Bryan’s road to New Orleans was. That was once in a lifetime and you can’t recreate it, no matter how much WWE may want to.
Bryan’s taking the general sociopathic nature of a heel and adding a nice twist to it by incorporating the douchebag, self-righteous environmentalist into the mix. It’s working quite well, in my opinion, and I’m wondering just how much of all of this is Bryan. Allegedly, one thing Bryan wanted before he signed his current WWE deal was to have “reasonable creative control” and I have little doubt WWE gave it to him or he probably wouldn’t have signed and it’s something that’s reserved for only a handful.
But no, Yesamania won’t be coming back around anytime soon. Bryan’s journey to WrestleMania XXX was, if anything, as passionate of a response as you’re likely to get from fans, especially in this day and age where fans often decide to boo faces while cheering heels and are, quite frankly, every bit as fickle as Bryan’s new character often claims them to be. It was a combination of a lot of factors but one of the most constant things I kept hearing out of people was that they were tired of seeing people with tremendous ability not getting a real shot just because they didn’t have the sort of look that Vince McMahon preferred. I think the overwhelming embrace of Daniel Bryan during that time was partly inspired by wanting to send a message that they were really tired of the big muscled, alpha males that had dominated so much of WWE’s main event picture for so long. Bryan had the right combination of great wrestling ability, personality, likeability and a genuineness about him that didn’t come off like something that didn’t have the stain of corporate creation all over him.