YMMV / Mercedes Martinez

• Draco in Leather Pants: Mercedes Martinez was supposed to be the first brutish heel of SHIMMER, not Sara Del Rey. After Martinez returned from injury she gradually started trying to drift towards that role as planned, but the fans never took the hint and kept treating her like a baby face. Even beating up Leva Bates, which worked for everyone until then, including Cheerleader Melissa, failed to get the fans to realize, let alone accept Martinez had turned heel. It was only after she denied restarting a match with Athena, who was at least acknowledged as a heel but cheered anyway, that fans even considered the possibility Martinez might be turning heel and she still had to maliciously injure Athena to get booed.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic
  • Her feud with Daffney Unger worked well enough on paper. Martinez targeting the no longer fit to compete Unger was suitably despicable and worked well at making Mercedes the heel in a feud with Nikki Roxx, where fans would otherwise be inclined to side with Martinez over Roxx, given their history. The problem was that Daffney remained the real target of Martinez's ire, leading Martinez to target the power stable Unger had put together. While Unger's stable didn't use any cheap tactics on Martinez, or even go out of their way to antagonize her, it was nonetheless three or four women against one. Even if the one stupidly provoked them, it's hard not to sympathize with the lone woman's futile efforts take down a numerically superior group. Especially when one of them was Kimberly, who fans had much more reason to dislike than Martinez and much like Roxx, past history that made them that much more inclined to side with Martinez against. In fact, joining Unger's stable to make the odds even more against Martinez was only the second facey thing Kimberly had done in SHINE, the only facey thing she had done all year and the supposed start of her Heel–Face Turn even though it was clearly motivated more by selfish desire to be admired than genuine altruism.
  • Martinez had many heel runs and was the reigning heel champion of SHIMMER at the time, so what was the problem with booking her as the heel on Gnarly Pop Production's Life Love & Lady Wrestling? Her opponent being Jessicka Havok, who is in the best of circumstances a situational baby face but was also the one who insulted Martinez's race, hospitalized Martinez, vandalized an area of her worship and even tried to kill Martinez with a machete. They knew they couldn't make Martinez the heel right off the bat and instead built towards it as the show approached the main event, but one show was still too little; half the crowd still cheered Martinez over Havok.