Tuesday, November 13, 2012

"X-Pac Heat" Is a Myth

Booing a guy doesn't mean you don't want to see him
Photo Credit: WWE.com
Whenever someone says that a guy has "X-Pac heat," that's a clear sign that that person doesn't know what he or she is talking about. Yes, that's a blunt lede, but it's true. It is the most self-involved term in wrestling fan analysis history, and it absolutely doesn't describe the thing that people say it describes. People think it means heat for someone that they don't want to appear on TV, that they want to "go away" so to speak rather than continue being a heel.

The term originated back when X-Pac had temporarily split from Degeneration X (or the group had been temporarily dissolved) and was a good guy. He didn't get cheered like most good guys of the time did, even though he was part of a really cool team with Kane at the time. The fans booed him, which caused certain people on the Internet to say that it was because they wanted him not to be on TV anymore. That made sense at the time, but then people started applying the term to actual heels, like you could fucking tell the difference between a chorus of boos a guy got for, say, kidnapping Stephanie McMahon and rape-marrying her at a drive-thru chapel and the one gotten just for being a greasy little shit.

Since then, people have tried to use the term hilariously to describe why a certain person they don't like shouldn't be on television, as if everyone booing exactly is booing it as a designated effort to tell Vince McMahon (or Dixie Carter or Eric Bischoff or Mike Quackenbush or whomever) that they don't want those people to be booked. They even go so far as to say, "Well, that's my aim, so to me, it's X-Pac heat."

First thing's first. The opposite of cheering is not booing in terms of gauging interest in a wrestler. There are two true reactions for a wrestler. One is reacting to him/her. The other is not reacting to him/her. It's just that first true reaction comes in two flavors, both of which are delicious to most wrestling promoters. Promoters and bookers don't have special gauges they use to analyze what boos are what. They hear boos and either plug along like they ain't care if the dude getting them is a heel, or they do the logical think and make the good guy who's getting boos into a bad guy. People who say they can tell the difference between the two come across as more self-absorbed than even the most self-absorbed wrestling analyst out there, Mark Madden. That's a feat, and not a good one either.

Second, it's all well and good to argue that X-Pac heat exists because that's your intent on a microscopic level, but the actions of one fan hardly if ever make a difference to most companies that have an anchor base of even a few hundred fans. You could be booing whomever because you don't wanna see them, but most other fans are booing someone either because they're annoying, they've done something dastardly or in the case of a guy like John Cena, they're lame and deserve scorn.

John Cena is the curious case of a guy who might be the exception to the rule, but the thing is that most people revel in booing him. Why else would they sell a "Cena sucks!" shirt? That's the thing about X-Pac heat that is incongruous to me. It supposes that no one wants to see the guy in the ring, but the act of booing or cheering shows that you indeed care enough to react. And again, caring about a wrestler means that he or she becomes valuable to a promoter.

The best way to get a wrestling promoter to get someone off TV is not to react to them at all. The best way to intimate to other fans that you don't like them is to say that you flat out don't like that wrestler, not to frame a dishonest argument around them not being a success because they get "X-Pac heat."