Bray Wyatt walks out?

[Wideload90]

Good riddance. Massively overrated, offering bugger all to the company.

Can't ever finish a story and has to rely on gimmicks. 

[Nick James]

46 minutes ago, Daddymagic said:

From Sean Sapp:

 

Bray Wyatt is out of action with an undisclosed "physical issue," WWE sources claim to Fightful.

We haven't heard anything regarding rumors of creative issues, and one source denied it. We'll continue asking.

Hurt pride from Cool Bobby calling him out for his kid games.

[Supremo]

Brock bumping into Lashley in a corridor at Raw, still pencilled in for a couple of million dollars for three minutes work at Wrestlemania, chucking Omos about.

Smartest man in the biz.

[uklaw]

Not sure what to make of this. It always comes out in the wash, so I’m sure whoever wants to know will find out.

I’ve seen everything speculated from he actually being injured to being upset by Brock Lesnar preferring to work Omos over him, to Vince being a LOT more involved in setting the general direction and messing up his stuff. 

[The Gaffer]

Visions of him down the job center being told fuck off after showing up with a sock puppet and smoke bombs, signing his name on the form as 'Salvation 2.0' whilst  putting on crazy accents. 

[Jonny Vegas]

4 hours ago, Arch Stanton said:

Is it known that Bray has full creative control over his character and storylines now then?

I cannot imagine any scenario where if he had full creative control over the gimmick and storylines, he would think for one second that the god awful sponsored by MTN DEW PITCH BLACK match was a good idea.

Let alone against a lower mid carder, as his first match back.

[Guest]

Getting creative licence and creative control are two different things. Regardless of that has he done anything that wasn’t heavy shite since 2014?

[Daddymagic]

Original Bray Wyatt was great up to when he got supernatural powers. A modern day Waylon Mercy was a great gimmick. 
 

Fiend was good up until his Hell in a Cell with Seth. That was dross. And continued to be outside of the fun match with Cena. 
 

Ever since the QR codes stopped this return has been a bust and exposed Wyatt. 
 

 

[RedRooster]

52 minutes ago, Daddymagic said:

Original Bray Wyatt was great up to when he got supernatural powers. A modern day Waylon Mercy was a great gimmick. 
 

Fiend was good up until his Hell in a Cell with Seth. That was dross. And continued to be outside of the fun match with Cena. 
 

Ever since the QR codes stopped this return has been a bust and exposed Wyatt. 
 

 

While I agree with your first statement, I think The Fiend was exposed as an unworkable idea immediately after the introductory vignettes; which in themselves worked because they were so unexpected and different. 

His current run is a mess. I liked his return promo, but everything since then has been, at best, incoherent; and at worst, utterly tedious. If his apparent "physical issue" is long-term, I hope they take time to reassess and scrap this disastrous attempt at a narrative. 

[Loki]

It's such a pity.  I know he's not popular on here, and with good reason, but in amongst the mess of the Bray character are bits of good ideas.  I don't know where the idea came from to constantly change his gimmick  - Undertaker only had 3 variations in his run - but rather than refreshing him it's destroyed the character.

Everyone seemed to like the Waylon Mercy Wyatt, and the Family addition always worked for me.  When he came back this time I was really hoping they'd FINALLY find a role for Bo Dallas and so I was quite excited by Howdy.

I remember Astro Hollywood (RIP)'s long dissertation on the gimmick, and it was such a zeitgeist grabbing, complex homage.  At that point you would have put money on Bray becoming a long-standing main eventer.  He's charismatic, has a good promo style, he CAN work well in the ring (although it rarely fits the character any more).

Is it even salvageable?  Could he come back as the backwoods cult leader with Bo Wyatt and a couple of lackeys, and find a more permanent role on the roster?  Is he even interested in that?  It would mean ditching all the supernatural stuff.

I do wonder if Undertaker's whispered comment to him in the ring a few weeks ago was "what the hell are you doing?"

 

[Keith Houchen]

3 minutes ago, Loki said:

I remember Astro Hollywood (RIP)

He died of well bad nob ache. 

[BomberPat]

I think pretty much everyone agrees that the original Bray Wyatt run was initially great, and it went off the rails when they killed all nuance and made him a spooky bollocks evil wizard.

