X-Pac Heat

aka: Go Away Heat

"Sir! I feel compelled to stress that we are not booing because of your effective heel work, we are booing because you are simply awful."

— Fan sign regarding Mark Henry, seen on the April 2, 2012 edition of WWE Raw.

In Professional Wrestling, "heat" is used to describe any reaction to a wrestler and their gimmick. Face and heel heat can make or break a wrestler; the former ought to be cheered, and the latter ought to be booed. Not getting any heat at all due to audience apathy is the kiss of death in pro wrestling.

Then there's X-Pac Heat, otherwise known as "Go Away Heat". This is when the audience boos and insults a wrestler not because they hate the character, but because they hate the performer and find their antics annoying in an unfunny way or even think they are straight up boring.

X-Pac Heat can occur because the performer has been pushed too hard, they have political power behind the scenes, or because they're terrible performers. For wrestlers, this often refers to those who have poor matches, are seen as increasingly tiresome, or actively wreck the pushes of others, and become overexposed despite crowds not caring for them one way or the other, regardless if they're a face or a heel.

"Not the right kind of heat" is an alternative meaning to "X-Pac Heat" that can (but does not always) intersect with it. This is not a villain whom fans want to see punished with comeuppance, which is the impression you want the fans to have; a wrestler with X-Pac Heat is someone whom fans refer to more with, "We are sick of this person and don't want to see them at all." It's a very specific form of breaking kayfabe.

Normally, it is possible to correct an unfavorable response by altering a wrestler's gimmick or shifting their position in the company. It is significantly harder, though not impossible, to overcome X-Pac Heat and "get over" well with fans. This is more or less the equivalent of a villainous Scrappy, but fits this page more due to the pro wrestling/live reaction factor. Unlike the Scrappy, the audience is reacting not to an annoying character, but to a bad or overexposed performer.

In short: if fans Love to Hate the character, or wish to see someone beat them, they're a heel. If fans just hate the character regardless of their alignment, they're the Scrappy. If fans hate seeing the performer behind the character, then it's X-Pac Heat.

Notes:

• The live audience in professional wrestling is considered to be in-universe because it is such a major part of the show. When the reaction is obvious and on-camera, examples involving it can be considered objective, unlike those involving the viewers at home or other media. Therefore, it only counts as X-Pac Heat if the live audience is booing/insulting a wrestler in ways that they shouldn't.
• If smarks and critics trash a wrestler, but that wrestler still receives the appropriate reaction onscreen, that's Critical Dissonance.
• Be aware that wrestlers are usually only responsible for their performance in the ring, and, to an extent, the development of their character in the promotion that they work for. Unless they have enough power to dictate the booking, or even book the matches themselves, overexposure is more the fault of the bookers than the wrestlers. See "So you want to be a booker?".

This is a Limited Real Life Examples Only trope. Only professional wrestling examples are permitted, and only when the live audience reaction is captured on-camera.

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Examples

The Trope Namer

• The Trope Namer is Sean "X-Pac" Waltman. He was part of the New World Order and D-Generation X stables in the late 1990s, and was actually a popular performer during this time. Several years and a heel turn later, DX was long since over and X-Pac hadn't evolved his persona in any significant way. Despite not getting pushed or doing much of anything, he was still booked on just about every show, winning a disproportionate amount of matches against opponents who were often more interesting than he was. Fans soon started regarding X-Pac matches as a safe time to take a bathroom break.
  
  Both the X-Pac persona and Waltman himself, due to his membership in The Kliq, soon became really grating, as he gyrated and gestured around and acted like a petulant little tool, making the crowds, who were supposed to find him rotten, hate him on a personal level instead of a kayfabe one. The vicious combination of declining performance due to years of injuries, a stale personality, and a reputation for attaching himself to a hot act, losing to them, but then squashing them cleanly during a rematch to ensure he captured more attention, caused wrestling fans to start chanting "X-Pac sucks".
  
  One defining moment occurred on an episode of SmackDown! during the Invasion angle in 2001 when, in a fight against a WCW invader, X-Pac mounted an offense and posed on the turnbuckle, drawing boos despite being the face. He looked visibly distraught at the lack of support from WWF fans.
  
  Unfortunately for those who were sick of X-Pac, "[Wrestler's name] sucks" chants are frequently the result of regular heel heat, so X-Pac's push continued, to the point where he received his own stable (X-Factor) comprised of himself and the similarly-hated Justin Credible^note Who was getting plenty of X-Pac Heat before it was cool as ECW champion a couple years beforehand and Albert. The hatred for X-Pac eventually reached a point where fans would chant "X-Pac sucks" when there was nothing else to chant, even when Waltman wasn't booked on the show. In the end, Waltman ended his tenure with the company with an awful reputation amongst fans and his fellow wrestlers. His reputation continued to deteriorate due to an infamous video that he and Chyna appeared in, being accused of domestic violence during said relationship with Chyna, and a crystal meth addiction that got him fired from TNA after botching a match with AJ Styles. While Waltman has gained back a lot respect for his work in the indies as well as owning up to his past mistakes and turning his life around, you'd be hard pressed to find any wrestling fan who will claim he is their favorite wrestler, and to this day, the phrase "X-Pac Heat" is given to performers who "aren't getting the right kind of heat".

WWF (1980s)

• Most fans may remember The Honky Tonk Man as one of the top midcard heels of his era, and formerly the longest-reigning Intercontinental Champion in history (before being surpassed by Gunther in 2023). What they may not know, however, is that he actually got his start in the WWF as a babyface. Fans refused to buy into the idea of an Elvis impersonator as a good guy, however, and after a series of "Vote of Confidence" promos and an actual poll where the fans (as expected) weren't behind him, he was turned heel and the rest is history.
• Towards the end of his first World championship run, fans were getting bored of Bob Backlund, openly cheering for the heels and wishing someone else would win the title. Only losing to The Iron Sheik got the fans on his side. It was so bad, that Wrestling Observer Newsletter called him still being champion in 1982 their "Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic" and he was named "Most Overrated Wrestler" in 1983.
• In a mix of this and Never Live It Down, Terry Taylor would often get "ROOSTER" chants wherever he wrestled after his oft-maligned WWF run in the late 80's as the Red Rooster.

WWF (1990s)

• The term "X-Pac Heat" was originally called "Bossman Heat". The term began to lose usage when X-Pac's level of "go away" heat eclipsed Bossman's, and it was pretty much completely retired with Ray Traylor's real life death in 2004, out of respect for the man. To explain this a little more: first of all, Bossman was one of the bigger stars in the 80s, and for most of his career was acknowledged as being tremendously talented, especially considering his size. Furthermore, he was well known for being one of the most popular guys in any locker room, he donated massive amounts of money and personal time to charity, and his death was discovered by his wife in a particularly heartbreaking way.^note She saw him lying on a bed, asked him if he wanted a blanket, and when he didn't answer, went to kiss him goodnight and found him cold. He suffered through a few bad gimmicks in WCW, then showed up in WWF, with a SWAT Team look, as hired muscle for heel stable The Corporation. By this point he was broken down by injuries, but he still played the part well.
  The bad heat started after The Corporation broke up, and the bookers decided to make Big Bossman the Worst Person Ever. He engaged in a feud with The Big Show where he tormented Show's mother and disrupted his father's funeral, he engaged in an angle with Al Snow in which he kidnapped and killed Snow's pet chihuahua and fed it to him. Due to his deteriorating physical condition, his matches consisted mostly of him punching kicking and stomping his opponents for the vast majority of the match. The thing that really turned fans against him was that he was a total Karma Houdini. He almost always won by cheating, and whether win, lose, or draw, his matches always ended with him handcuffing his opponents to the ropes and beating them to a pulp with his nightstick. The worst thing that ever happened to him was occasionally he lost a match clean and didn't get his usual nightstick based revenge. Fans got tired of this very quickly. Bossman was put into a Tag Team with a talented rookie named Bull Buchanan to help cover Bossman's declining ringwork, and after the team split he was Demoted to Extra, then retired from the ring to become a trainer.
• While the original heel version of Doink the Clown, portrayed by Matt Borne, was over and is well remembered, when Borne left the company, Doink was turned face and portrayed by Steve Lombardi. Lombardi wasn't as good of a wrestler as Borne, and the fans didn't find Doink amusing. However, even though Doink wasn't pushed per se, he received a lot of focus and a number of awful angles — allegedly, Vince McMahon thought he was hilarious. By the end of Doink's run, fans were cheering the heels he faced and chanting "Kill the Clown!" Here's a Doink vs. Waylon Mercy match, with the "Kill the Clown" chants starting at 4:40.
• Dwayne Johnson ran into this early in his career as "Rocky Maivia", when he was so pushed and overexposed as the next big thing that fans got sick of him almost from the moment he appeared. The fact that he was still very green in the ring and that his gimmick was that of a squeaky-clean third-generation superstar didn't help matters. After he received a Face–Heel Turn, which added some edge to his character and allowed him to cut loose with his formidable mic skills, "The Rock" was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap and exploded into a true star.
  
  The heel turn is a rare example of the WWF actually playing to the X-Pac Heat. The week after The Rock's heel turn, he cut a promo addressing the chants being the kayfabe reason he joined The Nation of Domination, naming the actual chants he was getting ("Die Rocky Die"). He recycled this promo somewhat when he joined The Corporation a year later. Prior to the heel turn, Jim Ross even addressed his concerns about them on air, saying that he wasn't able to understand the reasoning why the fans were giving him such heat. An article in WWF Magazine also addressed the chants as did an interview with him about them, though it was sort of in kayfabe.
• If you can find the single match the Toxic Turtles had in WWE (it never aired on television but was eventually included on their Unreleased DVD), you can pinpoint the exact moment X Pac Heat kicks in. During their entrance and early in the match, the Turtles, who are playing the faces, are getting very mild cheers. Then comes a spot where one of their jobber opponents kicks out of a pin and the turtle pinning him lands on his back and flails around until his partner tips him back over. This spot turned the fans against the Turtles on the spot, and they booed for the rest of the match.
• One of the strangest cases on record: Miguel Perez, a wrestler known less for his talent than his body hair, would inspire chants of "SHAVE YOUR BACK!" every time he stepped into the ring.
• Long after the fact, Vince McMahon, Shawn Michaels, and former WWE and later TNA referee Earl Hebner received "YOU SCREWED BRET!" chants whenever they appeared in Canada (Earl's twin brother Dave once even got them when fans thought he was Earl), and it's probably one reason why they don't appear in Montreal very much even when they do go to Canada. In all fairness, they did screw Bret Hart. Whenever Michaels needed some heel heat, Montreal was a perfect place to get it. This heat has mostly died down, however, due to Hart making amends with both Michaels and Vince in 2010.
• Michaels also got hit with a huge case of this during his world title defense against Sycho Sid at Survivor Series 1996. Michaels won the title at WrestleMania XII in March, by May a few people were already sick of Shawn's Mr. Fanservice act, and Vince gushing over him on commentary in a way that made people question the sexuality of both men didn't help. It was also around this time that word about his backstage politics and drug abuse trickled out to the public. Still, the majority of fans stuck with him, mainly because he was the top babyface in a really thin field^note Especially with Kevin Nash and Scott Hall leaving for Atlanta in May and basically the only guy in the company that could be relied on to have a good match^note Bret Hart stepped away from the WWF after dropping the title to Michaels at WrestleMania to rest, do a couple acting projects, and decide if he wanted to re-sign with Vince or take a more lucrative offer from WCW. We all know how that last one worked out. Owen Hart was still working at his usual high level, but there was only so much he could do while stuck in a pitiful tag division. But Survivor Series was at Madison Square Garden in New York City, aka Smark Central, and they let HBK have it with both barrels, booing everything he did while treating Sid (who was supposed to be the Heel) like the biggest babyface that ever babyfaced. The reaction Sid got when he pinned Michaels for the title is right up there with the pop that Goldberg got for beating Hulk Hogan 9 months later.^note It was actually supposed to be Big Van Vader in this spot, but after their first match at SummerSlam Michaels refused to work with him again because he was too stiff, even though Vader dialed it back a lot compared to most of his matches. Sid got the spot instead because Michaels had worked with him before and knew that for all of his other faults Sid was a really light worker, plus he was available since softball isn't played from November to January Shawn would shake it off and win the title back at the Royal Rumble two months later, but was forced to relinquish the belt due to a knee injury after a couple weeks. When he returned he brought with him a new faction and a much edgier persona.
• Sgt. Slaughter was a very popular wrestler in his time and even became a character in G.I. Joe. Then when the Gulf War built up, he defected to Saddam Hussein, teamed with old foe The Iron Sheik and was even given an expy manager that he initially thought was the real deal. This, along with vicious assaults on All-American Face Hulk Hogan, caused fans to hate him to the point that he received death threats.^note Kayfabe wasn't completely dead yet, so wrestling was still treated as completely real. As a result, Sgt. Slaughter feared for his life. In a sense, he was getting the right type of heat, but it got far too real. After losing to Hogan and turning face again, things settled down a lot.
• Jeff Jarrett, who has the dubious honor of being listed under three promotions on this page^note And is well on his way to being listed in the AEW section too.
  • His first WWF run in the country singer gimmick isn't too fondly remembered, but then again neither is much else from that time period. However, it did start off a trend that would be a major reason that this trope has followed Jarrett throughout his career, as he somehow became a 3 time Intercontinental Champion in the span of 5 months^note While this might not seem like a big deal today keep in mind that in 1995 the WWF only had two singles titles, so the Intercontinental belt was still considered prestigious. This first run isn't really an example of this trope because it drew genuine heel heat (albeit not in large quantities), but it gives a bit of background. Jarrett would walk out after losing the IC title to Shawn Michaels and eventually find his way to WCW, where he may or may not have been a member of the The Four Horsemen. After his contract ran out he headed back up north, which brings us to...
  • Jarrett's second WWF stint, where he became a record 5 time Intercontinental Champion^note Chris Jericho broke that record in 2004 and is still the record holder, with 9, and at this point people began to realize that Jeff was getting far too much TV time, far too big of a push, and way, way too many title reigns for a guy that just wasn't really that over, especially compared to some of the other people working for the WWF at the time. Having a really misogynistic gimmick even by Attitude Era standards and being perceived as dragging Owen Hart down with him didn't help. Of course we now know that this had a lot to do with being friends with the guy that was head writer at the time, and it was no surprise when Jarrett defected back to WCW (to the relief of everyone watching Raw) a week after Russo jumped ship, which you can read about below... but not before holding up Vince McMahon for a $200,000 payoff to put over Chyna on the way out. This got him blacklisted, which is why Jeff and his father had to start TNA, which you can also read about below.
• On rare occasions, a wrestler or stable can get good heat from some fans and X-Pac Heat from others at the same time. Right to Censor, a stable of moral guardians whose catchphrase was "You do NOT know what is good for you!" and who occasionally did things such as abort fanservice segments by covering the fanservice with sheets, are probably the best known example of mixed good heat and X-Pac Heat. About half the fans loved to hate the RTC, and the other half wanted them to just quit existing. The fact that Jerry Lawler, who was then a heel sympathizer, talked worse about the RTC on commentary than he did about faces like Mick Foley or The Rock is just more proof of how hated they were^note Seeing as how Lawler's commentary was 20% talking about the match and 80% making not-very-veiled references to the breasts of various members of the female roster (and even occasionally fans in the crowd) around this time it's not really surprising that King wasn't a fan.
• This was actually invoked when Kurt Angle debuted in the then-WWF. He was such a cheesy, over-the-top good guy^note imagine Beaver Cleaver in a singlet, and you'll get the idea of what his character was like at the time that it was almost painful to watch. And then he started wrestling: not "pro" wrestling, but collegiate/Olympic style wrestling, with holds even more drawn out than usual, and downplaying what few showy and impressive bits there were. This went on for weeks, to the point that the fans didn't need any prompting to begin the "boring" chants, and many wondered why anyone thought bringing "the other kind" of wrestler in was a good idea. Then Angle snapped under the constant verbal abuse, yelled at the fans, and switched to a brutal form of technical catch as catch can pro wrestling; the X-Pac Heat turned into the regular kind, and people were reminded that sometimes everything goes exactly as Vince wants it to.

