YMMV / Baron Corbin

• Awesome Music: His theme song introduced in September 2017, "I Bring the Darkness (End of Days)", AKA the remix of Jim Johnston's "New Rules" with more dynamic instruments and lyrics sung by Tommy Vext. Aside from being the first non-looping lyrical full song officially made for a wrestler in WWE since Sasha Banks' "Sky's the Limit" in 2014, it's being widely praised as a case and point in how superior Johnston is to his successors, not to mention a perfect example of why critics who find CFO$ musically lazy have been asking for efforts such as this.
• Badass Decay: Ever since moving to Raw and becoming Constable, Corbin went from a somewhat Wrestling Monster on both NXT and SmackDown to unable to win a match without someone interfering on his half or changing the match stipulation the last minute.
• Base-Breaking Character: Corbin received a good treatment from the fans for some time after he squashed CJ Parker, who was seen as The Scrappy of NXT, at NXT TakeOver II. It also helps that his finisher, the End of Days, looks awesome. However, it faded with time, and he became more of a Base-Breaking Character, at one point bordering on an outright Scrappy prior to his Face–Heel Turn and facing competitive opponents which allowed him to actually demonstrate and improve his ring work.
• Catharsis Factor: Those who ate the whole "Baron Corbin is responsible for every bad thing happening in Raw" (or those who had downright grown to hate Corbin as a performer) surely felt this at TLC 2018 and the following Raw episode.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: His first several weeks on the main roster (after winning the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal) were spent in a heatless feud with Dolph Ziggler, and nobody was sure if he could make it and grab the proverbial brass ring. The 2016 draft changed many fans' opinion of him, as Corbin slowly, but surely became one of SmackDown's highlights, gifted with incredible mic skills and an interesting wrestling style, reminding people of Test, another underrated talent from a decade ago. His wisely-moderated push as a Wrestling Monster also helps.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Big Bully/Baldy Bastard", thanks to "King" Ross Tweedell and his "WTF moments".
  • His Power Trio with Bobby Lashley and Drew McIntyre has been given the nickname of "The Midcard of Evil" by the guys of WrestleTalk and "Team Baddies" by Brian Zane at Wrestling With Wregret.
  • "Darren Cornbread", after the captions at the NXT No Mercy event misspelled his name.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: For some reason no one's quite figured out yet, he gets legitimate babyface pops any time WWE goes over to France.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: All the jokes about Baron Corbin's "sad belly" ended up becoming this when he eventually started the "Sad Corbin" gimmick, which saw his dramatic transformation into a miserable, destitute wreck after he (keyfabe) lost most of his money on poor investments.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Corbin's belly is sad.^ExplanationMany fans have noticed that his nipples and navel form a sad face, ridiculing him further. He's taken to wrestling wearing tank tops, so this joke doesn't come up as often as it used to.
    • "I am beautiful no matter what they say; shirts can't hold me down."
  • Corbin vs Dean Ambrose in a Hair vs. Hair match.^ExplanationBoth Ambrose and Corbin are ridiculed for their unkempt hairstyles despite having receding hairlines, seemingly in an attempt to cover it. Corbin's is more obvious than Ambrose's, however, hence why it's used more on him. This became Hilarious in Hindsight when Corbin finally shaved it off in June 2018 and Dean returned with a buzz cut not long after that.
  • Sacha Baron Corbin.^ExplanationA pun based on the similarities between his ring name and Sacha Baron Cohen's name.
  • After throwing Rey Mysterio and Aleister Black off the roof of WWE Headquarters at Money in the Bank 2020, fans have joked that he's now wanted for murder.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Corbin's performance in the 2019 King of the Ring tournament has slowly begun to rescue him from the near-universal criticism he had been receiving since the latter half of 2018. Many were pleasantly surprised at how strong his in-ring work was compared to most of his run of Raw up to that point. However, he quickly fell back into the territory after being drafted to SmackDown, during which he immediately resorted back to the Stupid Evil tactics that made his run on Raw infamous.
  • After losing his crown to Shinsuke Nakamura, Corbin has been struck with various misfortunes that quickly warm the fans back up to him. His desperate antics and overall depressed vibe made him an Ensemble Dark Horse once again, with viewers tuning in to see what has blighted him this week.
  • His 2023 return to NXT saw Corbin go on a run of very good matches, including a critically-acclaimed bout with Carmelo Hayes, that won over many of his former detractors. His tag team with Bron Breakker as half of the Wolf Dogs, a pair of ass kicking high energy jocks with great chemistry, solidified a career revival as not only was he more popular than ever but he managed to win his first title since 2017.