Bray Wyatt was genuinely scary. The Fiend isn't, because The Fiend is a cartoon character. WWE can't do nuance or subtlety, or any kind of intrigue beyond Michael Cole screaming a question at you, and all of that hurt what should have made the Bray Wyatt character work. It also doesn't help that their audience are largely shit at this too, so we've had years of fans predicting that every time a woman wears slightly darker than usual eye makeup that she's definitely going to be Sister Abigail, a character that Bray has explicitly said is long dead, and that the closest to us ever actually seeing them as a character was a picture of Bray in drag.

A weird backwoods cult leader who tells you elaborate stories of his background, and implies that he's possessed by a demon or evil spirit, is scary - either because he believes it, in which case who knows what he's capable of, or because he's a conman who's able to convince other people to believe it, in which case he's dangerous. The moment he starts doing actual magic, well, he's right, isn't he? He actually is a magical being, there's no nuance, no intrigue, everything he tells us is true. But we know it's not, because there's no such thing as demons or magic, so, again, he becomes a cartoon character. It's impossible to believe in the Bray Wyatt character any more.

Add to that, he was an objectively shit cult leader. He never had more than four followers, and they all turned on him. Over the course of his WWE run, he lost more cult followers than he ever recruited. I'm not even suggesting that they should have given him more meathead henchmen, but why not have some anonymous followers milling around in the background of his promos, or audience plants in Wyatt Family get-up to make it look like he had a real following? Rather than treating people lighting up their phones as a WWE "WHAT A MOMENT" visual, why not talk about how it shows the sway Wyatt has over the audience? 

 

There were flashes of potential greatness - him tagging with Roman Reigns and looking dead cool by just pointing to his opponent as Roman runs in for a Spear comes to mind - but they were lost among endless bullshit finishes, spooky nonsense, and rambling promos where it became clearer and clearer that he had nothing to say.

Even the Firefly Funhouse gimmick could have worked - he was the conman getting caught out and finding a new con, like Peter Popoff selling holy water on TV after his evangelist faith healing scam had been found out; the cult leader stuff didn't work, so he found a new platform to try and manipulate people from. If he had been explicitly a cult leader or con man, that would have worked. But instead, he's an evil clown monster with a big comedy hammer whose indestructible in wrestling matches, only up to the point when he wrestles someone who's not going to sell for that shit, in which case he gets squashed.

The comeback could have been a reset button for all of that shit, and it was the opposite. All content, no context. And the more creative freedom he's had, the more off the rails he's gone, into endless meaningless bollocks and smoke and mirrors.

[TheBurningRed]

23 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I think pretty much everyone agrees that the original Bray Wyatt run was initially great, and it went off the rails when they killed all nuance and made him a spooky bollocks evil wizard.

I think it started just before that when they split the Wyatts when he let Harper and Rowan “go free”. They should never have been split so soon. They had such a great aura about them. It was then after they split he started doing his spooky, magic shite. The cult leader gimmick had been lost immediately when he was on his own.

[Carbomb]

Given their propensity for recycling things, it's a little surprising they didn't just reuse the Raven's Flock playbook for the Wyatt Family. Didn't that do quite well?

[BomberPat]

7 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Given their propensity for recycling things, it's a little surprising they didn't just reuse the Raven's Flock playbook for the Wyatt Family. Didn't that do quite well?

my fantasy booking for Bray Wyatt was always the much-maligned "Raven turns out to be a rich spoiled brat" reveal. A lot of people hated it for Raven but I always thought it made perfect sense - in ECW, he was canonically the same person that had been Johnny Polo and Scotty Flamingo, so he was a rich kid, and anyone who's been in the kind of alternative scenes that Raven presented himself as being from knows that half the scuzzy grungy types with tragic backstories are actually posh pricks. 

I thought that would be the logical conclusion for Bray Wyatt's character, once the cult all turned on him or collapsed around him. Expose him as not being some backwoods hillbilly at all, that his whole given backstory is bullshit, that he was a spoiled brat who made the whole thing up. That way, the gimmick is that he was a manipulative conman, not an evil wizard. Hell, handwave all the magic and special effects away as him paying off someone in production. Go the whole hog and have someone do an "investigative film" into where he grew up, and have IRS cameo as his well-off, white-collar job dad. 

There's a question of where you go from there, sure, but you could easily have people make fun of him for it until he snaps and gets super-violent, and then he's right back to being dangerous and unpredictable again, just without the baggage of being Actually Magic.