WWF/E (2000s)

• The trope namer had a stablemate named Justin Credible who suffered the same fate. In ECW, he was pushed as a solid ex-jobber who was "actually very skilled", though his work rate was artificially inflated by giving him good workers to wrestle with. Eventually, as one of the last reasonably big names in the company, he got the ECW World Title, which resulted in massive overexposure. Even his former fans began seeing him as a mediocre worker with a terrible look and bad mic skills, and X-Pac Heat resulted.^note He had a catchphrase and a fake "angry voice" that involved him hissing his words out in a loud whisper all the time. ECW died shortly after his title win^note It's generally acknowledged today that the only reason he got the title is because Paul Heyman knew that neither WCW or the WWF wanted anything to do with him, so this way he didn't have to worry about anyone pulling a Mike Awesome and trying to take off to Atlanta with the belt and he promptly got similar reactions during his second stint in the WWF/E. It got so bad that some fans even blamed him for the death of ECW. He retired from wrestling, and got a job as the overnight stock manager at a Target superstore in New Jersey. After working there for a while, he got back into wrestling and, though confined to the independents, got a respectable level of popularity.
• Matt Bloom, better known as Albert, A-Train, Giant Bernard, Tensai and Jason Albert, inspired the same "Shave your back!" chants as Miguel Perez above due to his Wookiee-like pelt. He has since done as the fans asked, and gotten himself some badass chest tattoos to boot. He even gained some serious popularity during his time wrestling in Japan. Shame WWE's booking screwed his chances of escaping his status in the West, however^note He now runs the WWE Performance Center alongside Shawn Michaels.
• When Lita cheated on Matt Hardy with Edge, both Lita and Edge were showered with legitimate anger from the fans. This only intensified after Vince McMahon fired Hardy for complaining about the situation online. Their respective storylines had to be scrapped, and Lita was forced to turn heel. Edge, a natural heel, was able to turn the X-Pac Heat into regular heel heat relatively quickly, and Hardy getting re-hired calmed things down a lot. Lita did not get the fans' approval back so easily; she was still showered with boos and vicious insults for the next year-plus later, and actually quit wrestling entirely partially because of it. However, she was well received when she made a one night return in 2007, and very well received when she returned for the 1000th episode of Raw when she performed her moonsault on Heath Slater. During the latter, she was referenced as a legendary Diva, a far cry from another four-letter word she was once referred to as. Fans were also genuinely happy when she made the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2014, not to mention her in-ring return in 2018 at both the Royal Rumble and the women-only PPV Evolution, so hindsight has erased a lot of the tarnish in her case.
• Vickie Guerrero. The hate the crowd had for her during her run as GM of WWE SmackDown was absolutely brutal. The lowlight of her X-Pac Heat was at a PPV, where she came out to restart a match. Through the booing, you can very clearly hear a fan yell "THE WRONG GUERRERO DIED!". She eventually got better when her screen time was reduced and her heel persona was toned down. Vickie is a fantastic example of the creative department taking the ball and running with it. Capitalizing on her annoying voice, her ability to generate heat in WWE was unmatched. Wrestlers working in the industry for years couldn't hope to get the level of fervor she got just by showing her face. True, she probably could never have gotten over as a face with her character's direction, but she'd unquestionably left her mark. When Vickie did retire on June 24, 2014, she got cheered big time as the fans showed they respected her work in the business, and it was a nice touch seeing her come out to the music of her late husband Eddie before she got well-justified revenge against Stephanie McMahon.
• Vladimir Kozlov. Too easy. He began to be pushed to the moon within months of debuting and was even originally planned to be given the WWE Championship at one time. Any problems? Oh yeah, he couldn't wrestle. Yes, he was a heel all this time, so it could be translated to heel heat, but the smart fans hated him even more. To back this up, they turned him into an American loving goofy babyface, and the fans still hated him. It took a team up with the hilarious Santino Marella and a serious expansion of his moveset to become tolerable, though he was eventually fired. CM Punk cut a promo where the audience cheered when this was brought up.
• During WWE's infamous "Rosie O'Donnell" vs. "Donald Trump" match, fans got so sick of what they were seeing, they chanted for TNA instead. WWE takes videos of the match down when they find them, but for now, the full match can be viewed here. "BORING" chants start at 6:30, "TNA" is at 7:20, and "WE WANT WRESTLING" is at 8:20.

WWE (2010s)

• The Authority:
  • Triple H and Stephanie McMahon get this due to both their Arc Fatigue and their Invincible Villain streak against all of the babyfaces that have tried to oppose them. And HHH defeating Sting at WrestleMania 31 — in the latter's very first WWE match, no less — was just the absolute last straw for many. Furthermore, they're so hated that Roman Reigns, whose own case of X-Pac Heat is documented in the Repeat Offenders folder, got cheers simply by beating the crap out of Hunter, something that not even ten months of being booked as strong as John Cena could do. By WrestleMania 32, it had flipped — the crowd booed Reigns so hard that WWE muted the crowd mics, and they cheered for the Authority despite Stephanie pre-empting the match by literally personally insulting the audience.
  • Stephanie's bad heat goes all the way back to the early 2000s, starting with her involvement with the badly botched Invasion Angle, which brought this kind of heat on the whole McMahon family^note She also didn't do herself any favors by giving an interview shortly after the September 11th attacks where she compared them to her father's steroid trial, something a few fans still haven't forgotten about. But while Vince can skate by because he's the one who is putting on the show, and fans are quick to forgive Shane because he's willing to take insane bumps for our entertainment^note At least until the debacle at the 2022 Royal Rumble, listed below in the 2020s folder, Stephanie is seen as really bringing nothing positive to the table. Then there's Triple H's "Reign of Terror" in the mid-00s where he was being smashed over the entire roster despite fans having long been sick of him. Stephanie gets blamed for this and rightly so, even if you ignore the obvious Nepotism, Stephanie was Head of Creative at the time, a position she held for over a decade. Which means she also gets blamed for everything else that was rotten during this time period, which is somewhat unfair as most of the really terrible stuff (like Katie Vick) came directly from Vince. Still, Stephanie is absolutely despised in the smart fan/"IWC" community, mainly for her work backstage rather than anything she's done on camera.
  • Stephanie's case of X-Pac Heat is getting so bad it's starting to damage the company itself. A wrestling news site reported that in meetings with WWE stockholders, she has to open by informing them that she is only playing a character on TV and she won't act that way with them, and several outside media interviews as well as some of her own tweets show her doing exactly that in public view. Basically, she has to constantly take a dump on Kayfabe to keep from hurting WWE's PR and finances.^note Stephanie resigned from the company and more or less retired in 2022, shortly after her father muscled his way back onto the board of directors. WWE was sold to Endeavor Holdings Group (the parent company of UFC, renamed to TKO Holdings Group a few weeks later) in April 2023, with Vince being named a vice president of that company and given full control over WWE's day-to-day operations, though Triple H is doing the actual booking, with Shawn Michaels running NXT's creative.
• John Laurinaitis received X-Pac Heat a second time^note See the WCW folder for the first instance. during his appearances on WWE programming from 2011-2012; between his voice, which caused fans to call him "John Laryngitis", his frequent messing up of his lines, and the monotone delivery of his lines, people grew very tired of his run as General Manager of Raw. It got even worse after WrestleMania 28 when he became General Manager of SmackDown as well. Furthermore, he was booked in a main event feud on pay-per-view with John Cena, who himself is rather divisive, and hardly showcased any of his former in-ring talent. The fact that this match took place after the very well-received championship match between CM Punk and Daniel Bryan took any remaining interest in Laurinaitis and dropped it entirely, and everyone was rejoicing when Vince McMahon uttered his hammiest two words to him a month later.
• Chris Jericho invoked this trope in his January 2012 return. Jericho’s return promo consisted merely of him doing stereotypical babyface mannerisms and taunts for ten minutes straight, eventually getting the crowd sick and tired of his antics. By doing so, he established that he returned as a heel.
• Bo Dallas got a lot of this through 2013. In January, he was entered into the Royal Rumble where he proceeded to eliminate Wade Barrett, got into a feud with Barrett about this, and proceeded to go over him clean in a singles non-title match. While WWE tried to recreate Maven's infamous elimination of The Undertaker and push Dallas right out of the gate, most fans saw him as a generic, incredibly green babyface who made Barrett look bad. WWE did catch onto this after a while and took him back to NXT. But even there, he continued to be a powerful force, winning the NXT Championship by defeating legit fan favorite Big E. Langston. NXT capitalized on this by turning him into an disingenuous, egotistical heel that believed the fans love him even though they hated his guts. After returning to the main roster in 2014, Dallas was booked quite effectively as an annoying motivational speaker who told fans and other wrestlers to "BO-LIEVE!" while simultaneously being patronizing and condescending.
• As Mark Henry was walking to the ring for a match against CM Punk on the April 2, 2012 edition of Raw, a fan behind him held up a sign◊ that said this:^note Mind you, this was after fifteen years of receiving X-Pac Heat.
  "Sir! I feel compelled to stress that we are not booing because of your effective heel work, we are booing because you are simply awful."
• Mojo Rawley was the target of most NXT fans' hatred. He's seen as yet another generic babyface. Rawley was mostly disliked to due a combination of things:
  • His gimmick, which centered around being and staying "hyped", was mostly seen as obnoxious and grating.
  • His moveset was extremely limited.
  • His finisher, the Hyper Drive, was horrendous; it's basically just him landing on his opponent with his ass.
  • Surprisingly, it largely died down by the time he was drafted to SmackDown.
• Blake and Murphy, who won the NXT tag team championships by complete surprise from the crowd pleasing Lucha Dragons on a regular episode of NXT. Despite their later addition of Alexa Bliss, they were largely treated with apathy from the NXT faithful at the time even long after they lost the titles. Alexa would go on to the main roster and be positioned as a mainstay in WWE programming, while the other two would meaninglessly break up before having their match interrupted as a part of a long running storyline with Samoa Joe. While Murphy would end up being Rescued from the Scrappy Heap due to his well received move to 205 Live and then the main roster, Blake would unfortunately be hitched to YET ANOTHER recipiant of X-Pac Heat in The Forgotten Sons. It’s notable that when NXT attempted this type of quick switch again with The Revival, they actually built them up first beforehand.
• Ryback usually got good, if not great, reactions as a babyface. However, he'd also gotten his share of "GOLDBERG!" chants, mostly from smart fans who saw him as a poor man's version of Goldberg. This was especially true during his uninspiring runs as a midcard heel. It didn't help much that Ryback was accused multiple times of being an unsafe worker, most notably by CM Punk in his notorious shoot interview with Colt Cabana.
• Batista received minor examples of X-Pac Heat over the years, with his match with The Big Show on ECW being his worst offense, but they were nothing compared to the backlash over him winning the Royal Rumble in 2014. It certainly didn't help that he had been back on television for less than a week beforehand after being gone since 2010 and won the Royal Rumble altogether, sending him to the main event of WrestleMania over a number of more popular wrestlers like Daniel Bryan, who wasn’t even in the match. Much of the reaction had to do with revulsion to the WWE creative team rather than Batista himself (case in point, when Rey Mysterio came out at number 30 the boos started hard and heavy, which almost never happens to Rey), but he certainly seemed to take it poorly (reportedly flipping off fans and mocking the "YES!" chants with his middle fingers before walking backstage). Barely weeks into his big return, his appearances were greeted by main roster audiences chanting "BOO-TISTA!", NXT audiences chanting "BETTER THAN BATISTA!" in response to powerbombs, and cheers for his opponents Roman Reigns, Alberto Del Rio, and Randy Orton — the last of which was the top heel of the company at the time — thus leading to Batista undergoing a quickie heel turn and Daniel Bryan being inserted into the main event.
  • It didn’t help that his work rate hadn't measured up to the current roster (the matches he had since the Royal Rumble had shown him tiring quickly and botching simple moves like clotheslines) and, of course, telling fans that he was going to main event WrestleMania and that they should just deal with it didn't help him either. He later expressed in interviews that he had wanted to come back as a heel in the first place and was telling creative that instantly plugging him in as the top face would go over like a fart in a church, calling himself the worst babyface in the history of wrestling. Thus it's entirely likely he intentionally acted like a heel every chance he could from the moment he first got booed until the company finally caved and made him one.
• The New Day was launched in late 2014 as a babyface stable featuring Big E, Kofi Kingston, and Xavier Woods. Their gimmick is that of an overly optimistic stable that claps their hands and dances before, during, and after matches. The gimmick, however, went down very poorly with fans, who had, by early 2015, taken to booing them and shouting "SUCKS!" whenever one of the members would yell "NEW DAY!" The stable quickly turned heel, which turned their X-Pac Heat into regular, good heat. Ironically, their creatively hammy and hilarious heel personas were so popular that they ultimately became faces again. In addition, the fact that Woods hosts Up, Up, Down, Down, a YouTube channel where he plays video games with celebrities and other wrestlers, only adds to his individual popularity. The New Day's escape from X-Pac Heat also launched Kingston into main event status, culminating in his 2019 run with the WWE Championship.
• The so-called "Divas Revolution" was considered by many fans to be a poorly-booked storyline, with the center being the rivalry among three-woman factions Team PCB (Paige, Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch), Team Bella (Bella Twins + Alicia Fox), and Team BAD (Naomi, Tamina Snuka, Sasha Banks). As a result, even the babyface Team PCB, excluding Becky Lynch, received X-Pac Heat from fans. Banks was also popular despite her heel status. Eventually, Paige escaped her earlier X-Pac Heat by turning heel on Team PCB with an impressive worked shoot promo on the September 21, 2015 episode of Raw, only to rejoin them one week later, before turning on them again after Hell in a Cell.
• Nikki and Brie Bella's terrible acting skills (Nikki's infamous "I wish you died in the wooooomb" promo ^note Incidentally, even she disliked that promo.) and perceived success due to their respective partners haven't gone over well with smarks, resulting in them receiving inappropriate sexual chants from fans on the RAW after WrestleMania 31 ("You suck Bryan!" and "You Suck Cena!"). While they have improved significantly since their debut and get mostly positive reactions from the more casual fans, it seemingly wasn't enough to justify Nikki holding the Divas Championship for over 300 days, while Bayley was still in NXT. Not to mention their feuding story line with each other that was being built up for months ultimately led to Brie forgiving Nikki for all the terrible things that she's said and done to her. The heat appears to be dying down, more so on Nikki than Brie. First, Nikki improved her ring skills to the point that she was actually pretty decent in the ring. Then, after suffering a career threatening neck injury, it became hard to hate her after seeing how heartbroken she was over not being able to wrestle anymore. Brie also had a bit of Daniel Bryan's heat rub off on her, although since her wrestling skill didn't improve much, she still got some bad heat.
• Michael Cole during his 2010-12 heel run. His constant Trolling of the crowd had taken him to new levels. His "Anonymous GM" emails, his incessant crapping all over smark-beloved wrestlers like Daniel Bryan and R-Truth, his creepy fanboying of The Miz, and his severe lack of respect for Jim Ross didn't just make fans want to boo him, but want to wring his neck. Even a little payback from his screwed-over broadcast partner Jerry Lawler hadn't dimmed Cole's huge amounts of smarm. There's playing a heel commentator, and then there's Michael Cole. However, he seemed to have been Rescued from the Scrappy Heap due to him gaining a ton of respect from the 9-10-2012 episode of Raw, when Lawler collapsed during a match between Daniel Bryan and Kane vs. The Prime Time Players. Not only did Cole retain his composure, but showed a lot of legitimate emotion on air as he gave updates concerning Lawler's condition.
• Enzo Amore may be the first example of the bookers deliberately getting X-Pac Heat on a wrestler. Enzo's a brilliant talker, but one of the worst workers in all of WWE. When the decision was made to split the Enzo & Cass tag team, Enzo was moved over into the Cruiserweight division, which is the most workrate-centric division in WWE and the one most marketed to smarks. Numerous stories were also leaked about Enzo's obnoxious, egotistical behavior behind the scenes, especially Simon Gotch's rant. He then became the Cruiserweight Champion in a match where he got next to no offense and won by cheating, while Neville carried the entire match to the point that Neville legitimately quit. It came across like, having noticed that smarks tend to cheer anyone they like regardless of face/heel, WWE built Enzo up to specifically antagonize fans into disliking him.
  
