In the WWE, hate is great. Professional wrestling has a lot in common with pantomime, in that it relies heavily on the mass manipulation of an audience's emotions. One of the reasons that the WWE is so often clownishly over-the-top is that it has evoke huge emotions from a huge number of people. They want cheers and boos in colossal numbers. That raw emotion is what separates a good match from a classic, and a piece of intense physical choreography from a story. In the past this was simpler than it is today, because the business hadn't been exposed. Kayfabe was still intact and the majority of audiences, baffling as it seems today, genuinely believed that what they were seeing was real. Heels didn't have twitter accounts, so people believed that old school heels like Maurice 'Mad Dog' Vachon or Ivan Koloff were terrible people who spent all day everyday biting people or hating America, respectively. These days successful heels are so respected for doing well at their job (as people recognise it these days) that they are often cheered for it. CM Punk was one of the most committed heels of the modern era and he couldn't pay hardcore fans to boo him, even after desecrating the memory of a dead man. But occasionally, there comes a perfect storm, when people don't just hate the wrestling persona, they hate the performer behind the persona. If a promotion capitalises on this 'real-life' resentment they have the opportunity to create intense, palpable heat. It's a relatively modern phenomenon, but these are the wrestlers who have been able to weave magic out of real-life loathing.
