In 2017, Roman committed one of the most violent acts in post-Attitude-Era WWE by locking Braun Strowman in an ambulance and crashing it full-speed into a semi. This was extremely out of character for Roman, having long since fought with an unyielding code of honor and ethics. Then came his 2020 heel turn, during which he showed a side we weren't used to; one where he inflicts ungodly amounts of violence on anyone he deems to be in his way, including his own family. The ambulance incident wasn't out of character— it was simply buried deep, deep inside Roman's subconscious, and only extreme circumstances (a rampaging, nigh-unstoppable monster and an overwhelming feeling of being mistreated in the face of life-threatening illness, plus, possibly, the influence of Paul Heyman) to bring it out. It also gives credence to Seth Rollins's constant claims that Roman was full of uncontrollable rage and aggression, despite those claims appearing to be untrue, until Roman's heel turn.
One of Reigns's (admittedly lesser-known) catchphrases is "One vs all." Apparently, Reigns is used to being and fighting alone and having no friends to watch his back. This explains a few things: His dominance in both of his Royal Rumble appearances as of late 2015, his amazing showing in the 2013 Survivor Series in which he eliminated four men and overcame a 2-on-1 (and at one point, 5-on-2) disadvantage, and the fact that he butted heads constantly with Dean Ambrose in The Shield.
It also sheds light on Ambrose's and Reigns's amicable relationship after The Shield's dissolution. Without the pressure of constantly performing as part of a team, they both are free to be loners but can still look out for one another.
Despite having spent several months the previous year tearing each other apart, Roman and Bray proved they could actually work together as an effective tag team when pitted against the League of Nations. It makes sense that after fighting each other so many times, each would know how the other worked and be able to play off of one another very well.
An unfortunate Real Life example: after Roman revealed he once had leukemia, and that it had returned, all the reports about him taking time off due to "serious illness" made fans realize that those illnesses were the result of his compromised immune system from his previous treatment for the disease.
Also related to his leukemia is the fact that Roman Reigns took years to turn heel. If someone is powering through a history of cancer to become a multiple-time WrestleMania main eventer, world heavyweight champion, and crowned face of the biggest professional wrestling promotion in the entire world, of course, little things like "half the crowd don't like me" wouldn't cause him to change his ultimately successful ways. However, taking time off to keep himself and his newborn kids safe only to find that same promotion making a halfhearted attempt to forgo acknowledging his existence for the convenience of a locker room he led resolutely, less than a year after his family members outside the company had already made a takeover statement? By Roman's standards, possibly shared by The Wild Samoans, the company had declared him and his bloodline disposable, an insult which could not stand if he was truly its flagbearer. Honor Is Fair Play no more; now it's time to rule through fear.
One could even arguenote if you're looking at his WWE career as one single coherent continuity, which is always a bit risky that Rollins's WrestleMania 31 cash-in was his Start of Darkness. Think about everything that happened to start around that time and in the following year or two:
Saw the fans turn against him through no fault of his own - Seth Rollins' betrayal forcing him to try and continue The Shield's mission without being able to depend on anyone else, leaving a far diminished impression from before, and a Royal Rumble which saw Daniel Bryan's sudden return and quick elimination, followed by Big Show and Kane unceremoniously disposing of the rest of his peers only to suddenly stop and attack each other when it was his turn, giving him the opening to beat them, did far more to shape Roman's perception than anything Roman himself did. Despite his clear opposition to The Authority, he was getting asked questions from Michael Cole about being handpicked by the office as a top guy, and even The Rock got booed to death for saving him from a 2-on-1 mugging.
This got so bad that when his seemingly penciled-in victory over Brock Lesnar was upended by the now-infamous Rollins cash-in, a notion which purportedly had his father Sika in a legit rage backstage before the event, fans actually cheered Rollins as though he had come to save the show. (As an aside, he also likely saw the benefits through Rollins's victory and everything that led up to it of putting morality aside for opportunism.)
Roman spends the next year trying to get over as a babyface. Seth Rollins blows his knee out and Reigns wins a quickly-put-together tournament to win his first championship at a mostly-inconsequential Survivor Series... only to have Sheamus of all people - who hasn't won a major championship in about four years - cash in immediately after and take the newly won title off him... because, backstage, Vince wants to see the title on Roman so badly, but he's scared of the crowd reactions, so he's allowing Triple H to put every possible roadblock in his way. And all the while this office-and-crowd political dance is keeping Roman under the glass ceiling, away from the screens, Roman's wife is pregnant with twins.
