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YMMV / Alberto Del Rio

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  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • While most would agree that his in-ring work is solid, some think his character's too bland to really get over. And trying to guess the reasoning behind that breaks the base even further. Some think it's because he just plain can't cut a promo. Others think that his gimmick has really handcuffed him and not allowed him to show his true personality. Still others reasoned at first that it's possible that after spending most of his Mexico career as a técnico, he's simply miscast as a heel — but then his first face run in WWE continued getting tepid reactions and he was reverted back to heel by the summer, so it became safe to rule that out.
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    • In the year and some change he spent with AAA and on the independents, he typically got much better reactions especially as a face than he did in his WWE career. Part of it is due to sympathy for the incident that got him fired, but many feel that the biggest factor is Alberto's own natural personality getting to shine through more caused him to resonate better. Naturally, when WWE brought him back they had Zeb Colter return with him as his mouthpiece and start talking about "uniting Mexico and America together" in a blatantly political angle, then later had him take part in a stable of international midcarders who were all frequently and irritatingly jobbed out to make Roman Reigns look strong. Literally the only night in his return in which he was nearly as over as he had been in the entire year-plus since he was let go was the first night at Hell in a Cell — when he kicked John Cena packing for a few months to take the US title.
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    • Given the above points as well as the Internet Backdraft factory that is Alberto's relationship with Paige, the difference in how he is viewed can almost be broken down to the simple question of whether one is a more-or-less WWE purist or has paid attention to other wrestling products involving him.
  • Critical Dissonance: WWE audiences tend to be apathetic towards anything Alberto does in the ring and the IWC tends to be much more critical of him, both as a performer and a person. However, whenever Alberto is involved in the independent scene like with Lucha Underground or WCPW, he's massively over with the fans and able to fire up the crowd like he's the second coming of Daniel Bryan.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: His personal ring announcer Ricardo Rodriguez. So much so that when he showed up in Alberto's stead at the 2012 Royal Rumble (doing a parody of Alberto's entrance and driving The Alleged Car), he got face-like pops and some of the fans even got a chant going for him. It doesn't hurt matters that the internet has lots of footage of Ricardo wrestling, both in developmental, as well as in the indies and... well, he's actually pretty good. It's also helped by Alberto treating Ricardo horribly in his first heel run.
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  • Ethnic Scrappy: It's widely believed that Del Rio's continued (over)exposure at the top of the card during his WWE runs stems from the company's perceived need to have a Hispanic star due to an injury-prone Rey Mysterio approaching the end of his career, as well as the mostly failed Sin Cara experiment. To make matters worse, a fair bit of this fanbase was built on the career of one Eddie Guerrero, who, of course, had much, much more charisma than Del Rio does. El Patrón is a great subversion, however, as he has the combination of that fanbase, the lucha libre fanbase he previously knew as Dos Caras Jr., and the fanbase that likes seeing WWE get called to task when perceived to be vile or incompetent — as well as, again, much more charisma than Del Rio does.
  • Funny Moment: Moreso for the crowd, but after accidentally running over Santa Claus, he gets chants of "YOU KILLED SANTA! *clap clap clapclapclap*".
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Is, unsurprisingly, extremely over in Mexico, considering his lineage and the fact that he wrestled there as Dos Caras Jr. before his time in WWE.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Like many of WWE's hyped up new gimmicks, Alberto Del Rio was popular when he first showed up on TV before he became stale after about six months...okay, popular might not be the best word but he won the award for best gimmick in the wrestling observer in 2010 and then saw a sharp decline in popularity polls afterwards.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Holding both AAA's Mega Title and WWE's US title while still being the (disputed) Heavyweight Champion of the World Wrestling League. The US title at this point in time wouldn't mean nearly as much as the other two if WWE hadn't established itself as possibly the single most isolationist pro wrestling promotion of the world since the late 1990s and likely the most controlling too.