• Rooting for the Empire: Corbin was rather inexplicably picked to be the opponent for the highly-anticipated debut match of Gable Steveson, a former Olympic gold medalist who was being tipped as the next Kurt Angle, at the NXT event Great American Bash 2023. Corbin had been having a rather good run since his return to NXT, which had been winning over his detractors again, but unfortunately the match with Steveson turned out to be an absolute disaster, although not for the reason you might have expected beforehand. The fans simply were not having anything to do with the former Olympian and utterly rejected him in favour of cheering for Corbin, who admitted in an interview that he tried to get them back to booing him again for a while, before eventually just throwing in the towel and rolling with it rather than continuing to fight against what the crowd clearly wanted.
• The Scrappy: Became absolutely despised during his run as Raw General Manager in the fall of 2018. Though fans would have to argue that the creative team had placed his character in an incredibly difficult position by the end of the year, many people had noted how his in-ring/promo work during this time had become much lazier and average in comparison to his run on SmackDown. It went to the point that all bad things happening at Raw began to be blamed squarely on him in-universe and on-screen. Even after being removed from power, many agree his role in a heel stable with Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley isn't working either, due to its utterly generic and dull booking.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: His NXT character of a quiet loner with wolfish mystique, while a little strange and difficult to pull off, had decent potential and could've made him stand out in the same vein as Bray Wyatt or even The Undertaker. Instead, he got called up to the main roster as an obnoxious generic heel character.
  • Subsequently, his "Sad Corbin" character made him sympathetic because of the performer's commitment to the role (such as purposely not shaving and intentionally wearing the same ketchup-stained shirt week after week) and allowing him to show a personality beyond "generic obnoxious heel" for perhaps the first time since going to the main roster. Many fans thought this could have been a good start to a character shift, even a full-on redemption arc, if WWE had stuck with it. But not only did they not stick with it, but they retooled him back into a generic obnoxious heel - except now with a sidekick and dad jokes (and not even good ones or So Bad, It's Good ones), which many people thought was even worse than his initial heel work.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: While it is pretty much universally agreed that shaving Corbin's hair off was the right call, many point out that WWE should have done it in a Hair vs. Hair match.
• WTH, Costuming Department??: His GM attire of a button-up with a vest has made everyone, even Finn Bálor, make of fun of him for looking like a server at a restaurant. The more ridiculous part is that he even wrestles in that as opposed to actual ring gear. And even after being dropped from GM, fans can't help but wonder why Corbin can't just go back to wearing his old gear.
  • Taken to even more ridiculous levels when he became King Corbin. Now he has a plastic-looking crown with a cheap, fake animal hide thing that's supposed to be his mantle.
• X-Pac Heat: Though he had been getting very bad reactions since the previous year due to his mediocre run as the Raw GM, the backlash after Kurt Angle announced Corbin would be his opponent for his final retirement match at WrestleMania 35 was insane. Most people wanted either John Cena (who had debuted in the WWE against Angle in 2002) or at least for Kurt to put over an up-and-comer whose career hasn't been tragically mismanaged like Corbin has and thus could actually benefit from being put over by retiring a legend as big as Angle. The criticism was so immediate that when Corbin came out for a match later that episode, the crowd hijacked it by chanting "You're not Cena!" at him — and this episode of RAW was taking place in Chicago! Despite expectations that WWE was planning some kind of swerve, the match went ahead exactly as planned, much to the disappointment of everyone, with the universal consensus being that Kurt deserved better and Corbin was an unworthy final opponent.
  • In 2019 and 2020 Corbin has come to be seen as the heel version of Roman Reigns (only not the actual heel Roman Reigns people actually wanted back at the height of Roman's endless failed face push). He's constantly at the top of the card, being pushed way beyond his ability and dragging down any face unlucky enough to be stuck facing him into his "midcard of evil" (since he always seems to have a couple of other directionless heels hanging around to do his bidding for no particular reason). After conclusively deflating Seth Rollins' face push in a dull feud that saw the two men teaming up with Lacey Evans and Seth's IRL girlfriend Becky Lynch respectively, he had a brief and dumb feud with Chad Gable based entirely around Gable being short, then got stuck into a terrible and overlong feud with, ironically, Roman Reigns based around Corbin mocking him for his "big dog" moniker, including a bit where Corbin and his lackeys hung Roman from the turnbuckle and poured dog food over him. Fans have noticed that nobody comes out of a feud with Corbin looking better than they did going in, but Vince continues to push him as the top heel simply because he's big.
    • To be fair, Corbin is also apparently a very safe and reliable worker with a very low chance of injuring his opponents, so it may also be that WWE is thoroughly sick of having to call off a star's big push when they suddenly get injured by a botch and see Corbin as the solution. Which, if true, is laudable enough. Unfortunately this kind of reasoning isn't going to do much help with Corbin's reception in front of the cameras.