  Unrelated to the booking in WWE, but not too long after they made him the centerpiece of 205 Live, in January 2018, real allegations of Enzo raping a woman the previous October became public; he was immediately fired for failing to inform WWE of the subsequent police investigation. While no charges were filed due to a lack of evidence, with there being a possibility that the accusations were false, the damage was done. Enzo then went ahead and made the situation even worse by releasing a hilariously awful rap song about the experience, insulting his accuser and fans who, as Jim Cornette pointed out, were the only ones who actually cared about Enzo in the first place. While he was immensely popular among fans, especially during his NXT run, the circumstances of his departure and his subsequent attitude mean not only is Enzo's career dead and buried, even if he's completely innocent, few will admit to having ever liked him.
• Jinder Mahal in mid-2017. Back when he was booked as a jobber on a regular basis, most notably when he was a member of the 3MB stable, fans didn't mind Mahal so much. Upon his return in 2016, his in-ring skills had moderately improved, but his character did not. He resumed his status as a bonafide jobber before he eventually became a lackey and tag team partner for Rusev for a while. This all changed after WrestleMania 33, where Mahal was moved to SmackDown during the Superstar Shake-up between the brands, upon which he suddenly upset then-WWE Champion Randy Orton at Backlash in May to obtain the belt, which he held onto for nearly six months. Mahal's mega push could have worked if it was given the proper amount of time and buildup. Additionally, Mahal shifted his character to a by-the-book foreign heel that failed to captivate audiences while continuing to work mediocre matches, which further discredited his sudden elevation. This caused WWE's TV ratings and ticket sales to plummet even further than they already were. It didn't help that he regularly scored victories over beloved wrestlers such as Luke Harper, Sami Zayn and Shinsuke Nakamura, almost halting their pushes in the process. Perhaps worst of all though, nearly all of Mahal’s matches ended with a screwy finish, typically involving his two henchmen, the Singh Brothers, interfering and causing enough of a distraction that Mahal was able to capitalize, ensuring Mahal never got over cleanly and proving that he was only winning because he was cheating, which wouldn't normally be odd for a heel, but while most other heels only cheat to win against credible babyfaces who actually have a strong chance at beating them, Mahal couldn't even beat jobbers without interference. It's worth noting that Mahal didn't get much personal hate, as he was both humble and grateful for the opportunity, but as WrestleCrap pointed out, according to the numbers, he didn't even draw in India, which was one of the main reasons why he was given the belt in the first place.
• Vince's desire to push giants at the expense of better workers doesn't just apply to men, as the case of Nia Jax shows. Due to her size and bloodline, she was pushed heavily on NXT and fast-tracked to the main roster not even a year after her TV debut. Jax was still considered green at best and in the worst cases downright dangerous to work with. Even after being a focal part of the Raw women's division for months, she was still prone to botching and was pretty shaky on the mic.
  
  Despite her reputation with the IWC finally coming around at the beginning of 2018, Jax has suffered numerous character derailments. Between the months of March to June, she had been made out to go from being a Wrestling Monster to a storyline where she was made out to be a bullying victim by Alexa Bliss, who is half her size, back to a wrestling monster. The insane amount of sudden changes, not to mention the disingenuous speeches about body acceptance in the "bullying victim" phase, destroyed her character for the time being, so much so that crowds barely reacted to her appearing. It had gotten so bad that the title was abruptly won back by Bliss only two months into her reign via the Money in the Bank briefcase (which she won the very same night) because fans were already so bored of Jax.
  
  To some, it got worse as she ended up turning heel and aligning with Tamina Snuka, who a) was never really that over to begin with, b) is the daughter of a man that many consider even more checkered than Hulk Hogan even after his death, and c) despite not having competed in over a year, ended up on the women's Survivor Series team in favor of far better and more popular superstars like Ember Moon, Bayley and Sasha Banks. As if that wasn't enough, when Becky Lynch led an invasion of Raw and attacked Ronda Rousey, Jax was among those who defended Raw but ended up delivering a stiff punch to Lynch's face that left the latter bleeding. Initially seen as great for the run-off to Survivor Series, Lynch was legitimately too injured to compete, thus depriving fans of Rousey vs. Lynch, a match they were hotly anticipating. Quickly inciting a massive fan backlash, many called for Jax to be sent back down to NXT or even fired due to her already spotty record of injuring other superstars. Not helped by how much like Roman Reigns, many see her push and staying on the roster as doing The Rock a favor, but unlike Reigns, who at least had some moments where fans got behind him (and, after his 2020 heel turn, might be escaping X-Pac Heat for good), she can't seem to shake the X-Pac Heat off no matter what she does.
  
  By Survivor Series 2018, WWE's writers seemed to be aiming to invoke this by having her gloat about breaking Lynch's face and reveling in the boos, which ended up reaching Ciampa or Reigns levels of heat that night, while also boasting her elimination of Asuka from the match just to spite them some more. The weeks that followed saw Jax become one of the most disliked people on the Raw brand. Many people turned on Jax, mainly due to the realization that her in-ring ability paled significantly in comparison to the other women on the roster, as well as the dreadful mic work she had done prior to her second match with Ronda Rousey. No one batted an eye when it was revealed that due to an injury exacerbated at WrestleMania 35, Jax would be gone for the rest of 2019. She would finally be cut loose for good in 2021, supposedly for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine^note Which would basically limit her to shows in the U.S. (though this has never been confirmed).
  
  Despite having been fired in 2021, she made a surprising return in 2023 and instantly dangerously botched a Banzai Drop, landing with all her weight on Rhea Ripley, which led to fan outcry. Thankfully, Ripley wasn't injured, but this led to another storm of X-Pac Heat as Jax was instantly inserted right back at the top of the card despite not improving her work or promo skills in the time that she had been away from WWE. It only got worse when she went on record in several interviews equating legitimate fan criticism (i.e. her tendency for unsafe work and propensity for injuring other wrestlers) to cyberbullying and body-shaming. This seemed to indicate that not only did she know she was unsafe and dangerous in the ring, she didn't have any intention to get better, and another storm of X-Pac Heat quickly ensued.
• James Ellsworth first appeared as a enhancement talent, but his unique look and attitude led to him becoming an Ensemble Dark Horse, appearing on SmackDown again and even getting involved in the AJ Styles feud with Dean Ambrose over the WWE Championship. However, his beloved status among the fans started to evaporate when he repeatedly defeated Styles thanks to interference; some called it a burial and heaped hate on Ellsworth for it, but he was still popular enough to get signed to a permanent WWE contract and appear as SmackDown's "mascot" for Survivor Series 2016. Immediately after the feud with Styles however, it was abundantly clear WWE had run out of ideas for him; since Ellsworth had just been signed and the company had to do something with him, they paired him up with Carmella as her lackey, and his goodwill with the crowd instantly evaporated. By this time, he was largely seen as a punchline that had ceased to be funny a long time ago, but WWE still seemed to think the fans loved him just as much as they had on his first appearance. The hatred came to a head at Money in the Bank 2017 when he helped Carmella win the Money in the Bank ladder match by pulling down the briefcase for her. The fact that, technically, a man won the first-ever women's Money in the Bank ladder match, caused so much hate toward both him and the company (with fans accusing WWE of blatant sexism) that Ellsworth had to be taken off TV for a while to calm the heat down. Ultimately, the company saw the writing on the wall and didn't renew his contract, and his last match saw his arm get Kayfabe snapped by Becky Lynch. The general consensus among fans is that Ellsworth was a mildly funny in-joke that stopped being so as soon as the company got ahold of his popularity and immediately shoved him down their throats, and few were sad to see him go. He then made a shock return in 2018 by distracting Asuka to help Carmella retain her championship, and the IWC's collective palms met their faces. He was gone again in about five weeks much to the delight of everyone, with his final appearance seeing SmackDown General Manager Paige fire him and literally kick him out of the building.
• Baron Corbin initially fell into this after being drafted to Monday Night RAW in 2018 as Stephanie McMahon's accountant, placed in a meaningless feud with Finn Balor with repetitive matches and later usurping Kurt Angle as the RAW General Manager for the rest of 2018; despite being designated The Scapegoat after being fired as GM, he still had screentime on the midcard , paired with Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley with no explanation. Though the reactions to all this were bad enough, the backlash after Kurt Angle announced Corbin would be his opponent for his final retirement match at WrestleMania 35 was what really turned the entire fanbase against him. Most people wanted either John Cena or at least for him to put over an up-and-comer who could benefit from retiring a legend, and as well as not being John Cena, pretty much nobody believes Corbin deserves to be put over by a name as big as Angle, not after his career has been mismanaged as badly as it has. Hell, when Corbin came out for a match later that episode, the crowd hijacked it by chanting "You're not Cena!" at him. Unfortunately, despite expectations that WWE was planning some kind of swerve the match went ahead exactly as planned, much to the disappointment of everyone, with the universal consensus being that Kurt deserved better and that Corbin was an undeserving last opponent.
  • Corbin would continue to get this treatment after besting Chad Gable to become King Corbin, especially when Gable would rename himself the ill advised ‘Shorty G’ due to Corbin’s taunts. Worse still, he would next enter a feud with Roman Reigns involving him pouring DOG FOOD of all things onto the Big Dog.
  • While he temporarily received praise for his work after losing the crown in 2021 and becoming ‘Bum Ass Corbin’ in the words of Pat McAfee, his repackaging as Happy Corbin just a matter of months later lead to him getting it right back again. This trope could honestly be renamed "Baron Corbin Heat" given that he elicits a far stronger hate from the audience than even the Trope Namer.
  • Thankfully, his new run in NXT slowly restored the fans' opinion of him after his improved character work and hot feuds with Carmelo Hayes and Ilja Dragunov. He was even cheered at one point (given that he was going against a very controversial Gable Steveson, that wasn't exactly surprising}.
• The second half of 2019 saw Seth Rollins become a major recipient of X-Pac Heat, and it appeared to be at least partly his own doing. The backlash toward Rollins started becoming evident in early October, in the aftermath of his Hell in a Cell match against "The Fiend" Bray Wyatt, a match that ended in a massively unpopular non-finish and gave off the impression that WWE had no plans of having the revitalized Wyatt and his brilliant character win the Universal Championship. However, fans were already turning on Rollins due to his penchant for defending WWE to the death online and in interviews, going as far as to argue with New Japan Pro-Wrestling's Will Ospreay over their respective paychecks. With Rollins still mouthing off on social media as the heat intensified — this included comments about All Elite Wrestling's Kenny Omega competing in the "minor leagues" — the boos kept ramping up, to the point that WWE had to edit them out of a pre-taped Raw from Manchester, England, in November. It didn't help that he was also criticized by Jim Ross, who said on his podcast that "maybe one day you'll be as over as your girlfriend" while reacting to Rollins' comments on AEW and Omega. Likewise, CM Punk took aim at Rollins on his WWE Backstage debut on Fox Sports 1, advising him to delete his Twitter because it isn't doing him any favors — this was in response to Rollins challenging Punk to a fight on repeated occasions ahead of the episode, and possibly to his past Twitter shenanigans as a die-hard WWE company man as well. For what it's worth, WWE soon leaned into the criticisms and had Seth pull a Face–Heel Turn post-Survivor Series.

WWE (2020s)

• The Velveteen Dream had his share of X-Pac Heat in the latter half of 2020, largely due to WWE's decision to bring him back to television despite numerous accusations of sexual misconduct and grooming toward minors, and soon after, Triple H's claim that the company found nothing incriminating against him, and that Dream's hiatus was a result of a car crash he was involved in. Not helping that one of his accusers stated that he was never contacted for the investigation. While the COVID-19 Pandemic at the time had prevented WWE from holding shows with live audiences, many fans took to Twitter to call the company out for allowing Dream to return to action on NXT.
  • When WWE launched its virtual fan experience, the ThunderDome, just ahead of SummerSlam 2020, one fan found himself banned from the service for showing a "Fire Velveteen Dream" sign on his live feed during the event. If Finn Balor's tweet in regards to his match against Dream is anything to go by, not even a good portion of the roster was happy to have him back. Furthermore, not helping matters is the fact that WWE wasn't shy of firing and refusing to further acknowledge three other superstars for the same reason.^note NXT UK's Travis Banks and El Ligero, and 205 Live's Gentleman Jack Gallagher.
  • This was escalated when on April 15, 2021, several superstars, including Samoa Joe, were released from the company. However, Velveteen Dream survived the purge and remained with the company until May 20, 2021, where he was finally released.
• Jaxson Ryker spent the vast majority of his run receiving this kind of heat from the crowd, but following law enforcement officers forcefully clearing peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square before then-President Donald Trump went to the adjacent St. John's Episcopal Church for a photo op amid the George Floyd protests on June 2020, he would take to Twitter to voice his support of President Trump, while inserting his stable The Forgotten Sons' catchphrase (Forgotten No More) in as a hashtag. Naturally, fans and fellow wrestlers alike saw the gesture as disrespectful and called him out on it, quickly leading to the stable being quickly taken off of television.
  • Even after his fellow stable members Wesley Blake and Steve Cutler were released, Ryker would remain a part of WWE television due to being one of Vince's final pet projects, receiving a role as an ally to the ever popular Elias. Even Elias turning on him didn’t lead to him connecting with the crowd, as they showed anything from apathy to distaste at seeing him (especially after Elias would be written off TV after losing their feud). Ryker would be banished to Main Event, where he would remain until being released in November 2021.
• Shane McMahon received this reaction in record time after the 2022 Men's Royal Rumble, which was widely regarded as one of the worst and most underwhelming Rumble matches in recent memory. It was reported that the real-life booking of the match was changed multiple times at the behest of Shane (surprising considering he's always been well-liked and humble), angering both the talent and bookers. Just days after^note More like as soon as the match ended, but the news took a couple days to trickle out, Shane was said to have been sent home, showing just far he's fallen in popularity behind the curtain.
• Celebrity guests are always hated by fans but there is no one more hated than Logan Paul, even if one disregards the controversies he had before 2022 which include filming and uploading footage of the corpse of a suicide victim on to his YouTube channel in 2017, as well as his most recent Cryptozoo affair. Although Paul is capable of putting up a good match, fans hated him for being given high profile matches, including a world championship match on his third match at the cost of actual wrestlers. At Money in the Bank 2023, Paul is booed to oblivion throughout the men's ladder match and even when he pulled an amazing feat, the fans still chant "You still suck!" to him. Since then, however, Paul has managed to shake off some of the heat by putting on good in-ring performances and even preventing Rey Mysterio Jr. from suffering a serious injury at WWE Crown Jewel 2023, which earned him some respect from the fans, coupled with him also making regular appearances on TV.
• Gable Steveson had a lot of hype around him during the time he signed a WWE contract while still in college wrestling in amateur competitions and had a chance to become the next Kurt Angle, an Olympic medalist amateur wrestler who managed to make a smooth transition into the world of pro wrestling. However, his reputation became permanently marred due to him being accused of rape and avoiding any legal repercussions due to the wording of the law in Minnesota. Case in point, at NXT The Great American Bash 2023 where he made his in-ring debut against fellow X-Pac Heat recipient Baron Corbin ^note Who to be fair has been in the middle of rebuilding his career and has been earning back the respect of fans, the crowd cheered for Corbin while Steveson received chants such as "Gable Sucks" and "You're not Angle", not helped by his performance in the match being subpar. Since then, he was seen working dark matches before tapings of WWE Smackdown where the crowd was still unanimously not in his favor.

