Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Bray Wyatt

Go To

  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Bray Wyatt an actual malevolent entity who possessed Husky Harris' body, or was he just Husky Harris, who, after being punted by Randy Orton, went mental and started seeing things?
  • And You Thought It Would Fail:
    • Many detractors were puzzled at the whole idea of Bray's new gimmick being a friendly kid's show host until it was later revealed that it was a platform for Bray's new dark side called "The Fiend". Nowadays, it's nearly impossible to find people who dislike the gimmick.
    • Likewise his "Firefly Funhouse" match at WrestleMania 36 had people wondering how the hell that would work. Many people were amazed at it was a cinematic that made a lot of references to John Cena's life all while Wyatt psychologically broke the Cenation leader.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Badass Decay:
    • Suffering this after several underwhelming ends to feuds with John Cena and Chris Jericho. While Bray is still considered one of the better in-ring talkers, his promos have started to lose credibility due to him having little impact on his opponents (particularly John Cena) and having no clear goal or focus. It's gotten to the point where WWE attempted a retool on the entire Wyatt family, having Harper and Rowan "break free," and Wyatt to enter into singles competition and putting him into a feud with Dean Ambrose.
    • Seemed to be getting a bit of his mojo back, looking very dangerous in his feud with Roman Reigns and reconstituting the Family along the way... but then started trying to mess with The Undertaker and Kane. At the same time. Being the shortest one of his stable doesn't help when he is going against the Brothers of Destruction. Harper can take a concentrated beating from Kane and Undertaker. Bray? Not so much.
    • Elimination Chamber 2017 may have finally cured the decay with him winning the WWE Championship in the titular match, concluding by pinning both John Cena and AJ Styles cleanly, then following that up two nights later by Arc Welding his creative difficulties over the years into Sister Abigail's prophecy to his character and then beating both Cena and Styles again in a triple threat rematch by pinning Cena — again clean, and this time after being attacked by Luke Harper before the match!
    • Then, typically, undone again when his feud with Randy Orton, which had been thought to be resolved, started up again when Orton turned on him and beat him at WrestleMania 33, ending his championship reign after only a month and making it jarringly obvious that the whole point of the feud and Bray's title win was just to put Orton over again for his 13th World Championship on the Grandest Stage Of Them All. Oh, and this means Bray loses at WrestleMania yet again!note  And considering he'd supposedly absorbed the power of Sister Abigail (after Randy had burned down the Wyatt compound) to become more powerful than ever, the fact that he then lost means the Bray Wyatt character has pretty much no credibility left now. Even worse, it made Bray Wyatt,who was previously a great example of a Magnificent Bastard, look like a gullible fool. "The guy who betrays everyone betrayed me! How could this happen?!" Bray is one of the tragic few cases of someone who's come out of a run with the World Championship worse off than he was before he won it!
    • His late 2017/early 2018 feud with Woken Matt Hardy largely involved Hardy upstaging Wyatt in the war of mind games, and concluded with Wyatt being defeated in an "Ultimate Deletion" match and dumped into the Lake of Reincarnation at the Hardy Compound. Given the lake's name and previous feats, fans who think the Bray Wyatt charaxcter has been irretrievably damaged by the years worth of Badass Decay have speculated that this will be used to repackage Windham Rotunda in a new gimmick, or at least to "reboot" Bray Wyatt after all his defeats are given time to be forgotten. He came back at WrestleMania as a face to aid Woken Matt Hardy in winning the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal, the premise being that the Lake somehow freed him of Sister Abigail's influence, with Bray becoming Hardy's tag team partner in the process and later winning the Raw Tag Team Championship.
