Only relevant to pro-wrestling: X Pac Heat

Bump. So what do to.

The problem with having X-Pac Heat as a trope is that not even pro wrestling fans can agree on what X-Pac Heat actually is. Some think it refers to all cases where a babyface is booed, some think heels are immune because there's No Such Thing As Bad Heat, some think it's specific to wrestlers that are hated or disliked for who they are, some think it's possible for a character to have X-Pac Heat even though the wrestlers is a good person, some think that X-Pac Heat doesn't even exist. X-Pac Heat does not have a single definition in the fandom, therefore the TV Tropes community needs to define one, whether it's specific to wrestling or not. I personally think that X-Pac Heat should apply to any case where a character is disliked because of the actor portraying them. This may be a specific form of Hatedom, though it appears that Hatedom is the supertrope covering all forms of hate, with things like The Scrappy and X-Pac Heat being subtropes.

Fans argue about the degrees of X-pac heat, and the definition, but X-pac heat is distinct from regular "Heel heat" and they all get that. A heel or rudo who's being effective is someone the fans will pay money to see get hurt or pinned. They laugh at his misfortune. People are sorry when a good heel is out of action, people laugh at legitimate injuries and problems unrelated to the show when you have X-pac Heat.

X-Pac heat is so named because X-pac was turned heel and still didn't get over, making him the perfect picture of why a simple turn usually is not enough to shake X-pac heat. Fans didn't want to see X-pac lose, they didn't want to see X-pac humiliated, they didn't want to see him at all. His matches were called bathroom breaks. The easiest way to tell in a heel's case is how well he plays a crowd. X-pac, was completely failing to keep people interested.

An example of almost escaping? Michael Cole didn't just turn heel, he also stopped recycling all his predictable commentary, stopped speaking in one tone and did something fans were interested in seeing. That's the extent it takes to escape X-pac heat. Contrast proper heel Kane, who just hit a member of the core with a chair and now gets wild cheers or his tag team partner Big Show, who just stopped playing a villain, made one heroic save, and got cheered immediately. That's the difference between "Heel Heat and X-pac Heat". People who say there's no bad heat are delusional. When you have X-pac heat it directly hurts the ability to draw tickets, it almost ended his career because people genuinely hated Sean Waltman the man.

When fans chant "You Suck" "Asshole" or "Go To Hell" that's good heat, they care. When test shows of Nitro's take over of Raw had fans demanding refunds, that wasn't good heat. When fans chanted "Change The Channel" on WWECW, that wasn't good heat.

For now, can we make this an Audience Reaction trope instead of YMMV, and note that in Professional Wrestling the live audience is actually treated as In-Universe.

Yeah in wrestling this really isn't that subjective when you see it in action.

When John Cena is handcuffed to the ropes and forced to watch Randy Orton beat on his dad but the crowd is only interested in chanting "You can't wrestle" at John Cena and completely apathetic to Randy Orton's villainy, you know its X-pac heat. You also knew when he largely escaped it, when people actually getting into his story lines and chanted "Never Give Up" during his match with Wade Barret.

It sounds a lot like a pro-wrestling specific trope to me the way Cider is talking about it.

It's too broad really to be a trope, as it pretty much covers any "unexpected" negative reaction (X-Pac is an example of X-Pac Heat, but not a defining example), and even then, by the time people pick up on it and start calling it X-Pac Heat, it's usually turned the corner into Memetic Mutation.

It probably should be made an audience reaction trope, but it's definitely not exclusive to pro wrestling, it's not "too broad to be a trope" and it doesn't need a rename.

It is a wrestling trope, heat is a wrestling term referring to anything the live audience is doing.

However, since we, tv tropes, are defining it as any character who is hated more for the actor than what the character does I went ahead and removed all examples that don't related to characters and actors. The page is a lot shorter now.

We don't define shit. If TV Tropes has a different meaning of the trope than is widely used outside of the site, then TV Tropes is wrong.

This assertion does not hold water. We are the catalogers; if we do not define it, who will?

I believe that this trope is too useful for describing some reactions than to be confined strictly to professional wrestling. The Tom Cruise example is; a number of people who were actually related to Klaus Staffenburg actually got very upset with Valkyrie, not because they felt it didn't do him justice but because of who was playing him. That's the sort of thing that should be on the page.

The page is currently a mess with too many examples that are actually Hatedom, but that means you should clean it up rather than try to axe or limit the trope.

So I'm off to try to do that.

I think "we hate the actor playing him" is kind of the BASIS for X-Pac Heat, but really, there's a bit more to it, as others have elaborated. The thing with "X-Pac Heat" was that it was explicitly "not the right kind of heat", and people in the business acknowledged it — Waltman wasn't just hated as a heel should have been, he was just hated, and nobody wanted to see him.

I agree that the Tom Cruise example is a good one. This trope is basically Hatedom with an actual effect that hampers an actor's roles.

Yeah, I supposed these two have the right idea.

Actor examples still sound a lot like Hatedom to me.

Even actual wrestling examples are instances of hatedom. It's all right; I think X-Pac Heat is a Sub-Trope of it.

edited 30th Apr '11 2:47:52 AM by Catalogue

With the live audience in pro wrestling, there is a good way to objectively gauge the reaction.

edited 30th Apr '11 9:51:14 AM by MegaJ

True, but I don't find it much more authoritative than, say, reviews.

Reviews are metatextual, audience reaction in Professional Wrestling is textual. I think.

I'm interested in whether we can gauge the reaction. Audience reaction in pro wrestling has a higher authority, but film reviews are good enough for me.

I think the Tom Cruise phenomenon can be explained under the light of this trope; although it's possible that it's not common enough.