WCW

• A classic case of this: the Dynamic Dudes, who were skateboarding wrestlers. When they received a face push by having manager Jim Cornette betray them for an opposing heel tag team (The Midnight Express), the audience cheered Cornette. Amusingly, the Dynamic Dudes included later X-Pac Heat recipient John Laurinaitis^note It got so bad that at one show someone brought a bedsheet that had "JOHNNY SUCKS SHANE'S DICK" ("Shane" as in Shane Douglas, the other half of the Dudes) spray painted on it and hung it from the balcony. Remember, the Dudes were supposed to be the good guys.
• The Ding Dongs, one of the first of a series of really idiotic gimmicks (along with the Dynamic Dudes) thought of by former WCW head Jim Herd, and a permanent resident in any list of worst tag teams, worst gimmicks, etc... Cornette (now a podcaster) describes the reception they got from a southern wrasslin' crowd:
  And they started ringing that bell and the people were like "Fuck you!" They were either laughing, or going to the concession stand, or just "Get the fuck out of this ring!"
• One of the first examples of this being used deliberately was a match between The Mauler (long time jobber-to-the-stars Mike Enos, repackaged as a biker) and Steve Doll. The Mauler was being presented as a Monster Heel despite clearly not being one, and the match dragged on and on and on, with Mauler endlessly beating on Doll and not even trying to win the match. The reason they booked this dull extended squash? To make sure that the debuting Scott Hall didn't overshadow anything that the fans might actually care about.
• Erik Watts from the early days of WCW. He was pushed because he was the son of Cowboy Bill Watts, who was in charge of WCW at the time. He was a crappy wrestler, didn't have a great physique, and was nearly booed out of the building whenever he appeared. The sad part is that he did eventually develop some talent in the ring and a decent look, but was so notorious for his nepotistic push (and for throwing the worst dropkick in human history at Starrcade 92) that he still couldn't get over and promoters were afraid to push him very hard.
• Hulk Hogan was one of if not the biggest WWF stars of all time. However, when he brought the flexing, no-selling, All-American gimmick to WCW, fans started out lukewarm at best, and progressed to booing him and throwing his merchandise back into the ring. The negative fan reaction inspired Hogan to agree to turn heel, becoming the villainous Hollywood Hogan and forming the New World Order. It worked impressively. However, once the nWo ran its course and he turned back into Hulk Hogan, the negative reactions came back. Hardcore fans knew of Hogan's backstage politicking and resented him for it (both Kevin Nash and later Jeff Jarrett would catch a healthy amount of X-Pac heat too, for the exact same reason), and both hardcore and casual fans, many of whom had been fans of the old NWA, hated the WWF's campy, story-driven style that Hogan brought with him compared to the NWA's hard action and grittier aesthetic. It also didn't help that his turn back to Hulk Hogan was matched up with an attempted heel turn by Sting, who the fans adamantly refused to boo no matter what he did.
• The Ultimate Warrior had a disastrous run in WCW. He was initially well-received by fans during his debut on Nitro when he interrupted a Hollywood Hogan promo. His pop soon diminished, however, as fans grew to dislike him. It wasn't long before Warrior was receiving heavy boos, despite playing a face to Hogan's heel. His terrible promo and wrestling abilities, as well as a bad angle by this point, grated on fans. He also had considerable creative control over his character in WCW, and entered himself and Hogan into an angle that was very much hated by fans. The penultimate moment being when he was haunting Hogan through a locker room mirror, but the angle called for Hogan being the only person who could see him, even though everyone watching could see him as well.^note This was made even worse when Eric Bischoff kept pretending that he couldn't see Warrior. Warrior only wrestled in two matches during his brief tenure,^note Technically, he appeared in three matches. However, the real Warrior didn't actually wrestle during the War Games match at Fall Brawl, as he was replaced by the Renegade using smoke and mirrors. the most infamous being the Hogan-Warrior rematch at Halloween Havoc 1998, widely considered to be one of the worst matches in wrestling history. He was gone shortly afterward.
• The No Limit Soldiers, a stable of rappers led by Master P, were conceived of when WCW decided to try and target the urban/hip hop market. WCW intended to bring hip hop fans into the wrestling fandom, and Master P wanted to give his cousin Swoll a break in the wrestling business. WCW put veterans Konnan, Rey Mysterio Jr., and Billy Kidman in the stable along with Swoll, a pair of muscular rookies named Chase and 4x4, and former jobber "BA" Brad Armstrong to take bumps and cover for the rookies. WCW then made a country music stable to feud with them, the West Texas Rednecks,^note Actually the West Texas Outlaws; West Texas Rednecks was supposed to be an insult, but between the commentators almost never calling them the Outlaws and the southern fans not taking "rednecks" as an insult, Rednecks became the official name. consisting of Curt Hennig, Bobby Duncum Jr., and Kendall and Barry Windham.
  
  The angle was doomed from the beginning. Master P wasn't seen by the hip hop fandom as particularly cool or a particularly good rapper at the time, and his raps for WCW certainly didn't change that impression. He failed to draw in any new fans, and then after he was booed on his first appearance, he refused to return and support the angle. Although the Soldiers were supposed to be street-wise antiheroes, they simply came across as heels (particularly in that they started the feud with the Rednecks, destroying a gift Hennig intended for Master P's brother and then attacking him for no particular reason), and the bloated roster of re-gimmicked veterans and rookies no one had ever heard of before failed to connect with the fans. Meanwhile, the Rednecks recorded a downright hilarious song titled "Rap is Crap", held their own against the No Limit Soldiers despite being outnumbered almost two-to-one, and had Hennig, widely considered one of the best ever in the business and a really nice guy to boot, as their leader. Also, the WCW fanbase, which was largely white southern males, was pre-conditioned to prefer the country music-loving rednecks anyway. It's no surprise the latter stable became a collective Ensemble Dark Horse. So with the fans cheering the Rednecks and booing every time the Soldiers chanted "hootie-hoo," the angle ended barely a month in. Konnan, Mysterio, and Kidman split from the group to form The Filthy Animals, BA reunited with his brother Scott Armstrong, and Swoll, Chase and 4x4 disappeared uneventfully, Chase having done so before the angle was even finished.
• Diamond Dallas Page received this reaction in 1999, as fans grew tired of his good guy shtick. He quickly shook it off by turning heel shortly after winning his first world title. When attacking Goldberg to solidify his turn, he started shouting "Boo me now, bitch!" at the fans.
• The Harris Twins in general, but especially in WCW in 1999 and 2000. They were pushed as monsters and rarely lost, but they were pretty much lacking charisma entirely and their One-Hit Kill finisher, the A-Bomb, didn't look particularly devastating.^note It was more or less a two man flapjack press. When they performed a run-in at a pay-per-view after it had been announced that they'd been released a few days earlier, the fans groaned.
• A rare commentator example: Mark Madden. Although he was a heel, many fans found his unfunny jokes, shrieking, and general personality to be so obnoxious that they despised him. To this day, it isn't hard to find comments on video clips featuring his commentary that list him among the reasons for WCW's demise.
• Jeff Jarrett. While he was considered mid-card status during the time in WWE, he utilized political power to become a multi-time champion and main eventer. This did not go well with the fans, seeing as there were no development to make him that type of caliber champion. However, his WCW tenure is somewhat unfairly harshly judged. Most of Jarrett's hate could be considered Mis-blamed due to...

TNA / Impact Wrestling

• By the end of Jeff Jarrett's last run as NWA Champion in TNA in 2006, fans were pleading with him to "Drop the title! Drop the title!" and fans pelting him with trash (both were happening as early as his second reign) and it had gotten so bad that even his WCW tenure ended up being harshly vilified when he had done no worse than several others in the promotion that could be named. There were even chants of "Fuck you, Jarrett! Fuck you, Jarrett!" Jarrett was truly hated by TNA fans for good reasons—during the first four years, he held the NWA Championship for the better part of three of them. Occasionally, he would lose at a pay-per-view, only to win the title back at the very next show, leading fans to see the title as meaningless, since it had just become a prop for Jarrett. In every match he had at the time, he resorted to ref bumps, smashing guys with a guitar, run ins, or running into the crowd. To make matters worse, Jarrett was more than just the Creator's Pet—as one of the founders of TNA, he was the creator. It was almost as if he helped build TNA just so he can make himself the champion.^note Jim Cornette had a bit of an explanation as to why this happens: If you put the belt on yourself you never have to worry about your champ no-showing or leaving with the belt, and you never have to worry about him holding you up for more money. With Jarrett though it was ego. It's no wonder some fans started calling him "Triple J".
  • It only gets worse from here. While Kurt Angle and Karen Angle divorced, it was later revealed in 2009 that Jeff Jarrett started dating Karen Angle, causing real-life animosity towards Jarrett. Fortunately, the board of directors put Jarrett on leave. Jarrett later on moved to The Scrappy due to the writers at that time making it a storyline.
• Fans of TNA wrestling were so disgusted with how matches were booked, that some fans started "Fire Russo!" chants, aimed at writer Vince Russo. Russo's not the only one behind the shows, of course, but his track record with WWE and WCW made him a convenient lightning rod for fans' wrath. He was fired in February 2012, so it's left to the fans to come up with new chants.^note He secretly returned to TNA as a consultant from 2013-2014 since neither the fans nor Spike TV wanted him anywhere near the product. When Spike found out, they were less than pleased and ended up removing TNA from their programming altogether, leading to their move to Destination America the following year.
• Sonjay Dutt, Chris Sabin, and Jay Lethal got X-Pac Heat in 2006 when TNA gave all three of them Jackass fanboy gimmicks, receiving chants such as "This is Stupid!" when this (naturally) had to carry over into their matches against the likes of Petey Williams and Senshi. Then WWE had the gall to bring the actual stars of Jackass onto Monday Night Raw, where people started cheering when Umaga started legitimately beating on Steve-O.
• Bubba the Love Sponge. He was brought in around the time Hulk Hogan came to TNA as he hijacked Jeremy Borash and Christy Hemme's job as backstage interviewer, leading to loud "FIRE BUBBA" chants from the audience. It didn't help that he said "Fuck Haiti" on his radio show after the tragic earthquake, leading to Awesome Kong kicking his ass backstage for his disrespect to the numerous lives lost or ruined. One not-so-sincere apology later, with Hogan siding with him and making PMS jokes about Kong, and Kong asked for her release from the company. Bubba later ambushed Kong during her appearance on The Cowhead Show which turned out to be an elaborate setup by Bubba and show host Mike Calta to lure Kong on the show in the first place. This eventually led to his firing from TNA, capped by Mick Foley giving Bubba a legitimate punch to the face. Guess how the fandom responded?
• A stable in TNA called Shore (Rob Eckos and Becky Bayless) were two wrestlers who were paper-thin parodies of Jersey Shore cast members "The Situation" and "Snooki". They debuted before the "Bound for Glory" PPV on 10/7/10, and by their second appearance (said PPV), fans were universally booing them out of the arena. Bayless remained popular as a manager outside of TNA and Robbie E gained a fanbase, of sorts by teaming up with the similarly hated Rob Terry and DJ Z to become the Bro Mans, who were supposed to be aggravating.

Ring of Honor

• Jeff Hardy received a terrible reception from the RoHBots at his initial ROH appearance. He had already antagonized the fans by making comments about having no passion for wrestling in an interview, and the fans were further antagonized by the presence of a couple hundred teenage girls in the audience who'd showed up just for Jeff Hardy. Things got worse when Hardy came out in his Will-o-the-Wisp attire, and received chants of "We want Matt!". Then the match started, and it was awful, with Hardy botching nearly everything he attempted to do, and Krazy K (a trainee of Hardy's who had no other reason to even be in the match) being worse than Hardy. The fans cheered for everything Joey Matthews (who was supposed to be the heel) did and booed everything Hardy or Krazy K did. When the match ended, with Jeff winning, the fans chanted "Don't come back!"
• Matt Hardy himself had a rough start in Ring of Honor but the bots eventually took a liking to him when they saw he had been resigned by WWE but was keeping all of his advertised ROH dates and even more when he put over ROH regulars on the way out. He fell right back into this type of heat in his second run in the form of fat shaming but by the end of his run was again managing to get good heat, doing much to help Mike Bennett's own case of this (see below). By the time of Matt's third run he was so welcomed there weren't even any complaints when he vowed to bring back Jeff Hardy...ahem, Brother Nero.
• In Summer 2007, "Emo Kid" Jimmy Jacobs was transitioning into a new, much eviler role as the leader of a stable called The Age of the Fall. This, in and of itself, wasn't all that awful an angle. However, at the Ring of Honor Man Up PPV in September, Jimmy came out to speak to the crowd. For over 10 straight minutes. Much of this wasn't speaking, but standing around with his arms raised, saying nothing, while wearing a nice white jacket and being bled on by Jay Briscoe of The Briscoes suspended from the ceiling, head down, bleeding copiously. The crowd was furious, screaming to move on already. It totally burned all the house energy, which was at insane levels after the previous match — a Tag Team match featuring The Briscoes facing off against El Generico and Kevin Steen (aka "Steenerico") in a Ladder Match referred to as "Ladder War". It also bears mentioning that, initially at least, Jimmy Jacobs (and at that, all members of Age of the Fall) used a track of high-pitched female screaming for their entry music that lasted for several minutes. It was utterly intolerable, and changed quickly. Laurie Strode's screaming from the Halloween remake was eventually used as the intro for The Age of the Fall's actual entrance theme.
• The Kingdom, mainly due to two members, 2011 Top Prospect Tournament winner Mike Bennett and 2013 Top Prospect Tournament winner Matt Taven. The RoHbots didn't agree with either decision then and by 2015 still hadn't warmed up to either man after years of pushes, especially not with tag team title runs that saw them emulate the Hardy Boys. Sorry thing is they are decent enough wrestlers, decent enough for Taven to get a "thank you" chant at least once, just a little too hyped for fans' tastes.
• The Decade was a fairly well received group, until BJ Whitmer's feud with Steve Corino became a Plot Tumor. Then Jimmy Jacobs and Roderick Strong left the group in protest to Whitmer brainwashing Steven's son Colby, making Whitmer the focal point of Decade, which combined with his deteriorating work rate made him the recipient of much X-Pac Heat. His feuds with Mr. Wrestling III and Adam Page did slowly get some fan investment, although the insertion of Kevin Sullivan into their feud was a point of contention.
• Kenny King got some during his return to Ring of Honor on account of his departure involving him vacating the tag team titles in exchange for a TNA tryout. During the Road to Best in the World, his partner, Rhett Titus, started to pick up a little as well, since some fans were of the opinion the All Night Express had served their purpose by losing to War Machine so they could call themselves linear champions in addition to holding the belts and it was time for ANX to step aside for better teams. Then Caprice Coleman joined them, fans being of the opinion his Face–Heel Turn would be better served with a Dalton Castle feud, reuniting with Cedric Alexander or following up on Prince Nana's offer. Finally, the three men's Cabinet introduction promo "to make wrestling great again" went on so long it took away from the main event between Jay Lethal and Jay Briscoe, a rematch a year in the making. During the promo "This is awesome!" became "This is boring!" and that became "Wrap it up!". The Cabinet were saved from this when they became Darker and Edgier as The Rebellion, a group more about action than displays or speeches. This worked well enough for King to eventually turn face against popular heel Silas Young.
• Enzo and Cass got this from the very moment they showed up in Ring Of Honor. WWE had been actively raiding the ROH roster for over a year by that point, giving those in the Honor Nation who hadn't been following the wrestlers to NXT a decidedly anti WWE attitude and even those who did follow their favorites to NXT considered Enzo and Cass in particular to be has-beens unworthy of ROH. Even fans who did not keep up with WWE happenings and had little clue who they were hated them immediately on principal for distracting them from the always anticipated Hiroshi Tanahashi, and that sentiment seemed to extend beyond the fanbase and into New Japan Pro-Wrestling itself, who were not informed of Enzo and Cass's arrival. This perceived attempt to get two "unknowns" over at one of their biggest star's expense without telling them beforehand, much less getting approval, had NJPW threatening to cut out ROH as the middleman and run its own USA shows independently^note This eventually did happen, and later led to ROH's collapse and sale to AEW's Tony Khan in 2022, which in turn to that had fans who wanted New Japan Wrestlers to keep showing up on ROH cards even angrier with Enzo and Cass.

