>>17381363Excellent post, especially the part about selling out the same local market over and over again vs travelling the USA. It requires a different dynamic between Heel/Face, because it's HARD to sell out the same building every week. It's much easier (relatively) to travel the country to fill buildings.
Like the Easter Bunny and Santa, everyone over the age of about 6 knows that wrestling is fake. But you can only get so personal, funny (but not too funny), break the 4th wall only so many times before you get cheered as a heel which ruins what you're trying to do in the first place. In an ideal world, Roman Reigns would have spent at least a year getting a mixed reaction before winning the fans back over. Instead, Roman got chants and a huge ovation the first time he came back after losing the title following YEARS of being a despicable, cheating shithead who deprived numerous fan favorites of world title wins.
The new heel archetype is Kevin Owens - 50/50 at worst towards the audience, "I've been held back and held down", "I never got a fair shake", etc. They have to be otherwise tolerable if not for their blatant "the ends justify the means" disregard for the rules. And the only space for faces is to communicate some variation of "Stop whining all the time" "We've all had issues in life, but I win in this ring with honor and without cheating!" - Faces can't even exist in a vacuum any more, they need to play to mental health awareness, they have to make references to struggling to overcome the odds, and so on. But they can't win too often (handicap matches, etc), or the crowd will turn on them.
It's much, much easier in 2025 to be an indy wrestler with some vague outline of a character, and have the promoter tell you "You're working face|heel tonight", and just go out there and do moves until it's time to go home. There's too many layers of irony, of derisiveness, of divisiveness, to try to be all things for all people.