Seeing how what should've been the happiest time of his life, welcoming more sons into the world as WWE World Heavyweight Champion, was being marred by this bullshit, he completely lost it, going on a furious rampage against Triple H, The League of Nations, and even Vince McMahon himself. Ironically, this got him the title back a week later with the love of the same Philadelphia fans who booed him at the Rumble. Earn Your Happy Ending, right? Nope. Still not done yet. Triple H not only makes Roman defend the title in the Royal Rumble match as the first man in the match, he decides to interject himself into the Rumble match, with the end result of not just screwing Reigns out of the title, but taking it for himself.
Come WrestleMania 32, Reigns wins the title again and finally gets Hunter out of the way, only to get suspended for a Wellness Violation and be forced to drop it. Any amount of fact-checking now would reveal that the suspension was for Adderall and had to do with more of a miscommunication than steroids or any other blatant rule-breaking. But this wouldn't matter much to the legion of his detractors that were waiting and perhaps hoping for him to make a mistake that they could use as a justification of why he shouldn't be in the main event. Furthermore, WWE knew this well before his title loss and suspension but chose not to clarify it, even allowing Rollins to troll him on the subject, leading to speculation and more undeserved heat on Reigns. Whether the above was an attempt to correct Reigns's perception or a way of punishing him for his ill-timed absence*Talents that were in line for a push but suddenly find themselves unavailable due to a suspension or even an injury can often return to backstage heat in WWE, probably because Vince's known Control Freak personality means that he hates unexpected curveballs, Reigns was thrown off his game when he returned and started taking losses one could argue didn't make much sense.
When he later recovered his winning ways, this culminated in him defeating The Undertaker at WrestleMania in a match that ended with Roman almost literally running circles around the vaunted Deadman before hitting the closing Spear... and at that point his perception with the fans was SHOT DEAD. In fact, when Roman got the tar beaten out of him by the definitely villainous Braun Strowman about a week later, the crowd cheered and begged for more. (Fighting back Strowman's advance was the second of two benchmarks as mentioned previously when his tactics became much more desperate and brutal and you could see his honorable babyface veneer start to slip.) It wasn't until Roman had a real-life career-threatening and life-threatening second bout with leukemia that he got any good will back with the fans.
Combine all this with WWE's odd treatment of him after he pulled out of WM36 amid the COVID-19 pandemic (see last * about ill-timed absences), and him eventually deciding, "to hell with trying to be a good guy", is maybe not completely understandable, but somewhat justifiable.
Reigns's patriarchal heel persona heavily references the Samoan culture's idea of family, but Roman manipulates this typically positive cultural cornerstone to serve his own ends and acts more often than not like (and has been compared to) the head of a different type of 'family' - i.e. a ruthlessmob boss. For what it's worth, Reigns is, of course, Samoan from his father Sika's side - but his mother's ancestry is Italian. Fittingly, his two prominent nicknames seem to invoke both cultural sides of his mode of headship: "Tribal Chief" representing the responsible chosen Samoan, "Head of the Table" representing the ruthless power-centric Italian.
Reigns's June 2021 Hell In A Cell match against Rey Mysterio was moved from the eponymous PPV to the previous Friday's Smackdown, purportedly in part because the PPV happened to fall on Father's Day and Reigns wanted to stay home with his kids. The kayfabe reason also involved fatherhood, as Roman chucking Rey's son Dominik out of the ring and injuring him provoked Rey's anger to the point he couldn't wait for the PPV. This obviously precipitated a change to the card of the PPV itself and, one could argue, caused the show to suffer (as the main event ended up being Drew McIntyre vs. Bobby Lashley, which was causing some Arc Fatigue among fans since they had been firmly planted in the main event scene of RAW since mid-spring). Not only that, but real-life network politics became involved, with USA becoming upset that FOX was able to benefit from the ratings bump that came with a Hell in a Cell match being placed on weekly TV... which prompted WWE to throw a HIAC match onto the following RAW's card primarily to placate USA. This match saw Xavier Woods take on Bobby Lashley and added significant heat to Lashley's burgeoning feud with Kofi Kingston. Perhaps unintentionally, Reigns basically throwing the entire promotion into chaos for the sake of his family is perfectly in-character for the Tribal Chief.
Reigns being the guy to send Daniel Bryan off from Smackdown was probably done out of necessity given the real-life status of Bryan's contract, but it also makes sense from a character standpoint - Bryan had been a thorn in Reigns's side for years. Many people point to Bryan's massive wave of popularity in the mid-2010s (and his subsequent lowering from the main event scene to make room for Reigns) as the primary reason fans' reactions to Reigns were so infamously vitriolic, which caused WWE to hesitate on giving him an extended main event title reign. And then Bryan inserted himself into the main event of the most recent WrestleMania, this time to possibly engineer a scenario where Reigns could lose the title without being pinned or submitted. One has to imagine that the Tribal Chief took special joy in personally making sure Bryan would never be an obstacle to him again.
