Vickie Guerrero and the Curse of the Authority Figure

Go back to managing
Photo Credit: WWE.com

Vickie Guerrero is a great manager/valet/mouthpiece. She's not bad as eye candy either, but that's really not germane to the conversation. As a younger fan, I might have hated her because she was shrill. Right now, I appreciate how she's pretty much the best heat machine on the roster. It's not just cheap heat with the "EXCUSE ME" either. She's a pretty good manager in her own right, whether it be through distraction techniques or even just the facial expressions she makes.

However, whenever she gets near an authority position, she gets insufferable. It's not like she even changes her mannerisms or style of speaking either. It's all in the material, the stories given to her. Like, I could stand her being a complete shrill partisan when she's just administering Dolph Ziggler. However, when she's totally in the bag against a wrestler as a general manager, or in this case a "managing supervisor," it's just awful.

The problem isn't just confined to Guerrero. It seems like every person shunted into the role of general manager has sucked at it no matter their talent level with one glaring exception. John Laurinaitis was excellent as the evil authority figure, but mainly it was because his evil was never outright bias against a certain alignment of wrestlers. He was a bad boss because he thought he was doing the right thing by everyone, and instead was favoring wrestlers (if he was favoring them at all) passive-aggressively. In some cases, the people he'd antagonize, like CM Punk and even John Cena, would bring it upon themselves.

I know in the subject line I used the word "curse", but really, it's dishonest to call something the company itself has power over a curse. They got it right once in the last ten years because they switched up the formula. Instead of switching up the formula again, going with Laurinaitis in a scaled back role to keep him fresh or going back to, y'know, a time when authority figures were mentioned once a week instead of once a segment and maybe appeared once every other month, they went back to the skulldrudgery of having the willfully biased GM.

AJ Lee, the one who ultimately replaced Laurinaitis, went from a dynamic, fresh character into being the Vickie Guerrero who skipped to the ring. She was replaced by Guerrero, who now is back to her old groove to even worse degrees, going after Cena and AJ for "having an affair" when she carried on an illicit relationship with Edge to the point of marriage when she was Smackdown GM. That's not a failure of Guerrero. That's a failure of the people coming up with the stories either forgetting about that relationship or showing immense cognitive dissonance by not even acknowledging it in character when Cena was one of the ones who was at the brunt of Guerrero screwing around as GM.

Many things are working for WWE right now, but the direction of the company is either not the reason why they are in the case of CM Punk or it's actively hurting it in the case of this Cena/Lee/Guerrero/Ziggler thing. It's beating a dead horse, but the creative direction either needs to be streamlined or the people making that direction need to be streamlined. The authority figure BS has gotta go.

Unless they want to bring back John Laurinaitis. I'd be fine with that.