All Elite Wrestling

• Cody Rhodes is probably the first example of this in AEW, whose fanbase has otherwise proved incredibly forgiving and patient. When the company began, Cody was hailed as the man who broke free of WWE and made AEW possible, and was basically the company's top Face for its first year. He had well received feuds with Chris Jericho and MJF and his reign as inaugural TNT Champion was also pretty popular as he gave young up-and-comers and outside indie talent a shot at TV exposure, eventually losing the belt to incoming fan favorite Brodie Lee. However, after that the wheels began to gradually fall off- he got an absolutely ridiculous neck tattoo that got him dunked on even by heels, making him a laughing stock. After losing to Lee he went on hiatus with an "injury" so he could film a gameshow, then returned and quickly won his title back, and although he dropped it to Ensemble Dark Horse Darby Allin a month later, a lot of fans were confused. From there he consciously distanced himself from the rest of The Elite and got a reputation (rightly or wrongly) as someone who comes in, works a brief program with whoever's hot at that moment and then disappears again to work on outside projects before coming back after weeks off TV to beat the guy he was feuding with before moving on to repeat this sequence with someone else—fans began to notice that this sequence never elevated the wrestlers he was feuding with. Fans also started to reject his in-ring work as generally inferior to much of the rest of the roster, and overbooked to hide his limitations. Meanwhile, he also keeps trying to get an acting or reality TV career off the ground, giving the impression that he's only interested in wrestling as a springboard for other things, further alienating the fans. Up until his return to WWE in early 2022, he was booed relentlessly, most notably in his feud with Malakai Black, despite ostensibly being the Face.
• As much X-Pac Heat as Cody gathers, there are still some who respect his work. The same can't be said about his wife Brandi, who almost no AEW fan will defend. Her in-ring career started off poorly enough as the manager of the Nightmare Collective, a stable so bad AEW had to disband it (and this is a company that has put the Dark Order on TV for 3 years and counting, mind you), but when she became her husband's valet/manager, fan opinion soured on her, as she drew unfavorable comparisons by fans to Poochie as someone who constantly involves herself into her husband's matches and feuds regardless of how little she adds. Meanwhile, her promos failed to impress, as she came across as a grating, bitchy wannabe Stephanie McMahon despite ostensibly being a face manager, and the few times she stepped in the ring, she displayed a complete lack of ability to wrestle. Just like her husband, she's been accused of only using wrestling as a stepping stone for other projects such as her reality show—and fan opinion of her only got worse when it was revealed on said show that she was planned to win the AEW Women's Championship instead of other fan favorites before she got pregnant and had to take maternity leave. Unfortunately, after her return, she was pushed right back into being prominent in her husband's angles. Her X-Pac Heat ended up being so great that when she cut a promo on Dan Lambert, the face of one of AEW's most hated angles, the crowd cheered Lambert. Likely for the best that Brandi has been completely absent from Cody’s return to WWE in 2022.
• In perhaps a cruel twist of fate, Rhodes' opponent in his final AEW match, Sammy Guevara has since become a major recipient of X-Pac Heat after Rhodes departed for WWE. When AEW started, Guevara had initially been a member as part of the heel stable The Inner Circle, alongside Chris Jericho, and was effective enough in receiving the 'good' kind of heat from the fans. Over time, Guevara would eventually turn face, and during his pursuit of the TNT Championship, initially received great reactions from the fans, thanks to his outstanding, "no-fear" ring work. However, not long after defeating Rhodes in a highly praised ladder match to regain the title, fans began to sour HARD on Guevara, thanks to a confusing and dull feud with Scorpio Sky that saw his real-life relationship with Tay Conti (later known as Tay Melo) be acknowledged on-screen. The problem is that while fans acknowledge that he's a tremendous athlete, capable of putting on some of the best matches in AEW, Sammy did not come off as a likable face in the slightest during the storyline, acting like a petulant jerk to his opponents and constantly making out with Tay. Combined with hot-potato'ing the TNT Championship with Sky, and even running an angle where it was heavily implied that Tay and Sammy made love while wearing the championship, it's no wonder that Dan Lambert is once again being cheered over the two. The heat had gotten so bad that AEW had to edit the crowd reaction for an episode of Rampage, where both Sammy and Tay were apparently getting booed out of the building. By the end of April, AEW made the decision to turn Sammy back into a heel and play into these dislikable elements. But shortly after, Sammy was once again placed into a stable with Jericho, showcasing just how far he’d fallen as a viable entity on his own (to say nothing about Tay, who now mainly exists to be a shallow heel manager to Sammy, despite being a competent in-ring talent in her own right).^note Sammy and Tay got married in August 2022 (which is why she changed her name; "Conti" is he ex-husband's last name, "Melo" is her mother's surname) and in May of 2023 announced they were expecting a child, so Tay's in-ring career is on hold until some point in 2024 at the earliest.

Other Promotions

• Had the American Wrestling Association's memory not been broken to pieces and swept under a rug by the WWF^note Though old episodes of the AWA television show are shown on ESPN Classic, this might be known as Greg Gagne heat. Being the son of promoter Verne, he already had a lot to overcome in the eyes of the fans but managed to win them over until 1987, when Verne transparently created the AWA International Television Title for Greg to hold. Ronnie Garvin, who that same year was a babyface so ill-received he was booed against Ric Flair, was cheered when working heel against Greg because he managed to, ever so briefly, take the belt from him.
• The Dudley Boys most popular members are Big Dick, Little Spike, Devon, Bubba Ray, with Big Dick not being as well known to people who only watched WWE/TNA (or HUSTLE/New Japan), but when The Dudley Boys were first baby faces in ECW, Bubba Ray wasn't liked at all. Paul Heyman tried to hide the fact the crowds were deriding Bubba Ray through astroturfing, but once the fans held out a bedsheet with "BUBBA MUST DIE" written across^note Wrestling podcaster Brian Last, best known as the co-host of two podcasts with Jim Cornette (The Jim Cornette Experience and Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru), claims to be the one who made the sign (with help from ECW wrestler Danny Doring) and one of the people holding it, too wide for the camera to completely hide, it was time for a Face–Heel Turn. That did save Bubba Ray in the eyes of the fans, however, and later lead to him become one of the four most popular.
• Rush nicely demonstrates how "técnico" and "babyface" don't always mesh. CMLL started pushing him as an ultra badass after he won one of their annual body building contests, causing fans to believe he was being pushed more for his look than his talent. He kept the técnico designation even as he was getting booed more than most rudos. After teaming with the fast falling star of La Sombra, they became the most hated men in CMLL, and were often booked in the manner of heels. That said, CMLL booking him as a rudo in all but name eventually did start getting him and his Los Ingobernables good heat, in a sense.
• After Sara Del Rey turned heel, SHIMMER brought in "Sweet and Sour" Larry Sweeney as her manager. Fans reacted so badly to the idea of a man being involved in the action as anything other than a referee that he was dropped after one appearance.
• Athena abandoning the role of a valet to become a professional wrestler was supposed to be a baby face move, excepting the promotions like Booker T's PWA where she was the valet of baby faces to begin with. But Athena was more cocky than fans thought a rookie should be. She also gained muscle mass to the point people found it jarring, and was trained in a style of slams and kicks fans found boring, which all lead to her getting booed. So she embraced being a heel and actively antagonized fans, but also found the "power" style awkward for someone so short, and decided to slim down and lean on her gymnastics background instead. This lead to fans cheering for her exciting offense and being happy when they got her to yell at them. So then she got put against less popular heels and finally became a baby face. Basically she wasn't ready for the face role and had to learn how to make people like her.
• While nobody in the industry really ever used the term "go away heat" up to that point, "Go Away!" is exactly what the fans of New Japan Pro-Wrestling have chanted at Taichi Ishikari. He has gone away, getting over well enough in CMLL and Pro Wrestling NOAH, but he always comes back to New Japan, where he is best known as the most unpopular member of an unpopular stable. Suzuki-gun as a whole got a little of this ever after they ousted Satoshi Kojima, and a lot of it after the formation of Los Ingobernables de Japon made fans see Suzuki-gun as outdated, with the exceptions of Minoru Suzuki himself and Zack Sabre Jr.. They get good heat in NJPW... when the rest of the group are not around. Eventually, Suzuki himself disbanded the stable in 2022, with Taichi and three others forming the stable now known as Just 5 Guys and Zack Sabre Jr. joining TMDK.
• When the Chicago Cubs overcame a 3-1 deficit and ended the longest championship drought in the history of North American professional sports by defeating the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) in the 2016 World Series, fans who attended Absolute Intense Wrestling shows, which are almost entirely in Ohio, became enraged at the sight of anything related to Chicago for about a year, which included the usually popular Colt Cabana.
• When Jake Strong signed with Lucha Underground, he was fairly well received at first. However, after losing his debut match, he started a massive win streak where he'd always snap his opponents' ankles with his ankle lock. As Strong continued to win matches and put more popular wrestlers on the shelf, his popularity continued to decline and his win streak became known by the fans as his "cutting a swathe of apathy." At the end of Season 4, where he won the Lucha Underground Championship, the fans chanted "bullshit".
• Sexy Star may have one of the best reasons of anyone on this page for having X-Pac Heat with the fans, due to the Rosemary Incident. To wit, after applying a worked armbar to Rosemary, she then cranked it for real, spraining Rosemary's elbow and putting her out of action for 3 months. The fandom and her fellow wrestlers alike were outraged, and Sexy Star was promptly blackballed from Lucha Underground, Wrestle Circus, and every major wrestling promotion in the world. Even years later she can't find pro wrestling work outside Mexican indy feds.

Pay Per Views

• A particularly significant example came during the Mabel-Savio Vega tournament final at WWF King of the Ring 1995, which was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the heartland of ECW. This at a time when that promotion was at its hottest. The crowd was decidedly displeased with the tournament, which saw then-WWF World Tag Team Champion Yokozuna, that year's Royal Rumble winner Shawn Michaels, and The Undertaker all get eliminated. By the time Mabel and Savio Vega faced off in the finals, Philadelphia finally started chanting "ECW! ECW! ECW!" in protest and Mabel had trash thrown at him by the crowd during his coronation. The lesson? Don't go into Philadelphia with a terrible show.^note How terrible? Over 25 years later this is still near universally considered the worst PPV that the WWF/E has ever produced. Fans seemed to know this going in because the buy rate absolutely tanked and when all was said and done this show lost money for the WWF (ticket sales were also pretty weak and the show was heavily comped), it was basically the wrestling equivalent of a Box Office Bomb
• December To Dismember 2006, the first and only pay per view exclusive to WWE's rebooted ECW brand. Said brand had its share of problems, such as the phasing out of ECW originals like Sabu and The Sandman, the stricter WWE rules, the untimely suspension of the first champion of the new ECW, Rob Van Dam, the sudden release of Kurt Angle due to substance abuse, and everything that happened with the late Chris Benoit. Not to mention that it quickly became a C-show to Raw and SmackDown. But December to Dismember, held in Augusta, Georgia, was rock bottom for the roster. The undercard had a skeleton crew of perennial midcarders and no-names like Sylvester Terkay^note a legit fighter who had been big in Pro Wrestling ZERO1 when it was big and pushed hard in OVW but WWE made sure he'd never get over again by repackaging him as a white Umaga on their main roster, Kevin Thorn and Mike Knox, plus a pre-commentary Matt Striker going against one of the few ECW originals on the show, Balls Mahoney. Matt and Jeff Hardy versus MNM was inexplicably added despite neither team being on this roster. And then Sabu was taken out backstage and replaced in the main event with Hardcore Holly,^note Some explanation. Rumor has it that WWE viewed Sabu as being "useless" and Vince McMahon himself wanted Hardcore Holly to replace Sabu in the match for Lashley to have more villains to overcome. and the fans saw right through it. Thus, Holly joined CM Punk, Van Dam, Bobby Lashley, Big Show and Test in the Extreme Elimination Chamber main event. Punk had quickly gotten a huge fandom in WWE, so of course he was first eliminated, to a huge negative response. By the end, amidst "BULLSHIT" and "BORING" chants, it was Lashley, an obvious Creator's Pet at the time, going over The Big Show to win the ECW title. By then, the Augusta crowd had long turned on the show, sometimes literally. The result was what fans called "the death of ECW," and the aftermath saw Paul Heyman leaving the company, a fraction of the usual pay-per-view buy rate^note This show holds the dubious honor of having the lowest WWE PPV buy rate ever prior to the introduction of the WWE Network (and the only one to get less than 100,000 PPV buys), which made PPV obsolete for anyone with a broadband internet connection, WWE ending single-brand pay-per-views for eleven years, and the brand slowly dying.
• The 2014 Royal Rumble and the "Road to WrestleMania" were crapped on repeatedly when part timer Batista came back and won the Rumble, being set to feud with Randy Orton, who had not been truly been over as either a heel or face for years. At the same time this was going on, Daniel Bryan was white hot with the crowd via the "Yes Movement" (which led to lifelong babyface Rey Mysterio Jr. getting booed out of the building when he entered at #30 just because he wasn't Daniel Bryan). CM Punk quitting the company eventually led to a rewrite that saw Bryan enter a match against Triple H to gain entry into the WrestleMania main event, which he won.
  • The Royal Rumble reaction was particularly jarring for the company as it took place in Pittsburgh, which is a city that has a historical reputation for quiet/passive crowds. The intensity of the anger was more akin to something you'd see in cross state Philly^note This reaction could have been (mostly) avoided if not for two things. The first problem was Batista's return getting leaked, which forced WWE to announce it themselves a week beforehand. Had it actually been a surprise it probably would have been better received. The second problem was Bryan was actually out with an injury but in the "He'll be back any day now" stage of recovery. If they would have just said he'd be back a couple weeks after the Rumble and wouldn't be in the match (he actually returned the very next night) fans wouldn't have felt like they were victims of a bait-and-switch when he wasn't even in the match.
• The 2015 Royal Rumble match was another absolute travesty that was completely panned by the audience in - where else? - Philadelphia. After massive pops for Daniel Bryan, Dean Ambrose, and Dolph Ziggler, the quick eliminations of those three inevitably led to Roman Reigns, who had rapidly been losing fan support after some less-than-stellar ring work coming back from injury on top of having some of the worst promos of 2014, winning the Rumble. Even Rusev, an anti-America heel, was cheered on by the fans when he surprisingly appeared towards the end of the Rumble, not having been eliminated after all. Not even an appearance by The Rock could calm the crowd down. Fans were so furious that #CancelWWENetwork was the #1 trend on Twitter worldwide, and the page where customers could cancel their WWE Network subscriptions crashed due to heavy traffic. You've got to wonder how incompetent management has to be to book the Rumble like this, especially after the debacle of the Rumble the previous year, and in Philadelphia no less. The lesson? Don't go into Philadelphia with a terrible show.
• The main event of TLC 2015 between Roman Reigns and Sheamus had this because the fans didn't want them to feud (the company's terrible booking made it the most boring feud that could've happened thanks to Sheamus' massive loss of credibility — fans wanted Dean Ambrose or Kevin Owens to feud with Reigns instead). The Boston crowd, when not chanting "NXT", chanted for people not even in the arena, two of whom were (at the time) not likely to ever wrestle for the company again^note One was confirmed for a couple of years; Bryan retired in February 2016 due to constant injuries and risks he would have to take should he wrestle again, though he wound up being medically cleared to return to the ring in 2018: CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, Seth Rollins, and even John Cena. Nobody got a pop until after the match, when Reigns beat the crap out of the widely-reviled Triple H and briefly pulled out of the X-Pac Heat before he regained it quickly in 2016.
• The WrestleMania 34 main event featured Roman Reigns against WWE Champion Brock Lesnar, both men at the height of receiving massive heat from fans. Reigns for being a bland Creator's Pet who'd already main evented the previous three WrestleManias, Lesnar for being an Invincible Villain with a lack of passion, only showing up to compete every four months or so). During the match, chants of "CM Punk" started two minutes in, followed by "Delete!", "Boring!", and "This is awful!", among others. The crowd even popped for a beach ball that someone started bouncing around the arena.