    • His 2019 repackaging initially appeared to successfully reverse this trend, with Bray's debut match as the Fiend eliciting massive pops from the audience and widespread acclaim on social media, although with the caveat of leaving his fans even more desperate for WWE to not screw up his character again … And they promptly did screw up his character again, first with the Hell in a Cell 2019 debacle and then the loss to Goldberg, starting what could be seen as the path towards the end of Bray's WWE career with his absolute burial at the hands of the same man who'd derailed his last run, Randy Orton. After Orton defeated The Fiend at TLC 2020 in a Firefly Inferno match, burning him to a crisp, he feuded with The Fiend's Perky Female Minion Alexa Bliss until The Fiend returned from the dead at Fastlane, helping Alexa win an intergender match against Orton, a farce where Orton was unable to lay a hand on Alexa as she used "magic" to make him vomit black goo and cause lighting rigs to fall from the ceiling on him, and Orton and The Fiend were scheduled for a rematch at WrestleMania 37 in a... normal, no-stipulation singles wrestling match. Five minutes into the match, Alexa turned on The Fiend by distracting him, setting him up for Orton to beat with a single RKO (a move The Fiend had completely no-sold the last time they'd fought), before revealing on the follow-up episode of RAW that she's turned on The Fiend because... she was more evil than him and didn't need him any more (and that she had a new "friend", a rag doll named Lilly). Orton went on his merry way victorious, completely unbothered by the entire affair, Alexa began antagonizing the RAW women's division with magic shenanigans, and Bray returned to the Firefly Funhouse for one last episode to announce he was looking forward to "a fresh start" before completely disappearing from WWE screens altogether, with it initially emerging that he was dealing with unspecified health issues, and needed time off.note  However, it later turned out that creative had nothing for him, and he was released at the end of July 2021 (after reports that he was planning to return that August). The WrestleMania loss stung more, thanks in part to reports that Bray had previously been set to win the feud against the man who had literally tried to kill him before plans were torn up and changed to a pointless Orton victory at the last second. It also emerged that WWE had never had any endgame in mind for the Bray/Orton feud and had basically been winging it the whole time. When even Vince Russo is calling you out for inexcusably mismanaging your talent (and you can't find any real grounds to disagree with him), you know you've screwed up.
  • Broken Base:
    • It got broken just several hours after WrestleMania XXX, where John Cena won his match with Bray Wyatt (Wyatt's first WrestleMania). Some people claim that Wyatt was buried by losing to Cena; other people are saying that the Cena victory was the start of an eventually Wyatt-dominated feud. Still, others are saying Wyatt was elevated by the match itself due to the amazing display of storytelling involved with credit for this varying from half-Wyatt/half-Cena to being all down to Wyatt himself.
    • The base got broken in a whole new way after the debut of the Fiend gimmick, between those who adore the Fiend for it's depth, attention to detail, creativity, performance and feel that Bray Wyatt is perfectly capable of a decent match when he's allowed to do his own thing and not be bogged down by terrible creative decisions like the 2019 Hell in a Cell match, and those who see the Fiend as an overrated, overly goofy and pretentious gimmick tied to wrestler who they see as incapable of having a good match (unless carried by a Daniel Bryan). Perhaps as a symbol of this, The Wrestling Observer Newsletter named The Fiend the Best Gimmick of 2019, only to name it the Worst Gimmick one year later in 2020.
  • Creepy Awesome:
    • The only other Creepy Awesome trio in the WWE that could match him and the family would be The Brood.
    • The Fiend is a sinister Monster Clown with glowing gold eyes and a metal remix of "Broken Out in Love" who absolutely mauled Finn Balor in his debut match with the audience on his side. His trademark lantern was replaced by a model of Bray's head.
  • Designated Hero: The Fiend was this when he was treated as a face, despite having essentially brainwashed Alexa Bliss into being his follower and generally behaving like a horror movie villain. Sure, he was mostly going up against Randy Orton, who's a sadistic psychopath in his own right, but it came off as an Evil vs. Evil situation at best.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Much like the character who inspired his gimmick, Wyatt became universally beloved by fans as soon as he unveiled the Fiend and practically became a WWE icon overnight, which led to him becoming lopsidedly favored by audiences even during matches against unambiguous heroes. This role-defying popularity is so strong, in fact, that Wyatt was almost singlehandedly responsible for the death of Seth Rollins' audience approval following the latter's referee-stoppage victory against him at Hell in a Cell 2019, remaining popular himself after the universally-hated match while Seth was left with X-Pac Heat of the kind not seen since Roman Reigns.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Wyatt and his gimmick were likely not meant to be anything significant, but his captivating promos and unsettling character caught the attention of older male fans in a manner not unlike The Shield, resulting in a surge of popularity and a continued push. He not only was called up to the main roster much earlier than most expected, but also got cheered while feuding with DANIEL BRYAN. And upon his return in 2019 he became one again, with his segments getting millions of views; more than any other in RAW during the time they came out. Heck, he's even cheered like a Face when he took out Rollins for the Universal Title at Crown Jewel.
  • Fan Nickname:
  • Fountain of Memes: Just like BROKEN Matt Hardy, the Firefly Fun House made Bray a meme machine.
  • Growing the Beard: So to speak.... Wyatt definitely came a long way from being "that fat dude from the Nexus."