  • Mis-blamed:
    • Given the fact that in his first run in WWE he had an intriguing character concept that was gradually stripped down to bare bones and a tired catchphrase, he gained back major momentum and a more refined personality on the independents and in Mexico after getting fired, and then his second run had him be used as a stock Foreign Wrestling Heel and a glorified jobber despite getting paid almost main event money, the company's controlled creative environment has quite a bit to do with his inability to get over with fans for more than a few weeks at a time. Downplayed as some of the flak he gets for his WWE runs still comes down to him, given several other wrestlers' ability to get and stay over despite unfavorable booking and the fact that he's had a few noticeable off nights of his own in the ring, but it can be said that he absolutely struggles to adapt to the WWE way and still resonate with audiences like he does when he's being more natural.
    • His relationship with Paige. Oh boy, his relationship with Paige. Everything about that relationship says that if they're not absolutely perfect for each other the way they think they are, they will both give each other hell. Alberto is a near-40-year-old man at the twilight of his career whose WWE experience was mutually miserable (for both himself and the company), and if both he and his wife's statements in court are to be believed, checked out of an abusive marriage to the mother of his three kids months before he returned to WWE and then proceeded to get involved with two women on the roster the following year before the divorce was even finalized (hint: it's still ongoing). The second woman being Paige, who's fifteen years his junior and has a history of flaking out on relationships, who seems to have already hit her peak as a wrestler and has had her career hampered over the past couple of years by a combination of medical issues and attitude problems backstage, and who's basically pushed the pace of the relationship to the point she proposed to him in front of a live crowd in another company's wrestling ring while she's still under WWE contract—and again, his divorce is still ongoing. She gushes about him on Instagram while he seemingly devotes all his non-business attention to her, and she enjoys hanging out with his kids as well, meaning they're clearly both in love with each other. Yet not only does the latter fact get completely ignored, every aforementioned potential red flag in the relationship is blamed as being Alberto's fault because Paige's fans, who are all caught up in the idea of her as an icon for female empowerment within the WWE universe, hold him directly responsible as the millstone around her career even though she keeps talking like she'll get back in the ring and might even steal some of his moves, and would deliberately cast him as some master manipulator so as to push aside her very agency as a grown woman who can make and deal with her own choices rather than accept that she'd be making a personal sacrifice if she does decide to abandon wrestling to be with him. July 2017 in particular seems to be playing out as a classic example of this. TMZ recorded and released audio of an argument between Alberto and Paige at an airport around July 2017, prompting the police in Orlando, Florida to launch an investigation. In an interview with after the incident, one witness said Paige blamed Alberto for being verbally and physically abusive to her, as well as ruining her career. However, it should be noted that on the tape itself, Alberto claimed Paige was abusive to him and declared his intent to press charges — and that as in any "he said, she said" cases, whether one or the other, or even both of them, are actually responsible is largely indeterminable. Regardless of all this, many pundits and fans ran with the notion that this proves Alberto hasn't been Mis-blamed at all, roundly decrying him as an abuser and expressing quasi-familial concern for Paige's well-being — and Global Force/Impact Wrestling even leapt to suspend him and preempt his just-started world title reign — before the facts even began to play out. When Paige issued a statement stating she got angry over a small issue and threw a cup of beer in his face during a heated argument, the common assumption was that she was falsely incriminating herself to defend Alberto in a classic case of DV Stockholm Syndrome, in spite of the fact that her statement contradicted nothing that was heard in the tape — another blatant denial of her agency as an adult human being to paint Alberto as her devil. They instead put more stock into Paige's family making accusations against both Alberto and one of her previous boyfriends, the former Brad Maddox, despite said accusations containing timeline inconsistencies, zero evidence, and no scenario in which the family doesn't look worse. Only a few pointed out that he might be innocent and/or that she might actually be guilty in this case; lo and behold, the ensuing police investigation has ruled him out as a suspect and in fact leaned towards charging Paige before ultimately dropping the subject, and both Paige and Alberto have stayed consistent about the heated argument and beer cup story even following their breakup due to long distance and scheduling issues after she started training to return to WWE in late 2017. Thus, of all the possible conclusions one could reach prematurely as to what's been going on, the ones in which she is a purely innocent victim who never did anything wrong except getting with a dastardly abuser are largely thrown out the window — meaning, effectively, he HAS been misblamed.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Arguably crossed it when he faced Dolph Ziggler for the World Heavyweight Championship at "Payback" in June 2013, and spent the entire match attacking the head of Ziggler, who had recently come back from a concussion.
