Windham-Bray-The-Rotunda-Wyatt-Fiend - anyone miss him?

[CavemanLynn]

It'd be morbid curiosity, at this point. We've seen how bland and boring most of the "held back" NXT castoffs have been, so it could be fascinating seeing how Wyatt, someone who apparently DID have a lot of creative control and opportunities to succeed and was invariably mired in dross, would fare outside the WWE.

[Tommy!]

1 hour ago, WeeAl said:

People always bang on about his promos but they bored me to tears

A friend of mine once said he had one great promo, the problem was they heard it every Monday night.

I don't know who off here he stole that off but from what I saw on my way out of watching wrestling regular it wasn't far off.

Edited June 1, 2022 by Tommy!

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Tommy! said:

A friend of mine once said he had one great promo, the problem was they heard it every Monday night.

I don't know who off here he stole that off but from what I saw on my way out of watching wrestling regular it wasn't far off.

Him and Heyman both have said the same thing every week for years and yet are seen as great promos 

[Love-Wilcox]

LOL

[Statto]

I can never recall who it was on here that suggested it, but the only way I really want to see him back is as a "21st century Dusty" fiery southern babyface. I think he'd be genuinely good at that.

"The US Express" Windham Rotunda is a ready-made ring name.

[CL Punk]

I liked The Wyatt Family, Bray and I liked some of the Mister Rogers Firefly Fun House but The Fiend's spooky bollocks can fuck all the way off.

[neil is brill]

I’m not really fussed about him. He’s a decent talker, and The Fiend had a promising start, but ultimately, Bray Wyatt is like a fart. Sounds kinda funny, but absolutely stinks.

[air_raid]

On 6/1/2022 at 6:20 PM, Tommy! said:

A friend of mine once said he had one great promo, the problem was they heard it every Monday night.

I don't know who off here he stole that off but from what I saw on my way out of watching wrestling regular it wasn't far off.

I bet if you thought about, you know exactly that may have been.........

[IronSheik]

I quite liked the demon gimmick. From what i saw of it he managed to somehow make it feel like more than just a guy in a mask. 

[air_raid]

2 hours ago, IronSheik said:

I quite liked the demon gimmick. From what i saw of it he managed to somehow make it feel like more than just a guy in a mask. 

I felt the opposite of the Fiend. Mask, music and new paint of coat, it was still Just Bray Wyatt.

[Factotum]

Bray originally felt like something special. Loved everything around him with the cult leader and the promos. It played on the TRUE DETECTIVE stuff that was going around with the long creepy monologues.  The entrance was incredible as well with the phones. It seemed he was going to be something special. But then it all seemed to fall to shit. The promos became rambling and he became a black hole for others. The Fiend was cool for a moment but it really needed to be something that maybe came back every 6 months or so. It too became just awful.

Basically, if he got himself motivated to do an updated version of the original cult leader then I would be interested. He's clearly got a creative mind and is willing to stick his neck out, he just needs to find something that can help him on it I think.

[Pinc]

The original cult leader thing was great aesthetically but needed to actually go somewhere. Nowt complex necessarily just Bray trying to recruit followers, expand his influence in the fed. Become champ. Ministry of Darkness kind of thing with a different skin.

WWE refuse to do storylines now for some reason though so it just snapped back to being Bray and the lads having the same feud over and over again. Like a sitcom resetting at the end of every episode. It leaves the character without any discernible motivation. At which point he’s just a guy playing dress up on telly never achieving anything or doing anything with any stakes.

He’s probably the biggest casualty of the no stories era. Unless he has palpable goals you’re just left wondering why this cult leader guy is even bothering to be a wrestler?

[air_raid]

33 minutes ago, Pinc said:

He’s probably the biggest casualty of the no stories era. Unless he has palpable goals you’re just left wondering why this cult leader guy is even bothering to be a wrestler?

Thats always been the question. Why does this clown/dustbin man/tax collector have to moonlight as a wrestler?

[Chili]

They should never have made him spooky. That Undertaker Wrestlemania 31 match began a weird erosion. He didn't even have the Wyatt Family then as they weirdly split it for a bit. 

Fiend giant mallet in that AWFUL HIAC match. That did that one in for me. 

[BomberPat]

Cult leader is one which has a built-in, albeit gimmicky, explanation - "I wanted to reach the largest possible audience with my message, and the WWE Universe was the place to do it". It barely makes sense, but it makes enough to justify why he's there and not have to think about it any more.

He was a pretty shitty cult leader, considering he only ever had three people follow him. I was never interested in fantasy booking Sister Abigail, or Bo Dallas, or sticking every wrestler with a beard in the Wyatt Family, like some people were, but I always thought they should have done more to keep up the pretense of him having more followers - whether it's random people milling around in the background of vignettes in the Wyatt Family Compound, or just having some extras in the front row every now and then dressed up as his followers, show that he's managed to attract more people than just a couple of burly wrestlers. In the first feud with John Cena, the announcers tried to get over that it was sinister that people were cheering for him over Cena - Cena was everything good and right, but people were booing him because they'd been led astray by this guy. They should have kept that up for his whole run, the idea that people who cheer Bray Wyatt were themselves caught under his spell.

Instead, he became late career Raven - the guy who does wordy promos and uses spooky imagery, but there's no grand vision, no sense that any of this is going anywhere, either in terms of his booking or in terms of the character's actual motivation or goals. What does Bray Wyatt want? It's okay to keep that ambiguous if the point is that he's so unhinged that we can't possibly figure it out, it's not okay to keep it ambiguous because you're making it up as you go along.

He was pretty fucked before the Fiend stuff because, again, spookiness. Bray Wyatt in NXT and early WWE was brilliant because there was room for doubt and uncertainty; did he believe what he was saying, or was he a conman? Even if he believed it, was that just because he was a crazy person? But the moment it becomes clear that he has actual magic spooky powers, and that everything he's saying is true, he's stopped being a believable human being and become a cartoon character. Not only that, even if we're able to suspend our disbelief, this guy's telling us that he's a Messianic leader, and then using actual supernatural powers - maybe he's right? Part of what made him a good heel is that we could reasonably assume he was either dishonest or unhinged, but nope, turns out that everything he's been saying is true.

Then The Fiend came along, and represented the absolute death of subtlety or nuance. Just every Hot Topic and Rob Zombie horror cliché thrown at the wall, with no meaningful attempt to make it a coherent whole , all wrapped up with a presentation that guaranteed borderline unwatchable wrestling matches. Fucking dreadful stuff. And his big comedy hammer.

I know some people liked the Firefly Funhouse gimmick, but there was never a clear explanation as to how that character translated into a wrestling match at the end. And it never satisfactorily did, so what was the point?