Post by HMARK Center on May 4, 2020 13:43:31 GMT -5
The reason people are hesitant to agree with you about your interpretation of Orange Cassidy is that there is a dimension to Orange Cassidy as a performer and a character, if anyone goes digging into his background they see both his matches as Orange Cassidy which run the gamut of professional wrestling as well as learning his other characters and his entire body of work. Elias as a performer doesn't have that, and we have no reason to assume there is a semi-secret career as an ant to be uncovered from his background, just a fairly bog-standard WWE performance center product.
Orange Cassidy meanwhile has proven to get over, stay over, and change his act over the course of a career in a way a guy who's career highlights only come within the misery factory of wwe can't compare to.
The other part is that sometimes as part of his act he's doing something that's incredibly difficult to do: take an activity you do for a living, that's like second nature to you, and pretend you're not actually very good at it.
Obviously there are times when OC "juices up" (heh) and starts wrestling like a whirling dervish, ala the match with PAC at the pay per view, but a lot of the other times he's acting like he's not that good because he's acting like he's not trying, only to then do something that clearly takes a lot of effort to pop the crowd at the right time, e.g. the hands-in-pockets kip up and a few other moves.
I remember an interview years and years ago when Space Jam came out; one of the plot points is that the bad guys steal the basketball talent from major NBA players, and they asked guys like Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing what it was like to act like they didn't remember how to play the sport anymore. I think Ewing joked something like "I just tried to remember how I played the first game of my rookie year", but they admitted it was really difficult to turn off all their insanely well-trained and disciplined on-court instincts for the sake of the role they were playing. It's kind of similar for Orange: the only way to look that nonchalant and make it work is to actually be really freaking good, and managing to be both is a challenge and an art in itself.