The revelation that Reigns, as hard as he tried to patch things up over the years, never truly forgave Seth Rollins for the chair to his back that broke up The Shield, makes complete sense when considering the key role that Rollins' treachery had in both Reigns and Ambrose's descents to villainy later on. Aside from having a cherished brotherhood ripped out from underneath him, Rollins and The Authority's tactics played a major hand in Reigns' acidic fan reception going forward: Triple H and his minions spent years both opposing and trying to recruit him simultaneously, to where the fans rejected him for not being an organic star, all the while Rollins fully embraced opportunism at the expense of his brothers. This was the start of Reigns' corruption. Ambrose, meanwhile suffered one embarrassing hiccup after another in his early attempts to get revenge and could never find his true center as a man within WWE. Even during The Shield's reunion well after said vengeance was achieved, Ambrose was too scarred to fully trust Rollins ever again, forcing Reigns to act as the glue of the team... until Reigns was forced to battle leukemia again, causing Ambrose to snap against Rollins, completely lose his logical faculties, and chart his path out of the company altogether.note One could even argue that Rollins did a few things during that run which lent credence to the idea that he never truly changed back into a good person, what with replacing Ambrose with Jason Jordan for the tag team championships and making the occasional jokes about Ambrose being a lunatic, something he vocally never embraced within his branding in WWE. Reigns could only bring the brotherhood back for one more match before Ambrose left, and his interactions with Rollins since WrestleMania 35 had been scarce. He'd wanted to try to heal The Shield in order to heal his friend and even hold on to his own straight and narrow path, but he failed, and it all started because of Rollins. Since then, he couldn't stand being around the guy anymore but he had to keep it professional... all the way up until Rollins reopened the wound.
His half-joking threat to Jey Uso on the October 24, 2022 episode of RAW that he would induct Sami fully into the family if Jey didn't shape up. Jey had just gone on a rant talking about how Sami would never be accepted as part of the Bloodline because he literally wasn't part of the bloodline - but his reaction to Roman's "threat" (as well as Sami's background Christmas-come-early expression of delight) were taken as deadly serious. In Samoan culture, a family member can make a blood oath with someone not a biological relative, and that blood oath is taken seriously, to the point where that person is not just like family, they ARE family. How do we know this? Because it's actually happened - in fact, it's the reason one Dwayne Johnson is considered part of the Samoan Dynasty. Roman's grandfather (and the Usos' great-grandfather), who was the progenitor of the dynasty, had a blood oath with High Chief Peter Maivia, the Rock's maternal grandfather. So, as the head of the present family, Roman could literally graft Sami into the family if he truly wanted to, and all of the Bloodline are well aware of that.
Watch the ending to Royal Rumble 2023 again. Then go back and watch the dissolution of The Shield.
Typically in pro wrestling, during championship matches, the champion enters the match last. It's more tradition than anything practical, but it's a custom that WWE mostly stands firm on, although it's strongly implied that the champion can actually choose when to enter, and it just so happens that they almost always choose to enter last.
Roman Reigns, however, has a habit of entering his championship matches first since his heel turn in 2020. His obsession with validation, respect, and acknowledgement are likely driving him to hog all the glory any way he can, and this is just a small part. By entering first, Roman gets a reaction from the crowd with no residual effect from his opponent entering before him. He also gets to observe the ringside atmosphere first, as well as observing his opponent and the crowd's reaction to them.
Roman Reigns refused John Cena's challenge for the Universal Title despite previously accepting all challengers, as he would later accept Finn Balor's, who specifically said that he was not Cena. It's likely he remembers that promo where Cena utterly humiliated him ("It's called a promo, kid."') to the point of resentment. While he has admitted that he hates Seth Rollins for "breaking the Shield," it's possible he hates Cena just as much if not even more for that promo alone.
Roman Reigns continues his ever-long faults of not being able to let go of the past. At WrestleMania 40, it came down to two roads to take: hit Cody Rhodes with his steel chair and weaken him to finish him, or hit Seth Rollins with it as payback for his actions that ended the Shield. Hell, Rollins was wearing the attire as well. Reigns' hatred for what Rollins did that night never left him and he chose to attack him instead, which led to a much healthier Rhodes being able to fight off his offense, defeat him and end his legendary reign. Seth Rollins will always own the most precious and priceless piece of Reign's property: under his skin.
