This is Roman Reigns, WWE superstar.
For those who don’t watch WWE… shame on you! No, but seriously, if you don’t watch, Roman Reigns is a very interesting example of how a writing team can make one mistake, not realize it, and just keep going and keep going until they strike gold. The question is this: do they KNOW they struck gold?
Quick and dirty history on Roman Reigns: he’s related to the Rock. He has a pretty amazing physique, and while his offense in the ring is limited, he has a pretty decent idea of how to work inside a wrestling ring. He was being groomed for big things in the WWE’s developmental territory, OVW. Then there was NXT.
Roman debuted on the main WWE roster as part of a trio called The Shield, a heel-then-face-then-heel-then-tweener faction that consisted of Reigns, Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose. Rollins had a fairly well established career before WWE as Tyler Black, and he was the first NXT champion. Ambrose had a similarly impressive career as Jon Moxley. But Reigns was the unknown of the group, with not much in his background.
He was insanely over with the crowd as the muscle in the Shield. He and Rollins dominated the tag team scene for most of a year, and the Shield trio was regularly in the main event. They were a big deal, and Reigns was the one of the three with “the look.”
When the Shield split, due to a storyline turn by Rollins, it was meant for Reigns to be the breakout star. It was actually Rollins who became a megastar from that break-up, with Ambrose enjoying a moderate level of success sort of in spite of the changes to his character which turned him from loose cannon to Jason Sudekis the Greaser.
Roman might have gotten over, except for 3 things:
- He still, to this day, isn’t great on the microphone, but he was AWFUL at first. He actually tried to get “suffering succotash” over as a catchphrase in wrestling. So sad.
- He ran into the buzzsaw that was the fan reaction to Daniel Bryan, and he was the one booked to get the things that fans wanted Bryan to have
- WWE wouldn’t change direction on Roman, other than the one night he lost to Finn Balor in the Universal championship tournament, a moment that would have made Finn’s career had Finn not taken the bump in the title match wrong and suffered a major injury.
Since that first mistake with Reigns, WWE has tried over and over to force him down the throats of fans. They did a sustained segment with the Rock to remind fans of that connection. They tried running Roman with the Usos, his cousins who were also at the time more over than he was. They tried putting him in the ring with Brock Lesnar, then they let Seth Rollins “screw” him out of the title. Then he won the title. Then Triple H screwed him out of the title.
They tried and tried, but Roman Reigns has– since the Shield desolved– always gotten the John Cena response but with less cheers than boos. People do not like Roman. Some kids do. Some women do because, hey, I get it, he’s handsome. But most male fans (and most “smart” fans who read backstage news regardless of gender or age) do not like Roman Reigns.
At Wrestlemania, WWE did the unthinkable (but the logical): The Undertaker, who was once undefeated for 20 years of Wrestlemania before being destroyed by Brock Lesnar, lost his very last match… to Roman Reigns. This makes perfect sense for two reasons:
- Now there are 2 people who beat the Undertaker at Wrestlemania (which is arguably a bigger deal in storyline than any title): Brock Lesnar, the most legitimate wrestling threat of a generation due to having actually won the UFC title at one point, and Roman Reigns. There’s a year of storyline, and as I expected the second the Reigns win happened, Lesnar’s manager Paul Herman brought this up on Raw.
- Roman’s boos were significant. After beating and retiring the Undertaker, his heat would go NUCLEAR.
Sure enough, it did. And WWE was smart enough to let it. Roman Reigns stood in the ring for nearly 10 minutes silently as fans cycled through boos and every negative chant they could muster (from “just go away” to “fuck you, Roman”). And in this moment, Reigns got to show the thing that his personality has finally contributed to his wrestling character: he’s a smug bully.
Reigns has to be turning heel now, becoming the “bad guy” in the story. Before this, it would have been fairly cheap to just have him start acting evil and complaining and cheating and whatnot. He won’t be the usual heel. But WWE has accidentally turned Roman into a character that people love to hate who can still claim he’s a good guy, with a justification similar to Hulk Hogan’s before the Hollywood Hogan turn. Roman never did anything to make him the bad guy. He just… isn’t very good as a good guy, and WWE used him like a blunt force weapon on their fans.
My hope is that WWE sees this and uses Reigns as a monster who crushes people, a heel who allows people to dislike him but creeps toward hating them back at a slow, almost imperceptible pace. He could be the villain for a generation.
He’s never going to be a hero, though. One listen to the crowd last night and that was clear. The effort to build Roman Reigns as the Hulkster failed. It’s time to accept that sometimes an unhappy ending works, too.
And it’s time to realize that no matter how poorly the beginning of a story goes, if you keep writing and keep writing, eventually it’ll get good again.
Believe that.