Hello to all in this holiday season and welcome to another edition of The Trebor Mint. This edition has been a long time in the making, it’s taken me a while to get started, as the elements to the Perfect Feud are hard to describe. Each and every person who like wrestling will think that certain aspects make for a better feud than other aspects. So instead of listing and discussing my personal favourite parts of a feud I’m going to continue The Perfect Series, with what I think are the ingredients for The Perfect Feud.
The first ingredient that any good feud needs is a good beginning. Over the years there have been some terrible beginnings to feud my personal worst being Jericho and Kane where it started over some spilt hot coffee. There are in my personal opinion a few top tier ways of starting the perfect feud. The simplest being over a title, it give a meaningful start to the feud and the viewer can see the point behind the feud and will know there can be heat between two characters and they haven’t just been put together.
The next top tier way is an age-old reason for two men fighting, over a woman, or because of a woman. It’s known by everyone that women rule the life of men, either a man is looking for a woman, trying to keep one, or hating one after loosing them. This again can give the impression of true hatred about someone and can make for a good feud.
The other way for myself the perfect feud could start would be a combination of pure hatred and jealousy. Having a wrestler come out and have a personal problem with someone can lead to a great feud. This is because it can lead in any direction the booker want to take it. Its not focused on one certain feature lie a title, and other factors can be bought in if needs be.
The next key factor of The Perfect Feud is longevity. Short feuds just don’t make interesting feuds, you can’t have a good feud based on 1 PPV match and a couple of tag matches on RAW or Smackdown. In a good feud there needs to be at least 2 PPV matches, and it should last at least 3 months. Some of the greatest feuds in wrestling have lasted for a long time and been built up for over a year.
The perfect feud should be built up with a couple of incidents over the first month before the feud has even begun, this lays the seeds for the feud and gives the fan something to think about when the feud starts. They can look back in their head and think, I remember that thing that happened a few weeks back, so it isn’t just a booking thing. It makes it seem more realistic if there is tension before the start of the feud, and also gives an opening boost to the feud.
The feud needs to last in my opinion 3 PPV’s minimum, this is because it gives the chance for each wrestler to get a win and there still be an overall winner to the feud. Although really in the Perfect Feud there shouldn’t be an overall winner. There should be a visible match winner but fans of each wrestler should be able to come away from the feud and think in a small way that their favourite wrestler won the feud.
I think the next point in The Perfect Feud is a good selection of matches. I’m not going to go into great detail about the sorts of matches as I will be harking on about that in The Perfect PPV, but matches are important. This is one of the reasons why women’s feuds never seem that great because the matches never live up to the storyline. You can have the greatest storyline ever written, but it wont satisfy the reason why wrestling fans watch wrestling, for the matches. The Perfect Feud needs to have great matches, or else there is no point writing anything else. In my opinion the Perfect feud needs a mixture of matches, it needs a pure wrestling match, a gimmick match, and a match of the bookers choice, either gimmick, interference, wrestling etc. This way it varies the matches fans watch and can cater for the strengths of the wrestler.
The next and final major point for The Perfect Feud is adding a wrestler or two. If in a feud a new wrestler can be added then taken out and the feud still have strength then the feud is good. This wrestler could be bought in by one of the two feuding or just pick a problem with one of the two and then get a couple of matches out of them. This will add a sense of reality to the matches that a wrestler can come in be taken care of and the feud still carry on with passion.
It seems the one thing I have been taking about throughout the whole of this column is reality. I think this sums up The Perfect Feud, if a feud can seem real to the fans even the IWC fans who know how it’s going to end because they’ve read the spoilers then it’s a good feud. We watch wrestling to see wrestling, we may read spoilers about a feud but we will still watch the matches. This year if we had know the exact outcome of the Foley vs Orton feud we would have still watches because we could see the feud has passion between the two wrestlers.
These are what I consider to be the elements of the Perfect Feud. Last column I did ask for people to send me their opinion of the Perfect Feud and what constitutes it. I said I would put the best in this column, well I feel after reading the opinions that I couldn’t just put one in, so I’m not going to mention a specific feud. I hope that I mentioned people’s opinions during the column, but I will add that nearly every Perfect Feud included the McMahon’s, it was either McMahon/Austin, or The McMahon’s were involved. Henning vs Benoit was also mentioned a lot as was Road Warrior vs Dudleys. These are all great suggestions, but to me it does show that although we do complain about them being on TV too much when they’re on, the McMahon’s are needed for good feuds in wrestling.
If you have any feedback please send it too thetrebormint@hotmail.com
This has been The Trebor Mint, whether you loved it, hated it, or just want to give you’re opinion or just need to answer my question email me at the above address.
Have a Nice Day!! And also Merry Christmas if you are Christian and if not enjoy your weekend and your day off on Monday.
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