Repeat Offenders

• John Cena is a case of not having any heat to begin with, becoming very popular, getting X-Pac Heat with both barrels, shaking it off in an odd way, getting it back, and losing it again.
  • When he debuted, Cena didn't really have a gimmick, except perhaps "ruthless aggression", and fans were pretty apathetic towards Cena. Then, on a Halloween episode of SmackDown, WWE decided to run with a joke impression he did as Vanilla Ice, which eventually gave Cena a rapper gimmick and turned him into the Doctor of Thuganomics, which was very over. Then came his first world championship win at WrestleMania 21 in a bad match against JBL, where a lot of people became convinced that Cena just couldn't wrestle. While still popular upon his move to Raw, his feuds with Christian,^note Who many fans were expecting to be elevated to the main event scene. Chris Jericho, and Kurt Angle, three major Fan Favorites in the IWC, where he easily went through them were the last straw, causing Cena's X-Pac Heat to really take off. It didn't help that Christian and Jericho would be gone from WWE not too long after, making it seem like he ran them off. Also not helping matters was his abandonment of the Thuganomics gimmick, which if nothing else had been a good source of legitimately funny smack talk whenever Cena cut a promo, replaced by an '80s-style babyface with a gimmick similar to Hulk Hogan of an all-American hero. Cena's matches also became rather generic, with most amounting to him getting beat up the entire time before suddenly "overcoming the odds" with his Five Moves of Doom. The X-Pac Heat died down for a while, but never completely disappeared. A 2006 interview had Cena himself saying he'd rather drop down the card and redevelop his character, but wasn't being allowed to. The X-Pac Heat rose once again after he became the top star of WWE. The way WWE booked almost every single one of his feuding opponents since then only served to fuel the sentiment even further.
  • The highlight of his X-Pac Heat was predicted to come during his ECW One Night Stand 2006 match against Rob Van Dam. Cena acknowledged and played to the negativity, acting as an effective heel if only for one month (going so far as to proclaim he'd beat Van Dam even if the ECW mutants rioted). Cena's character is still hated by many, but mostly because it is the product of poor booking. Cena himself has a large fanbase that eats up his merchandise at rates surpassed by very few other wrestlers, none of whom have had his longevity in the company.
  • In 2011, "Cena Sucks" chants started to ring out during the shows of NWA promotions that never have and probably never will book John Cena, spontaneously, without any effort to work the crowds into it, putting him on the same level as the trope namer. Even more so after Cena claimed he would never wrestle for a promotion except WWE, saying it would be an insult to the WWE Championship during his otherwise hot feud with Daniel Bryan. While some people took the line as sounding shockingly honest and felt he had the right to feel that way, others resented him for it.
  • At the go-home show of 2013's TLC pay-per-view, it had gotten so bad that the audience practically ignored the in-ring characters and commentators' efforts to sell Cena's title-unification match against Randy Orton, the slated main event of TLC 2013, and instead kept chanting for Daniel Bryan.^note Who was relegated to a mid-card match in the PPV. Only due to Cena successfully piggybacking himself onto Bryan's popularity did the crowd give any attention to that main event.
  • In 2015, Cena started being booked lower on the card, feuding with Rusev over the United States Championship (his first title he won back in 2004). It didn't bring Cena all of his fans back, but when he won the title at WrestleMania 31, he began a weekly title defense of the United States Championship, putting on impressive matches against other mid-card wrestlers such as Dean Ambrose. The fans, while still mixed, started to realize Cena can actually pull off great matches, and enjoy not seeing him in the world title spotlight anymore. This went so far that when Cena was injured toward the end of 2015, even many smarks came to legitimately miss him, as WWE's next plan of building Roman Reigns as the next top face utterly failed and caused ratings to tank. Some even theorized that Reigns' mega-push was actually one long, convoluted scheme to finally get Cena over with the hardcore fans.
  • After 2017, Cena became a strictly part-time wrestler, turning his character more into a Fourth-Wall Observer who acknowledged a few behind-the-scenes details and got meta in his promos against other wrestlers, which endeared him to the smart marks. Cena's tendency to acknowledge and make fun of the "Let's go Cena/Cena sucks" and "John Cena sucks!" chants also endear him to a great proportion of the smarkier fans who like the guy behind the character because he's talented enough to work through the bad booking, demonstrating the genuine performance abilities that are valued in pro wrestling. The fourth-wall breaking aspects of Cena's character in the PG Era and the fact he's nowhere near the world title scene anymore seemed to have finally broken Cena out of his X-Pac Heat.
• The Miz is an interesting case of getting X-Pac Heat, shaking it off, and then getting it all over again:
  • He started off as a reality star of The Real World, where it was made pretty obvious that he was a massive fan of wrestling and WWE. He got onto a season of WWE Tough Enough where the winner is given a WWE contract. He was popular on Tough Enough but didn't win. Yet the winner disappeared and The Miz was pushed as the new star. Back then, The Miz had little mic ability, even less wrestling ability, and constantly made an idiot out of himself. Crowds loathed him, the locker room (JBL in particular) hazed the shit out of him, and he was constantly put into embarrassing matches and gimmicks. However, when he teamed up with John Morrison and drastically improved his mic and in-ring skills, he earned some respect. Then he became WWE Champion, and the IWC wanted to strangle him with his newly acquired belt. Despite his improved in-ring skills, The Miz still isn't believed to be that good. Now there's a split between (a) hatred and (b) being happy to finally have a vulnerable champion after years of unstoppable supermen holding the belt. What grates some people about his championship run is that literally up until the week before he won it, he was treated as a worthless Joke Character, and even after winning it, he still hadn't lost that status completely. Some find his character and Catchphrase grating and full of Narm considering that he's supposed to be the top heel in the business, and the fact that he practically had to murder both Randy Orton and John Cena before he could be seen as a legitimate threat, and both of the two were already pretty badly beaten when he got involved. It isn't so much that some hate him, it's that they wish he would be allowed to be a credible heel, or that the belt could have been given to somebody that was.
  • When Alex Riley got (Kayfabe) fired, for about two weeks, The Miz got the jump on Cena twice and beat the ever loving crap out of him. When WWE brought Riley back, The Miz went back to being a smug little shit, much to everyone's annoyance. He's still being alternated between the two settings, and it must be admitted that aforementioned fan hatred for Michael Cole at the time probably didn't help, as Cole slobbered all over The Miz's knob at every opportunity.
  • Some of the aforementioned problems, like Cole sucking up to The Miz, have been remedied. However, an ill-advised decision by WWE to revive the Figure Four Leglock and give it to The Miz as a finisher did no favors for his (already shaky) reputation in the eyes of wrestling purists. One can only imagine the firestorm that started when people started finding out that both the face turn and finisher were originally slated for Ensemble Dark Horse Dolph Ziggler.
  • 2016, however, was a very good year for The Miz. Despite taking the Intercontinental championship off of fan favorite Zack Ryder the night after the latter's WrestleMania win, he's brought a lot of credibility back to the title with how much he clearly values it. It culminated in him going to SmackDown during the brand split, cutting a passionate Worked Shoot promo on Talking Smack (which also sparked an ongoing rivalry with General Manager Daniel Bryan) that was met with widespread acclaim from both casual fans and smarks alike, and having stellar championship matches with the likes of the aforementioned Ziggler and Dean Ambrose. By the end of the year, he cemented himself as not only one of SmackDown's top heels, but one of WWE's greatest modern heels, period.
• Brock Lesnar:
  • In the dud on the WrestleMania XX card, a match between Brock Lesnar and Bill Goldberg, Lesnar was immediately showered with boos and chants of "You Sold Out", in reference to him retiring from wrestling to play football with the Minnesota Vikings.^note Which is pretty funny when the salary for an undrafted rookie in the NFL was somewhere between 10-20% of what he was making in WWE, and ended up making 0% of what he was making in WWE because he didn't make the team. MSG didn't really think that chant through. The fact that Goldberg was about to leave wrestling as well only made things worse. This continued to an extent in Lesnar's brief return to wrestling in New Japan and IGF (where Lesnar had more bad matches), even his mixed martial arts career after he was picked up by UFC, where he humorously decided to cut a heel style promo after winning their heavyweight belt^note "I'm gonna go home and drink some Coors Light, because Budweiser isn't paying me shit!".
  • It got so much worse for him after he ended the streak on April 6, 2014. Wrestlers and fans alike have been treating him worse than ever due to his attitude of only being in the company for the money. The crowd didn't bother booing him till the next night, while wrestlers backstage treated him like a non-entity the night of, and both fans and wrestlers alike treated The Undertaker with the respect due to being a legit legend, even though Taker ended up in an ambulance shortly after getting backstage. The hate came out in spades when he came out the next night on Raw. The look on Lesnar's face made it clear that he was not used to the raw hatred he was being shown even though he was trying to play it off by acting like a heel was supposed to. Made worse by all the media coverage of the event, from the Internet to newspapers to even Jon Stewart appearing to be upset at the situation, though he seemed to be only half joking at the time on his broadcast of The Daily Show later on that same night as the Raw broadcast.
  • Things later changed for Lesnar. Despite holding the WWE Championship with a potential return to UFC rumored after WrestleMania 31, Lesnar began to lose his X-Pac Heat in part thanks to the fallout of the 2015 Royal Rumble and Roman Reigns' victory. WWE's failure during the Road to WrestleMania to get Reigns over with the crowds combined with the extraordinary mic skills of Paul Heyman has turned Lesnar's X-Pac Heat into legit face heat. Furthermore, there was much jubilation in the IWC when Lesnar revealed that he had re-signed with WWE.
  • Back again to some extent after his matches in 2016. SummerSlam '14? Awesome due to the Catharsis Factor of Cena finally getting squashed in a match. Rollins? He was playing a Dirty Coward heel anyway and 2015 had the rematches with 'Taker. 2016 was where the pattern of every Lesnar match since breaking the streak became a problem and he delivered a dull match at WrestleMania 32 against Dean Ambrose. In the summer, Brock made a one-night return to UFC and failed two drug tests while preparing, confirming what many suspected for years. WWE did nothing to punish Brock, revealing that part-time wrestlers are exempt from their drug tests, which pissed fans off big time, especially since WWE had been handing out suspensions like Halloween candy to other superstars who failed drug tests, including Roman Reigns. Then at SummerSlam 2016, he beat up the returning Randy Orton badly enough that he was left in a pool of his own blood, had a legitimate concussion, several staples in his head and missed his next PPV appearance (to the point that Chris Jericho was ready to get into a real fight over the Orton fiasco). The overprotective nature of his booking which makes an already seemingly invincible monster look even stronger, plus the repetitive nature of his squash matches, has led to a bit of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring regarding his feuds now, since it's hard to get invested when he's going to walk all over whatever Face they feed to him next. It's reached the point where the returning Goldberg^note Who despite being massively popular in his time has developed a hatedom amongst smarks due to Hype Backlash, and really has never been popular to begin with among people who weren't WCW fans in 1998 has consistently gotten cheered over him, the sole exception being in Lesnar's home state of Minnesota.^note Goldberg's own case was helped by both nostalgia and the plain emotion he let show on his face on his return to Raw and that his promo came off as heartfelt and sold the crowd on the match. And the only notable time Lesnar was cheered was at his hometown. And then Goldberg squashed Lesnar in a minute during their rematch at Survivor Series, to the enjoyment of many fans.
  • It came back with a vengeance in 2017, when he won the Universal Championship. Many despised him once again because he rarely defended the title, along with the fact that his run surpassed CM Punk's record for longest world champion reign in modern WWE history.
  • A particularly egregious example of just how bad things were for Brock was when he was in New Japan He was awarded a shot at the IWGP Heavyweight Title in just his second match for the promotion, and left the promotion months later, with the physical IWGP heavyweight belt in his possession. He was so hated for this that when the IWGP plays the champions' roll call video prior to championship matches, the normally-stoic fans boo when Brock's picture shows up, as well as his nameplate not being on the banzuke sideplates.
• Roman Reigns was a VERY notorious case throughout his face run, to the point one could even rename it Reigns Heat:
  • During his time in The Shield, Reigns was immensely popular. However, while he was in the stable, he had Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins to cover for his weaknesses on the microphone and in the ring, and Luke Harper selling his offense and making him look awesome. Once The Shield broke up, Reigns was exposed as an inexperienced and poor worker with terrible mic skills. Since the break up, WWE management has been relentless in their attempts to make Reigns the new top babyface of the entire promotion. Many fans believed that he was only being pushed because of his look and because he's a member of the Anoa'i family. As a result, many fans turned against him. WWE has tried various methods over the years to get the fans behind him. While some of them worked temporarily, in the long run, the extreme effort they're going through to force Reigns down the fans' throats has only served to turn them further against him. And unlike John Cena above, Reigns' response to fans' dislike of him could best be described as smug nastiness.
  • The first time the heat kicked up was after he was out for several months starting in late 2014, and put right back into the main event slot as though he'd never left in the first place. He won the Royal Rumble in 2015 to a terrible reaction. WWE had apparently anticipated the fans' displeasure with the Rumble finish, and sent out The Rock, his cousin, to congratulate him after the match. The Rock was booed.
  • Following that, he was moved into a feud with Sheamus, a fellow recipient of fan disinterest. This sorta got the good heat back on Reigns, but only in the sense that they preferred him to Sheamus, not actually liking him. And as if to rub it in the face of the fans that Reigns was the next big thing, he was given a stable of his own to combat Sheamus' League of Nations, called The Roman Empire, featuring The Usos and Dean Ambrose as Reigns' lackeys. When Reigns eventually won the feud with Sheamus, the negative reactions came right back.
  • The heat came back hard after he pinned Ambrose for a #1 Contender's spot for Triple H's title. The angle went down very badly: Reigns was written off of TV after a brutal beatdown by Triple H (in a sense of irony stemming from the Authority's example on this page, when Triple H, the face of one of the most hated angles in the company, beat down Reigns, the audience cheered Triple H), and Ambrose was booked in his place.
  • Then there was the failed drug test in June 2016. When he returned, he started taking more clean pinfalls. This, ironically, led to him being better received in general by the fans, who thought Reigns as an angry upper-midcarder with an unclear agenda was better than Reigns as a bland babyface main eventer. So of course it was decided that Reigns had paid enough dues and was pushed back into the main event scene. Although he didn't win the title from champion Kevin Owens, he did manage to both repeatedly make Owens look like a chump and completely overshadow him.
  • How pervasive was Reigns' X-Pac Heat? He was 2016's winner of Pro Wrestling Illustrated's "Most Hated Wrestler of the Year" award, an award traditionally reserved for heels. The only other comparable instance of this happening was when Rob Van Dam won the "Most Popular" award during his heel run in the "Invasion" angle.
  • Then comes Royal Rumble 2017. Not only was he in the championship match against Kevin Owens for the WWE Universal title, but despite losing, he was the 30th entrant in the Royal Rumble match rather than the widely speculated/requested Finn Bálor, Samoa Joe, or Kurt Angle. A collective crowd calling "Bullshit" was the response and it got worse as he eliminated The Undertaker singlehandedly. When Randy Orton (who, being a member of The Wyatt Family, was technically a heel) eliminated him to win his second Royal Rumble, it was met with widespread cheers. The sheer audacity of putting Reigns in the Rumble at all despite knowing how poorly it went the last two years leads one to suspect that WWE expected the crowd to unanimously boo Reigns and cheer the winner, regardless of who it was.
  • Reigns' X-Pac Heat became utterly nuclear once he defeated The Undertaker at WrestleMania 33. The crowd chants he received - for almost fifteen straight minutes - on the first Raw after WrestleMania ranged from "Delete!" to "Roman sucks!" to "Fuck you, Roman!" to even "Go! A-way!" Even the commentators acknowledged that Reigns was booed out of the building.
  • Reigns actually has a second page on Wikipedia dedicated to cataloguing his career trajectory thanks to the extraordinary levels of hatred he's received. The reason is that in Reigns' case WWE are fully aware that he's massively hated, but rather than attempt to correct it as they have with unpopular wrestlers in the past, they've intentionally adopted a "screw the fans" mentality, repeatedly forcing him down the throats of the unwilling and unhappy audience out of spite and attempting to restructure the narrative to portray Reigns as the most-successful wrestler in the company because he gets the biggest and most-passionate reactions, irrespective of the fact that he's getting completely the wrong ones. They're basically denying the existence of X-Pac Heat because of a stubborn refusal to be dictated to by the fans. On the bright side, despite being booked as a face, Reigns is now capable of getting any wrestler cheered.
  • In 2018, not even reuniting The Shield has been able to reverse the trend. They get cheered by the crowd...except for when Reigns is on the mic, at which point it turns to boos. The main reason for this is that reuniting the stable is a transparent attempt by WWE to get Ambrose and Rollins' "good" heat to rub off on Reigns, and the fans can see right through it.
  • The amount of heat Reigns received suddenly all hit the fans when on the October 22, 2018 episode of Raw, Reigns, who had entered to his usual affair of heat, suddenly announced that he was vacating the Universal Championship after being legitimately re-diagnosed with leukemia, and would be going on hiatus to treat it. The mostly negative reception immediately turned into an overwhelmingly positive amount of cheering in support for Reigns, even with the crowd breaking into chants of "Thank you, Roman!" and being embraced at the ramp by Ambrose and Rollins, both of whom were visibly shaken at the announcement. Reigns would not appear on WWE TV again until the February 25, 2019 episode of Raw, where he announced that he had entered into remission, which again received an overwhelmingly positive reaction, as despite the hatred fans had for the character, there was immense respect for him as a performer, and many were just happy to see him in a much better place health-wise.
  • The positive responses didn't last long after his return, though - by his first post-return pay per view match, he was already getting mixed reactions leaning towards boos. That being said, by the end of 2019, it has mostly mellowed out for him. Much like Cena, Joe Anoa'i is respected by fans as they do see strides in his workrate and mic skills, and it also helps that he isn't force fed in the main event as much as he used to be.
  • Amazingly, after fans had largely given up on the idea that Reigns would ever turn heel again, Reigns returned at the end of SummerSlam 2020 (after taking several months off due to the COVID-19 pandemic) by attacking both Bray Wyatt and Braun Strowman after their Universal Championship match. The following Friday, Reigns revealed that he had allied himself with Paul Heyman, before winning back the championship at Payback after signing the contract as the match was well underway and continuing to beat up both Wyatt and Strowman, thus solidifying himself as a heel for the first time since 2014. With the turn, Roman completely reinvigorated his character as "The Tribal Chief", and has since gone on to receive acclaim from fans and critics alike, with many feeling that Reigns is doing some of the best work of his career in terms of both promos and matches.
  • However, as of 2022, Reigns has fallen back into being hated. The issue now is that Reigns has continually beaten everyone who could conceivably be a threat to his title run, which, due to poor booking choices, has resulted in him holding both titles for three months and only making one defense in that entire time, severely devaluing both titles. In addition, fans have begun to grow bored of his gimmick. That said, it's not considered his fault this time, as he is still working at top rate and gets massive cheers when allowed to go off on the microphone. The problem is that Vince, just before his retirement, booked the world titles into a corner where it is going to be very difficult to take them off Roman by someone the fans will accept. Thankfully for Roman, this issue is mostly alleviated by the addition of Sami Zayn into The Bloodline storyline that breathed a new life into the group. While fans agreed that it would be hard to take the two world titles off from Roman, Sami's inclusion created a fascinating new dynamic for the stable that allowed Roman (and everyone else in The Bloodline) to become more developed and three-dimensional once again, with an added bonus of creating one of the most captivating storylines WWE has had in years. By the time the 2023 Royal Rumble came around, the reaction that Roman got when he mercilessly beat down Sami after Sami turned on Roman for his post-match beatdown on Kevin Owens suggests that Roman had gained the good kind of heat from the fans once more- but when Roman beat Cody Rhodes, things turned sour for him again, as Rhodes was seen as one of the few people left who was seen as a contender.
