The Tragic Story Of Bray Wyatt

This week's post isn't strictly autism-related, but it is about wrestling which has been my autistic special interest since I was 14, so it does still tie in... Vaguely. The internet wrestling community has been abuzz about Bray Wyatt's long awaited return, which has been built up to by a series of short episodes of Firefly Fun House. So with Bray's return imminent I thought there was no better time to look at his character direction and discuss my take on the character as a whole.

Let's go over the history of Bray Wyatt. In real life he is Windham Rotunda, brother to fellow WWE wrestler Bo Dallas, and he has also wrestled in WWE as Husky Harris during his very early days with the company. But here we're looking exclusively at the Bray Wyatt character (even though Firefly Fun House has featured some references to Husky Harris and real life scenarios).

Bray debuted in NXT back in 2012 and moved up to the main roster alongside Luke Harper and Erick Rowan as The Wyatt Family on 8th July 2013. His character (up until the Firefly Fun House) has always been that of an evil, semi-supernatural cult leader who has been lead by a higher power of sorts. This higher power was known as Sister Abigail and is the character after whom Bray's finishing move was named. Because Bray's monologues have always been very cryptic and nonsensical to a degree not much is known about Sister Abigail, except that she's a figure from his past, she appears to have been some sort of mentor to him and instrumental in establishing his cult leader status, and she's clearly somebody who he loved and cared for (although the exact nature of this affection isn't clear). She's also dead. In all of his feuds Bray would reference Sister Abigail, and in almost all of his feuds Bray would come up short in the payoff match at big pay per view events. He did win the WWE championship once at Elimination Chamber but this ultimately led to his challenger Randy Orton taking the title a couple of months later after burning the Wyatt Family compound and destroying Sister Abigail's remains in the process. Evidently, following Sister Abigail's influence didn't get him anywhere in the long run.

We fast forward now to 2018 where Bray had entered into a feud with Matt Hardy. This was a way of bringing Hardy's "Broken" gimmick to WWE for the first time - rebranded as "Woken" due to Impact! Wrestling still technically owning the gimmick. After The Ultimate Deletion match Bray was pushed into the Lake Of Reincarnation and wasn't seen again until around a month later when he returned at Wrestlemania to help Hardy win the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal. From there it was established that he was now Woken as a result of his fall into the Lake Of Reincarnation and instead of following Sister Abigail he was following Matt Hardy. They formed a team called Deleters Of Worlds and won the Raw tag titles only to lose them a few short months later to long time jobbers The B Team (Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel). Again, this choice of leader lead to a small amount of glory which was short lived, but didn't amount to much in the long term.

After losing the tag titles Hardy took some time off to recover from injury and Bray hasn't been seen on a live WWE show since, with the one-off exception of a match at Starrcade in November 2018 against Baron Corbin. Fast forwarding again we land in April 2019 at the debut of the Firefly Fun House. This ran for 9 episodes and was presented as a children's TV show hosted by a new and improved (both physically and mentally) Bray Wyatt. Each episode showed Bray's attempt at redeeming himself and in episode 4 he showed us the darkness that was still in him, which manifested itself as a new character/alter-ego called The Fiend, although Bray insisted that he has learned how to harness this darkness and control it. As each creepy episode passed it became increasing clear that Bray's control over The Fiend was weakening and The Fiend was in fact the one controlling Bray as each week Bray would ask viewers to "let me in". The final episode aired a few weeks ago where The Fiend appeared to have taken total control over Bray and disappeared from the Fun House implying that he's on his way to Raw or Smackdown. While Bray is still yet to make his return to live WWE events - as The Fiend or otherwise - the world is now glued to this story line and hoping that it will be used to turn Bray into the monster that he's been presented as in the Firefly Fun House.

Regardless of how the new character direction works out in the long term, what I've taken from Bray's story so far is that Bray Wyatt himself is a poor, unfortunate soul who I would even go as far as calling pathetic. He can't seem to catch a break in life which has lead him to misguidedly following these various figures of power, be it Sister Abigail, Woken Matt Hardy or now The Fiend. Each time he follows one of these figures it seems to be a desperate attempt to turn his life around and prove his worth by doing their bidding but so far he has failed every time. I like to think that this is the overarching story of the Bray Wyatt character and brings an element of tragedy that I haven't yet heard anybody else theorise. Of course, this is just my own theory and may or may not be something that was intended by the WWE creative team. But I think it's a concept that adds yet more interest to where Bray's character is heading and I know I'm not alone in hoping that The Fiend turns Bray's fortunes around and allows him to start being used properly by Creative, especially now that Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff are in charge of Raw and Smackdown. If my theory of tragedy is right, that means that the story will have to come full circle eventually but I don't want to get too far ahead of myself as WWE have done a fantastic job of rebuilding Bray through the Firefly Fun House by using a very slow build-up and I hope that means we're in store for a good, long, entertaining run with the new Bray Wyatt.

Only time will tell, but in the meantime all we can do is let him in.