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Kayfabe is the art of performing a character and maintaining your gimmick, even when you would not be expected to perform a character. The act of having a living and breathing character with its own fantastical lore that you bring into reality while simultaneously keeping things real enough to not break the illusion of the character's existence is itself kayfabe.
Is your character a prince, and you refer to your mother as a queen? That's kayfabe.
Refuse to acknowledge your previous job in a way that breaks away from your lore? That's kayfabe.
Wear gloves that match your model when doing handcam streams? Kayfabe.
Get caught saying something that breaks character, but you come up with a semi-reasonable in-lore reason for that character break? Kayfabe maintained, you have new lore now.
You can have good lore but poor kayfabe.
You can have good kayfabe with almost no lore.
The objective is to make the lore and reality compatible with each other. Kayfabe is the glue holding it all together. If it's done REALLY well, sometimes it's not even obvious you're playing a character.
The hallmark of good kayfabe isn't "they never break", it's "even when they could break, they find an in-character reason that makes it not a character break".
While the "expert opinion" status is appreciated, you guys should probably establish on your own what precisely is good kayfabe and what isn't. Otherwise this is just gonna become an extension of /hfz/ and the weekly /pw/ invasion thread, featuring some schizo rrats.