  • Making matters worse, as of 2023 Roman is still the Undisputed WWE Universal Champion^note the former WWE World and Universal Championships having been unified while he held them and a new World Heavyweight Championship inaugurated solely so WWE could have a top champion for the RAW brand again without anyone having to beat Roman for one of his belts, with a reign now exceeding 1000 days, but has transitioned to a part-time work schedule, meaning he hardly ever shows up on TV and actually wrestles even less, defending his championship even fewer times per year than even Brock Lesnar used to! As you can imagine, this has not endeared Roman to the fans, who are now having to put up with him being promoted as WWE's top attraction while not even being there.
• Eva Marie:
  • She got boos just for getting tagged into a match. She got a lot of exposure in the ring and on Total Divas, but it led to her getting her own hatedom. If they gave her a mic, she could reach Vickie Guerrero levels of heat soon. It's debatable how much of it has been intentional on WWE's part, given that one of her first onscreen appearances had her slapping Jerry Lawler for pronouncing her name wrong — and their efforts to portray her as an over-ambitious Gold Digger on Total Divas.
  • It was a conscious attempt to garner heel heat, portraying her as a selfish model type character who didn't care about wrestling or want to learn, playing into fan perception of "bad" Divas. Unfortunately, doing this was the ultimate way to garner "go away" heat. Ideally, that "go away" heat would have just been directed at the Eva Marie character, which would have made it easy to turn into straight heel heat, but unfortunately her early matches showed her as someone who hadn't even properly learned how to take moves yet, which cemented her status as someone the fans just absolutely hated. She took a break from wrestling for a while, most likely to train, and tried to reconvert that X-Pac Heat into legit heel heat, showing off a very heelish entrance on NXT in August 2014, playing up the fact that this is a character much more strongly.
  • Quite a lot of Eva's X-Pac Heat comes from the fact that unlike other Divas, she essentially debuted through Total Divas. Fans utterly loathe this for two main reasons: one, the success of Total Divas means that it's highly unlikely that any of the Divas on it will be fired or dropped down to NXT— even the ones who can't wrestle, are despised by the fans, or who are essentially useless.^note The one exception, JoJo, was dropped down to NXT because when the first season aired, she was only nineteen, too young to be on the main roster. While it could be argued that Total Divas is simply being used as a way to flesh out the characters of some of the less hyped Divas, it could also be argued that as a result, the matches on the main shows are being used to continue those story lines when there are some very talented Divas who aren't on the show who are just as, if not more deserving of those matches — in other words, being on the show means that Eva's getting preferential treatment over Divas who are adored by the fans. And two, she sucks in the ring and has pretty much no character besides the show. If she'd come through NXT, the fans would probably still hate her, but at least she would have actually had some experience. Instead, while it's true that she has improved, the fact still remains that compared to Divas like Paige (who's been wrestling since she was a teenager) and Bayley (who's had years of experience in the indies), Eva has no idea what she's doing, but she's still being hyped as someone just as good as them.
  • In the summer of 2015, Eva started training with retired wrestler Brian Kendrick in an attempt to improve her in-ring skills. She then joined the roster of NXT. The higher-ups expected the fans to get behind Eva as she was showing signs that she knew she was a poor in-ring performer and wanted to improve. Needless to say, this didn't work and the X-Pac Heat got even worse. Depending on who you ask, her in-ring skills didn't improve either. To make matters worse, it was widely expected at the time that Eva would be booked to win the NXT Women's Championship from Bayley, who had just put on two Match of the Year candidates with Sasha Banks.
  • During one match with Billie Kay, Eva forgot to kick out of a pin. The referee scrambled to declare that she got her shoulder up (she didn't) and Eva proceeded to hit her finisher for the win. Between the botched pin and the finish, the audience booed for a solid minute, not even breaking to chant against Eva. Since that botch, WWE seems to be trying to make her character into someone who doesn't actually care about wrestling and gets help from iffy ref decisions. She has cut promos from Paris saying (quite disingenuously) how much she misses wrestling, and they seem to be purposefully playing up the 'refs cheat for her' angle (in the botch match, the commentators didn't mention the obvious failure to kick out, but since then, the face announcers have been very quick to call out the refs). Now, WWE has changed her gimmick into a delusional heel, which is seen by fans as a retread of Bo Dallas' Face–Heel Turn without any of the aspects that made the Dallas turn effective.
  • The heat reached its zenith on the November 18, 2015 edition of NXT — when she came out to issue her title challenge to Bayley, the Full Sail crowd booed her so loudly that she couldn't get her promo out and Bayley, who was standing right next to her, couldn't even hear Eva even though she had a mic. Throughout the promo, Bayley looked like she felt sorry for Eva and even tried to calm the crowd down herself. At this point, she's getting more nuclear heat than Vickie Guerrero or heel Michael Cole circa-2011 ever did.
  • She decided to follow in Lita's footsteps and leave wrestling over the negative reactions. After a wellness policy violation in August 2016, she never returned to the ring, opted not to return to Total Divas in July 2017, and in August 2017 finally was released from the company. However, she was re-hired by WWE in late 2020, and attracted a great deal of controversy before she even re-appeared on TV, as the hype packages announcing her return began airing shortly after the releases of several popular women wrestlers such as Mickie James, Chelsea Green, Billie Kay and Peyton Royce, later followed by Ruby Riott, Lana and Santana Garrett. Many fans took those releases as WWE clearing out the Women's Division to make room for Eva's return and placed blame on her for the decision. Her run only lasted 3 months, with her most significant contribution being that she renamed the fairly popular Piper Niven to Doudrop, a name that has stuck with her even as she was reinvented as a heel in her own right. Safe to say that her legacy is likely to remain.
• Despite generally being well liked by casual fans and smarks alike, Rey Mysterio Jr. has fallen afoul of X-Pac Heat three times:
  • The first time was during his run with the aforementioned No Limit Soldiers (later the Filthy Animals) in WCW. The No Limit Soldiers were a rap themed stable that were supposed to be anti-heroes but really just came across as heels. The Filthy Animals eventually turned heel. It didn't help that Mysterio was terrible at playing a heel.
  • The second was in CMLL and tied into the WCW angle above. Mysterio was feuding with Psychosis in CMLL, and the original plan was to build to a mask vs. mask match with Psychosis winning Mysterio's mask. However, when CMLL got word that Mysterio had already been unmasked in WCW, they forbade Mysterio from wrestling with his mask on. This forced the feud to be rebooked to a much less meaningful stipulation, and Mysterio ended up winning the match and feud. Masks are taken very seriously in Mexico and allowing himself to be unmasked in WCW was considered a serious cultural faux pas, and the fact that Psychosis had held out against pressure to unmask in WCW made Mysterio look even worse in comparison.
  • The third was at the 2014 Royal Rumble, and wasn't Mysterio's fault per se. The fans wanted to see Daniel Bryan in the Rumble, and when Mysterio came out at #30, he ended up being the recipient of the vitriol of the pissed off fans. The sad thing is it's likely that WWE realized whoever came out at #30 was going to anger the fans, and they chose Rey for it because they thought he might be able to still get cheered.^note Fans still wax poetic about a What Could Have Been here, the basic idea being that Wade Barrett gets the #30 spot, spouting his "I'm afraid I've got some BAD NEWS!" catchphrase (possibly after playing the first few notes of Bryan's entrance music before cutting it off). This would have got absolutely nuclear heel heat from the crowd. But Vince decided to send one of his biggest merch movers to get booed out of the building instead.
• An unusual example of this came in "Not Daniel Bryan" heat, whereas anyone who got scapegoated for WWE's bad booking of Bryan (by either squashing him in a match or being essentially a Replacement Scrappy for him) unfairly got booed out of the area. Amongst those offenders include Sheamus (for "18 Seconds"), Randy Orton (for his 2013-14 title reign when he cashed in MITB on Bryan right after he beat Cena), Big Show (when he was shoved into Bryan's spot as Orton's main title challenger), Rey Mysterio Jr. (for being #30 in the 2014 Royal Rumble when it became clear Bryan would not be in the match that year), Batista (for winning that year's Rumble and being pushed in Bryan's place as the main anti-Authority babyface), and of course Roman Reigns.
• Carmella:
  • She first suffered this when she debuted in NXT. Fans weren't happy about her repeated botches in the ring, and found her bitchy heel gimmick to be grating and unfitting for Enzo and Cass, whom she debuted as a valet for. Eventually, she managed to shake this off by turning fully face and not wrestling as much, instead relying on her mic skills to get her over when she debuted on the main roster as a heel, although a far more proactive and less grating one. Ironically, what may have rescued her from the pits in the first place was getting injured by Eva Marie, an even bigger Scrappy. She even won the Women's Money in the Bank briefcase (albeit first with some interference, but she also won it again alone) for SmackDown, cutting an epic promo defending the act of James Ellsworth unhooking the case for her as a heel masterstroke which she called for, and seemed to be pegged to be a future star if she could improve in the ring…
  • That was, until she actually won the SmackDown Women's Championship, and the fans soured on her again. To many fans, the requirements of a champion to have repeated longer matches exposed her relative lack of improvement in the ring, and for all her character ability, her wrestling talent was subpar, especially in comparison to her challengers. For the most part, it died down after she turned face and formed a comedy-based alliance with R-Truth.
• Charlotte Flair is probably the biggest Creator's Pet in modern wrestling, likely even bigger than Roman Reigns, who was once considered her Spear Counterpart. While she is a great athlete who has been widely praised for her in-ring ability, her main issue stems over the fact that WWE is very obviously playing favorites with her. Having constantly been given title matches and reigns year after year, she had become a thirteen-time champion on the main roster by the fall of 2021^note The gap between her father's first and thirteenth world titles was a little over 14 years. Charlotte did it in 6. Who says titles bounce around too much these days? (nearly twice more than Trish Stratus, with seven). It doesn't help that she is highly protected by the company and is rarely pinned or submitted in any matches. If there's a chance someone defeats her for the championship, that person's reign will be short-lived as Charlotte will reclaim the title (or win one on a different brand) in the weeks shortly after. Many fans have perceived Charlotte to be legitimately stubborn and arrogant not only due to constantly defeating nearly every opponent she's encountered on the main roster (which in turn makes the rest of the women's division look weak and expendable) but also for rarely acknowledging in real-life just how overpushed she is. And whenever there'll be times when she might be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, she ended up returning to being booed again within a month or two.
  • While she'd actually been on the verge of getting it off-and-on ever since her debut on the main roster, she generally kept ahead of it through solid in-ring performances. Some fans started to turn against Charlotte when she ended Asuka's massive winning streak at WrestleMania 34 but the criticism wouldn't finally boil over until she won the SmackDown Women's Championship at SummerSlam 2018 (becoming a seven-time champion in the process). Many fans became incredibly frustrated that she was once again in the title picture after so many reigns, along with the fact that Becky Lynch (a massive Ensemble Dark Horse who had been expected to finally win back the championship after nearly two years) was once again screwed out of a title reign. When Becky turned on Charlotte after the match, she was outright cheered, while Charlotte received enormous boos. In the ensuing feud, the more arrogantly heel-ish Becky was booked to act, such as demanding that Charlotte call her queen and put the title belt around her waist, the more the crowd cheers. It seems that Charlotte's X-Pac Heat and WWE's questionable booking had, completely by accident, transformed Becky Lynch from a standard face into a "Stone Cold" Steve Austin style Anti-Hero who could do and say almost anything and still get cheered for it, while Charlotte could act like the nicest, most proper face and get booed. It almost became worse after Becky Lynch's injury prevented her from facing Ronda Rousey at Survivor Series and Charlotte was chosen over Asuka to square off with the Raw Women's Champion, seemingly undoing their months-long blood feud. Come Survivor Series, she was briefly put back in the fans' good graces with her not only putting up an excellent outing against Rousey, but absolutely decimating Rousey in the post match, with the fans actually being on her side despite all the boos they've been giving over the past few months.
  • This was short-lived, however, as the fans slowly returned to booing her in 2019, especially after Vince McMahon made her Becky Lynch's replacement for Ronda Rousey's opponent at WrestleMania. Fans were so outraged that Charlotte was once again handed another high-profile match that the YouTube video of this segment on WWE's channel was regarded as the most hated WWE video of all time. While Becky was eventually reinserted into the match, the main criticism still withstood that Charlotte was inserted into a high-profile match that nobody wanted her to be a part of. If it couldn't get any worse, Charlotte won back the SmackDown Women's Championship less than two weeks before the event on a random episode of Smackdown (in a match that wasn't even announced beforehand). The then-champion Asuka and every other woman on the SmackDown roster were pushed aside, all in order for Charlotte to shine alongside both Ronda and Becky (a decision that many female members of the roster criticized publicly). Even after WrestleMania, Charlotte continued to be in the championship spotlight while others were pushed aside into the languishing tag team division.
  • One of the most notorious incidents from her run in 2019 was the main event of Tables, Ladders & Chairs in which Charlotte and Becky challenged the Kabuki Warriors (Asuka and Kairi Sane) for the Women's Tag Team Championship. Early on, Kairi suffered a legitimate concussion, presumably from a botched suplex onto the outside barricade by Charlotte. Kairi was clearly in no condition to fight following this, something both Asuka and Becky took notice of but Charlotte did not. She would then perform a series of nasty bumps on Kairi, slapping her out of frustration at one point and then forcibly powerbombing her through a table. Arguments arose over whether or not Charlotte knew of Kairi's injury which lead to further debates over if she is being a dangerous worker. It doesn't help that in various interviews over this issue, Charlotte didn't take any responsibility for her actions and instead shifted the blame on the WWE universe for wanting more brutality. As with the case of Nia Jax the previous year, Charlotte was not punished for her actions.
  • Despite a controversial 2019, WWE did not learn its lesson. Just a month after the TLC match, Charlotte won the 2020 Women's Royal Rumble, eliminating the heavily favored Shayna Baszler (who was originally planned to be the winner before it was changed last minute). Charlotte would use her title match to defeat the fan-favorite Rhea Ripley for the NXT Women's Championship at WrestleMania, giving Charlotte yet another pointless achievement for her already long list of accolades and damaging the momentum of another young talent. For some reason after that, Charlotte began to show up in all three divisions, despite the Wild Card rule having long been lifted, completely stealing the spotlight from everyone. Charlotte eventually dropped the title to Io Shirai two months later, in a triple threat match in which Shirai pinned Ripley. A lot of fans saw this as Karma Houdini on Charlotte's part as not only did she refuse to put over anyone in NXT, she didn't even have the decency to be pinned in her last appearance for the brand.
  • 2021 saw the resurface of Charlotte's excessive title reigns. After missing WrestleMania that year, Charlotte was instantly placed in the Raw Women's Championship picture, competing for or defending the title in nearly every single PPV since then. After defeating Rhea Ripley for the title at Money in the Bank, she lost it to Nikki Cross the following day on Raw only to recapture it yet again a month later at SummerSlam (thus immediately derailing the momentum of Nikki's new superhero gimmick). Two months later, Charlotte was given yet another title reign due to being drafted to SmackDown while still the Raw Women's Champion (meaning that she had to trade titles with the then Smackdown Women's Champion Becky Lynch).
    • What was especially noteworthy during this time was the emergence of reports claiming that there was legitimate tension between Charlotte and the rest of the women's roster for supposedly the same reasons so many fans dislike her (both her ridiculously protective booking and for failing to show sportsmanship to the competitors who put her over). The most famous example of this was when she went off-script during the trade-off segment with Becky in order to not be seen as weak, where physically dropped both the Raw and Smackdown Women's titles on the mat of the ring.
  • To put into perspective just how exhausted audiences have become of Charlotte, the match between her and Ronda Rousey on night 1 of WrestleMania 38 was probably the lowest point of an otherwise excellent card, with the combination of both performers' unpopularity and the excellent Becky Lynch/Bianca Belair and Seth Rollins/Cody Rhodes matches back to back contributing to the lack of excitement from the crowd. It's probably fair to say that even Logan Paul and Wee Man got better reactions than both of them.
  • While Charlotte would ultimately be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap after ironically ending Ronda's reign as Smackdown Women's Champion at the end of 2022, it was only to some degree as many were still critical of her immediately being given yet another title reign despite being absent for several months. Like her previous reign, Charlotte rarely competed in televised or pay-per-view events until WrestleMania 39, let alone defending her title, which fans saw as WWE simply wanting to extend Charlotte's reign. Her feud with Royal Rumble winner Rhea Ripley received criticism due to how every promo between the two was simply Charlotte bragging on her achievements and the number of times she defeated Rhea for a title, as well as Rhea seeming to be more focused on the father-son Mysterio feud. Fortunately, unlike Charlotte's previous Mania, not only did Rhea defeat Charlotte, Dave Meltzer considered their match one of the best women's matches in WWE history.
• Despite her popularity in Ultimate Fighting Championship and her excellent debut match at WrestleMania 34 in 2018, Ronda Rousey gradually became one of the most divisive members of the WWE roster, primarily due to her increasingly poor promo skills and booking as an Invincible Hero that shuffled a great deal of the other women wrestlers down the card. This mainly happened following the start of her feud with Becky Lynch in the fall, who was in the midst of one of the hottest runs in all of professional wrestling at the time. The resulting feud was rather underwhelming one that was hampered by Ronda's very arrogant and hostile behavior toward Becky, despite ostensibly being the face in the storyline. While she would eventually turn heel the following spring, it wasn't enough to appeal to fans, who had long since turned on her.
  • After WrestleMania 35, Ronda wouldn't appear again until the 2022 Royal Rumble match, where she won the titular match. Fans were not happy with this, especially when Ronda chose to face Charlotte Flair for the SmackDown title, someone who herself was in the midst of an incredibly underwhelming and disliked run as champion. Things got worse when Ronda recaptured the title from fan-favorite Liv Morgan, essentially burying any good reception she had from the fans. It got so bad that when Charlotte returned after a prolonged leave of absence and defeated Ronda for the title, after Ronda's match against Raquel Rodríguez, fans cheered for Charlotte over Ronda, despite the nuclear heat most other wrestlers would get after pulling that off.
  • When Shayna Baszler betrayed Ronda by attacking her at the 2023 Money in the Bank, the crowd cheered Shayna despite this serving as a heel turn. Because of this, WWE quickly pivoted to Shayna being a hero in the resulting feud, cutting a babyface-style promo on Ronda on the subsequent episode of Raw. This promo, quite notably, focused on a lot of complaints fans have had about Ronda through the years — her rocket push despite a lack of experience, her arrogance, and the general perception that she didn't pay her dues.
• Austin Aries has been described as a malcontent and a "whiny turnip-eating doom and gloom miserable prick" by Jim Cornette, and his troublesome behavior both made him undesirable for promotions and led to waves of fans turning on him. He had been fired by pretty much every major and even many minor wrestling promotions in North America, in many cases multiple times (ROH and TNA, to name two) and often has to go abroad to find work. To boot:
  • While on TNA, at the tail end of 2019, he basically no-sold John Morrison's finisher (though he stayed down for the 3 count, at least) and then immediately popped up Flipping the Bird to TNA booker Don Callis, who was in the crowd. On live PPV.
  • During the COVID-19 Pandemic, he was selling tin foil hats to fans and taking pictures of himself unmasked. He has been spreading anti-mask conspiracy theories that promoters do not want to hire him as a result.