  • Narm: The new (and really stupid) finisher he debuted after returning to WWE in 2015, the top rope stomp on to his opponent tied on the tree of woe. It's rather convoluted as it requires the opponent to hold on to the ropes so he can hit it properly, and it looks like a stupider version of Finn Bálor's Coup de Grâce finisher, as Bálor's version goes for simply doing it to an opponent lying on the mat rather than the convulted holding on the ropes.
  • Narm Charm: "I'm handsome! I'm powerful! I'm RICH! I'M EVERYTHING!!"
  • The Scrappy: The IWC doesn't like him very much. Detractors think he's an uncharismatic Creator's Pet with a derivative gimmick (granted, the second part of this is probably true to some extent). He actually was well-liked upon his debut. His two reigns with the WWE title led to his IWC favoritism dropping precipitously, particularly given that he was running up against CM Punk at the height of Punk's popularity and his own character had devolved into constantly talking about his destiny to be champion. To be fair, this is only true in so far as his WWE run(s); he's fairly popular on the independent circuit and basically a national hero in Mexico, both of which it's been said—and he would agree—that he has a lot more fun in.
  • So Okay, It's Average: This is how some fans, particularly smarks, feel about his in-ring style. In their view, there's nothing wrong with his wrestling style on a purely technical level and they'll even concede that Alberto has a move or two that looks pretty good. But in the same token, even if they do find him technically sound, his detractors still feel that Alberto's matches are very much unspectacular and put together in a way that doesn't really set the world on fire.
  • Strawman Has a Point:
    • Eventually in his 2012 feud with Sheamus. While Del Rio is a jerk, that doesn't justify Sheamus stealing his car and bringing it back in an irreparable state. Then when Del Rio does something about it (Pressing charges against Sheamus, only to reveal the arresting officers are fakes & the whole thing was a set-up to attack Sheamus), Del Rio is somehow in the wrong when he could easily have actually pressed charges. In fact, before The Reveal that the cops were fakes, Del Rio was still treated as being in the wrong!
    • Following his 2013 Face–Heel Turn, Del Rio called the fans out on their hypocrisy of booing Del Rio for focusing his attack on Dolph Ziggler's head following his recent concussion, when they cheered Ziggler as he cashed in his Money in the Bank contract on an injured Del Rio several months earlier.
  • Unexpected Character: Literally was ANYONE predicting him to return at Hell in a Cell 2015? After he left he seemed to be about one rung below CM Punk on the Ret Gone ladder — especially when you consider he was released to avoid a potential lawsuit from a guy who made a racist joke, who eventually left the company anyway.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic:
    • Look at the December 24, 2012 edition of Raw and tell us that wasn't a company-wide Christmastime hazing of Alberto's character. He did run over Santa, but that was largely an accident, made even weirder by the fact that Alberto had already done a Heel–Face Turn a little more than a week before.
    • His brief feud with Batista. Basically, his complaint with Batista was that Batista came in and stole the spotlight from him. At the time of the Royal Rumble and Batista's subsequent win, Batista had every strike in the book against him in terms of being a representation of the things that piss off a lot of people about WWE, particularly around WrestleMania season. In any case, by the time his Elimination Chamber match with Del Rio came along (and keep in mind, this is Batista's first singles match since returning), Del Rio was getting cheers despite being the nominal Heel, and the crowd was fully in favor of his attempt to break Batista's arm.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: See Mis-blamed above for the Paige situation. Any sympathy Alberto would've garnered from it was nipped in the bud by his increasingly erratic behavior over the past year over the course of the relationship. For further clarification on what kind of behavior, see Creator Breakdown on his Trivia page.

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