Heel/babyface alignments are one of pro wrestling’s guiding tenets, something that has been used for decades to manipulate crowd reactions, smooth out in-ring storytelling and justify storyline beats. The heel/face dynamic is, of course, not always absolute - especially in the modern environment. Wrestlers will sometimes be shades of gray, and switch between face and heel based on the situation, the opponent, or even the crowd.
The problem with traditional wrestling storytelling is that heel and face turns often feel overly binary. A heel is a heel…until they aren’t. A face is a face…until they aren’t. This isn’t to say that alignment changes always happen overnight; they are sometimes built over long periods of time. But rather than legitimate character growth, it often feels like a character changes from heel to face with the flip of a switch. The next time we see them, they’re firmly established as the new alignment of their character. It doesn’t feel like true growth.
“Hangman” Adam Page is the wrestler who bucks that trend. Over the last nearly two years, Hangman went from face, to heel, and all the way back to face again in a way that felt truly organic. A switch wasn’t flipped overnight that moved him in either direction. It took months of the actions of others and himself to fully solidify these changes.
This culminated in the main event of AEW’s biggest North American show ever, All In, in which a 25-30k crowd witnessed Hangman fight AEW World Champion Jon Moxley in a Texas Death Match with the title at stake.
Hangman’s feud with rival Swerve Strickland, one of the most well-received storylines in company history, led to Page defeating Strickland at AEW All Out 2024 in a Lights Out Cage Match. This avenged the loss against Strickland at Full Gear 2023, where Page was hung by Swerve with a chain to end the match.
At All Out, Page knocked Strickland out with a chair shot to the head and stood at the top of the entrance ramp, looking like a man who had fully lost himself - a man fully consumed by hate and anger for Strickland. Right before the show went off the air, Hangman begun walking down the steps. Was he going to check on Strickland? Attack him? We might never know. This didn’t stop a member of the crowd from letting out a bloodcurdling scream in fear. It’s one of the most uncomfortable moments I can remember in recent wrestling history. This ended an escalation of violence in which Swerve broke into Hangman’s home to menacingly stand over Hangman’s newborn child, and Hangman burnt down Swerve’s childhood home over the period of nearly a year.
Just a few months later, Hangman wrestled his former friend Christopher Daniels in a Texas Death Match. Daniels barely got offense in and the match effectively ended his career (in kayfabe). When informed of this, Hangman finally felt remorse from something he had done.
This inspired him to take the six month journey that led him to All In. Hangman beat MJF at Revolution 2025, in a match where he was constantly looking at the crowd, seemingly in disbelief at the support he was receiving despite all he had done. Hangman made amends with Daniels and entered the Owen Hart Cup Tournament. The finals were set for Double or Nothing in the main event, where he and Will Ospreay would fight for a title shot.
An earlier version of Hangman might have tapped into the hate in his heart and used that as fuel. What happened, however, was different. While Ospreay and Hangman had some heated promos, the two largely kept it respectful. They ultimately agreed that whoever won the match would help the other against Moxley.
Hangman, of course, won the match. But there was still one man hanging over his road to the title: Swerve.
Ospreay attempted to resolve the issues between the two, but it wasn’t that easy. The two seemed entirely against the idea. But finally, with a violent match against Moxley staring him in the face, Hangman went to talk.
What happened next isn’t something you see very often in wrestling. Wrestling feuds are often dictated by violence, but the two men didn’t fight to resolve their issues. They weren’t booked to pretend like everything was okay because they’re both babyfaces now. They decided to…talk it out. Hangman walked into Swerve’s locker room and dropped a chain in front of him, calling back to the Texas Death Match the two had. Swerve and Hangman expressed regret for what happened, ending months upon months of toxicity and hatred. They aren’t, and will likely never be, actual friends. But as Swerve said to end the segment: “maybe it's time to let go of the past after all."
It wasn’t the crowd being in his corner that “turned” Hangman from heel to face. It wasn’t him simply fighting heels again. It wasn’t him making the save for someone. It happened when Hangman let Ospreay in. It happened when he tried to understand, to empathize, to move forward rather than ruminate on the past.
And at All In, when Hangman’s theme hit, it wasn’t the villainous “Black Hat” theme. It was his old theme, “Ghost Town Triumph.” And finally, cementing months of character development, Hangman entered through the face tunnel to fight Moxley.
What happened next was one of the best matches of the year in which an animalistic Moxley put Page through the paces. Moxley, in control for most of the match with his Death Riders and The Elite there to help, appeared to have Page defeated at multiple points. But Page kept getting up, and other wrestlers stepped up to have his back. Page receiving such help would have been unthinkable in the depths of his worst moments.
Finally, Swerve showed up with the chain and tossed it in the ring to Page. Hangman used it to hang Moxley, a callback to their previous Texas Death Match in 2023.
Against all the odds, in direct opposition with the man he had become in 2024, Hangman Page won the AEW World Championship. And he did so not by simply changing his alignment and being a “good guy”, but by building on years and years of character work. In a medium in which the heel and face version of a character can sometimes feel like two people, Hangman is just Hangman. Everything that has happened to him, and the things he has done - both good and bad - built him into the champion he became.
Moxley had been carrying the title in a briefcase for months, and finally, it would be revealed. Hangman struggled with the locking mechanism and unlocked the briefcase. But he didn’t open the lid right away. He looked at the crowd, saw them jumping up and down, heard their cheering. And unlike in the feud with MJF, where he felt like he didn’t deserve it, in this moment he knew he did. He tears up and nods his head in a moment that shows how real wrestling can be, before finally opening the briefcase and raising the title into the air.
Empathy and understanding appears to be at an all time low in 2025. This shining example of someone showing true forgiveness has significant value outside of our enjoyment of a professional wrestling storyline. It shows the humanity of the art, but it also makes us believe in something better. We all have a capacity to change, despite what we may have done or what has happened to us. And it’s never like flipping a switch from being one way, to being another. It takes time, focus and constant work. Somehow, a bunch of people performing a scripted fight can show us this.
In-character at the All In press conference, a visibly emotional Hangman summed it up when asked about Swerve:
“He ruined my life for so long. And I did the same to him. And tonight, he chose on his own to make my life better. And I don’t know if that’s for me, I don’t know if it’s for the company…I don’t know if it’s for himself. And I might never really figure that out. But it does feel good to be able to let go of a little bit of the past and to be excited about the future.”