Meta

• This sort of heat sometimes gets attached to a giant, especially if they have bad fundamentals or psychology. Eric Bischoff theorized on his 83 Weeks podcast that the reason why giants have trouble getting over—whether it be as heels or faces—is because their sheer size makes it hard for promoters to place them in roles that allow audiences to connect to them. Having giants sell for smaller, weaker opponents doesn't make them believable babyfaces (since the heel usually performs most of the offense in a match), but they can't get any genuine heel heat since they don't have to resort to cheating in order to beat said smaller, weaker opponents. Another reason why giants tend to be magnets for X Pac Heat is because promotors often favor big men and place them into main event storylines very quickly, oftentimes when they're still green (For example, Paul Wight's very first match in WCW was a world heavyweight championship match against Hulk Hogan) and wrestling fans frown upon wrestlers who are pushed heavily without having paid their dues—but, as alluded to earlier, giants can't do much jobbing without making themselves look weak. Bischoff said this was the reason why guys like Wight (see below) tend to undergo the Heel–Face Revolving Door quite a bit^note It's also probably a big part of why huge wrestlers often end up as comedy fodder, if nothing else goofy shit happening to really large men will never not be hilarious. Wight tended to get this a lot in WWE, mainly because he has the comedic talent to make it actually funny (i.e. the crowd likes it and wants to see more) as opposed to what Vince considers funny (i.e. the crowd boos and asks on the internet why this shit is even on TV)..:
  • WWE fans have nicknamed Paul Wight (a.k.a. Big Show) "The Big Slow". In one of the rare examples of escaping X-Pac Heat, The Big Show took some time off, dropped 50 pounds and got in shape, and came back. Unfortunately for The Big Show, he fell back into this by 2015, as he never quite shook off the sour taste of the infamous 2015 Royal Rumble. For the next several months, chants of "PLEASE RETIRE" haunted him at arenas. Then he lost even more weight, got into the best shape of his life, and escaped X-Pac Heat a second time.^note He basically has retired at this point and does... something for AEW. No one is exactly sure what, but he works there now.
  • Former WWE wrestler The Great Khali used to get "You can't wrestle!" chants back when he was a plodding monster heel being pushed to beat up The Undertaker and win the World Heavyweight Title. Khali didn't get over until they pulled him down the card, overhauled him into a fun babyface character nicknamed "The Punjabi Playboy", gave him a Bollywood-musical styled theme, and started having him host the Khali Kiss-Cam segments.
• The R.S.P-W FAQ explains X-Pac heat thusly: ^Explanation Section 0.1.11 "There is also 'bad' heat, which is unintended negative heat. When either a face or a heel draws bad heat, it is generally not because of any actions done by the character, but simply because the fans can no longer tolerate the person. [...] the fans are simply tired of seeing them and boo out of frustration rather than genuine dislike of anything they say. Bad heat is considered undesirable because it can actually hurt the drawing power of the person receiving it, since it can never be resolved in the ring." Jeff Jarrett, Hulk Hogan, and Eric Bischoff, during their time in WCW, are cited as examples.
• Any time a wrestler develops a Periphery Demographic, they run the risk of turning into one of these. Promoters love wrestlers who can draw in from a periphery demographic because it gets eyes and attention on the promotion that wouldn't usually be there. They then push the wrestler in question to make sure they're always there drawing in the periphery demographic. The main demographic will in turn begin resenting the wrestler, feeling their push is undeserved and because the periphery demographic annoys them. The classic example of this is Jeff Hardy and his popularity with teenage girls.^note As noted in his entry in the Ring of Honor section. This is also another reason why Roman Reigns was hated because female fans love him for obvious reasons. Another periphery may be a country that isn't usually interested, but can be if there's a wrestler from the country. A great example of this is the aforementioned Great Khali, who the WWE was using to broaden their appeal in India. They would later do the same with Jinder Mahal in 2017.
• X-Pac Heat also factors into a growing trend of fans turning on what they see as "part-time" wrestlers, similar to Triple H, Brock Lesnar, and others, who burst onto the scene in a titanic comeback and leap into the main event scene while performing only a handful of dates each year. Fans turn on these types of appearances because they feel that even though they used to be main event stars, these part-timers haven't earned the main event status they're given back as though they never left. The fact that the several of the past WrestleManias have been headlined primarily by part-time performers has only added fuel to the fire for fans and talent in recent years.
• The wrestling fandom in general has gotten smarter to kayfabe and is more interested in what doesn't happen on shows after the collapse of the territorial system and particularly during the Monday Night Wars, which in fact were kicked off in part by X-Pac Heat. While the blame has occasionally been placed on the increased prevalence of the internet, which makes it almost impossible for casual fans and smarks to not interact, as explained in this editorial, no matter the time or place, solid wrestling skills are the best way of getting over, and attempts to cover it up usually get wrestlers booed. Furthermore, while there are some wrestlers who manage to overcome this, there are many more who don't. What makes wrong heat look more prevalent in post-territorial wrestling is partial apathy. It's often not even noticed unless directed at a face, since heels are supposed to be booed, and among corrective efforts taken, improvement to the product in ring are often the last things attempted. But just as a heel who no longer relies on shortcuts to win often has a successful face turn, sufficient ring work is almost always enough to dampen and even overcome X-Pac Heat.
• As mentioned above, in The New '10s and beyond several heel wrestlers have been booked to intentionally get X-Pac Heat. This was discussed by Jim Cornette on his Jim Cornette Experience podcast; he theorized that because of the death of kayfabe, heels can't say or do truly vile things to get heat anymore because all the blame will be put on the company instead of going to the wrestler like it should. Combined with the fact that a heel who is entertaining on the mic or good in the ring is likely to get cheered because the fans know they are playing a character, X-Pac Heat is the only way for bookers to actually get the correct reaction for a heel.
• Just about anybody in the wrestling industry who did not take COVID-19 seriously either by their actions or through social media instantly received this kind of heat. Those who violated the policies are likely punished by upper management. All pro wrestling companies, despite mass criticisms of continuing business, are very lucky to still have performances and not get shut down entirely:
  • Chris Jericho from AEW received massive heat due to the Fozzy tour that had a lack of COVID-19 procedures. His comments received backlash for discussing the "low number percentage" inconsiderately. Fans were not pleased with AEW not punishing Jericho, who still remained on TV after failure to disclose COVID-19, which would have placed AEW in jeopardy.
  • Matt Cardona (Impact) and Chelsea Green (WWE) hosting a New Year's party, where various performers from different promotions. Deonna Purrazzo (Impact) and Steve Cutler (WWE) were in attendance of the party and were tested positive for COVID-19. Because Cutler was around other wrestlers before notifying the WWE where he was been, he was cut from the WWE as punishment. However, many others in that party were left unpunished. Although WWE released many superstars post-WrestleMania, this doesn't count as a punishment as superstars were laid off and not fired.

Fictional examples

• In Ratchet: Deadlocked, Ace Hardlight is positioned by Gleeman Vox to be the star of his Dreadzone competition, but Ace's arrogant personality causes audiences to reject him en masse, vastly preferring the recently arrived Ratchet over him—even as Vox runs a relentless smear campaign against the Lombax. It's so bad that Vox complains in one scene that he literally can't even give Ace's merchandise away.
• In Wanna Be the Strongest in the World!, during Sakura's 50 match losing streak, fans have grown sick of her always giving up once she is put in the Boston Crab. She eventually manages to get rid of it once she becomes a Determinator.

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