The old rules of kayfabe became a pawn for one of Triple H’s creative obsessions in 2025 — getting one up on the audience. Is that a good thing?
Does kayfabe still apply in modern WWE? I know — it’s the sort of cliched topic that wrestling forum types can debate for hours on end. But after the year we’ve just seen, we need to ask the question of where reality and fiction start and end in Triple H’s WWE.
Obviously, the basic laws of kayfabe will never change. Pro wrestling remains a staged product and requires the viewer to suspend their disbelief — whether that’s pretending the matches are genuinely adversarial, or going along with the wilder stuff around the edges (like the idea that the “SmackDown” tag-team champs have supernatural powers).
The more difficult question, at least under the current WWE leadership, is working out exactly where the boundaries of kayfabe end. We’ve seen some pretty notorious examples this year of the concept being stretched to its limit to cover things that would previously be considered off-limits: Namely the Seth Rollins fake injury and the whole R-Truth "fake" firing.
But while WWE has pushed the limits of what’s fair game for fakery, this administration has also become far more open than before about talking about the scripted side of things. Remember Triple H bragging after Money in the Bank about how the R-Truth firing was supposedly “all part of the show,” or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson talking openly about his WWE "character" like it’s another superhero role?
On their own, these kinds of things might seem like isolated quirks. But when you look at what we’ve seen across the past year, including on "WWE Unreal," a consistent theme is starting to emerge. The scripted nature of wrestling has become a pawn for one of Triple H’s creative obsessions, which is getting one up on the audience.
We saw that with the second half of "Unreal," which essentially became a victory lap about the whole John Cena heel turn. The gist of the argument from WWE towers was essentially, “Isn’t it brilliant that no one saw it coming?” — all of which stacks up until you remember how they failed to deliver on the expectations of that initial shock turn.
Ditto when you have big surprises like Rollins' Money In The Bank heist, which rely on the kind of twists that most of us had previously assumed were off-limits — i.e., pretending that a wrestler has suffered a real injury, to the extent that his locker room colleagues were deceived into thinking he was undergoing real surgery.
Is it really wrong-footing the audience when the twist relies on such a deviation from the usual rules? When you read an Agatha Christie murder mystery, for example, you’re usually working from the assumption that the twist relates to something within the existing narrative. You wouldn’t expect to find out that it’s actually down to aliens or vampire squids or whatever.
The other problem with these kinds of rug-pull twists is that they only really work once. When you’ve introduced the precedent that things like injuries or personnel decisions are fair game, you’ll soon have fans second-guessing every legitimate news story in search of the next twist.
We saw that with the Karrion Kross release after SummerSlam. Here were two wrestlers (Kross and Scarlett) who’d parted ways with the company they’d spent much of their adult lives working toward joining and were presumably pretty beaten up about it. But instead, we had people focusing on whether the whole thing was a work — and not without reason.
Obviously, there’s a place for guesswork in wrestling. But wouldn’t it be better to have your viewers swapping fan theories about actual storylines — like what’s really going on with Paul Heyman and Brock Lesnar, for example — rather than encouraging them to start delving into personnel decisions or mining the dirt sheets for backstage gossip?
What makes it more frustrating is the pride that WWE seemingly takes in its new creative strategy, going as far as to talk openly about the decisions after they’re made — something that overturns decades of pro-wrestling wisdom. Look at the recent Saturday Night's Main Event post-show, for example, where you had Triple H openly talking about why he had John Cena lose as if he’s a showrunner explaining a season finale.
TKO board member The Rock takes a similar approach. Remember when he appeared on "The Pat McAfee Show" less than 48 hours after WrestleMania 41 to give us a postmortem of the main event? Not only was he talking openly about wrestling as a scripted product, he was telling us exactly how they script it. (Though if you criticize it, he will tell you to “enjoy the show.”)
Where does it all leave kayfabe? After all the twists and turns we saw in 2025, it surely has to be in a very different position than a year ago. Who knows — maybe this will all prove to be an improvement in the long run. Though what we’ve seen so far hasn’t given much cause for optimism.
Category: General Sports