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Mick Foley was once quoted several years ago as calling Bray a darker, meaner, more athletic version of himself by way of a compliment. In 2019 Bray would return after a long absence, and down Foley with a more brutal version of Foley's own Mandible Claw. The Fiend proceeded to employ it as a finisher, but much, much more brutally than perhaps even early-era Mankind ever did. Seth Rollins even spit up blood once after having The Fiend's version put on him. Yikes.
    • At the height of The Fiend's first Universal Championship run, wrestling news site The Sportster ran an article listing 10 potential dream matches for The Fiend that would almost certainly never be able to happen. In most of the cases (Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Sting), it was because the opponent in question was long retired and in no shape to perform- but the #1 spot was occupied by Goldberg, on the basis of it just being a really, really bad idea. Well, we all know how that turned out: Goldberg squashed The Fiend in a very poor match at Super ShowDown 2020 in Saudi Arabia, and yes, it was a catastrophically bad idea. Even worse, the article was published three weeks before the event, and actually namedrops said event as a possible place for the match.
      Goldberg is still an active wrestler, who performs occasionally in WWE. As a matter of fact, the former Universal Champion could take part in Super ShowDown, which is set to take place in Saudi Arabia. It is feasible for Goldberg and The Fiend to collide, but WWE is unlikely to let this match happen, as it might affect the credibly of either of the two Superstars.
    • Look at almost every major moment on Bray's Awesome page- his getting over with The Wyatt Family, his WWE Championship win at Elimination Chamber 2017, (especially the bit about him supposedly having Randy Orton cowed and under his control), his creation of the Fiend character and his Universal Championship win. Every one of those moments was completely undermined by WWE's almost maliciously awful booking of him when it came time to deliver in big matches, something which suggests that they've never really had faith in him at any point. The Wyatt Family was buried by constant defeats, Randy Orton would backstab Bray, make him look like a fool, and take the WWE Championship off him at WrestleMania 33, the Fiend would be appallingly misbooked by being hotshotted into the Universal Title picture (leading to the Gooker-winning Hell in a Cell 2019 match) and Goldberg would squash him in a very poor match at Super ShowDown in Saudi Arabia for the Universal Title. The entire character of the goofy Firefly Funhouse Bray and The Fiend has been effectively taken from him so they could give it to Alexa Bliss instead. Even the one masterpiece his fans believed he would be able to have as his legacy forever, the Firefly Funhouse match where he defeated and completely deconstructed John Cena in a way that nobody ever had before, was effectively rendered null when Cena returned to WWE in 2021 to feud with Roman Reigns without even the most token acknowledgment of what he'd gone through in his last appearance due to Bray's release taking place in the interim, effectively rendering the match Canon Discontinuity. Nearly every single thing Bray has ever worked hard to accomplish, WWE has stripped away from him with the gleeful recklessness of a bratty kid kicking over a sandcastle.
    • The Raw after WrestleMania 37 has Bray declaring that he was looking forward to a fresh start. This wound up as becoming his final appearance before his absence and release 3 months later... Until his return at Extreme Rules 2022...
    • At the RAW is XXX show, The Undertaker gives a Passing the Torch moment to Bray, establishing him as the new Wrestling Monster in the WWE. Bray would never get that chance to truly show himself as a true monster as he passed away seven months after his final match against LA Knight. Moreover, LA Knight's promo was about Bray living on "past glory", which is now all that's left of him, plus how he constantly rambles on "but never gets to the point", and now that incarnation of Bray's character is the last to enter permanent limbo and Vince McMahon isn't the one that sent him there...
    • One of the lyrics for "Broken Out In Love/Live In Fear" goes "He won't see the sun again for years to come"...how about he'll never see the sun again...
  • He Really Can Act:
    • From his work as Husky Harris or Axel Mulligan, you would NEVER be able to guess that Wyatt had that amount of mic skills and character-performing ability in him. Go back and watch Husky Harris, and then watch Bray Wyatt. They're not even the same goddamn person.
    • His "Firefly Fun House" videos had people amazed at how Bray could balance the kind-hearted Mr. Rogers with the creepiness associated with Wyatt, capable of being happy and cheerful to serious at the drop of a hat.
      • The "Firefly Funhouse Match" against John Cena in WrestleMania 36 has him unleash a Break Them by Talking routine on Cena, shaking fans to their core with all of the points he makes in a way that is utterly visceral. And the March 13, 2020 promo (taped in an empty arena due to the COVID-19 Pandemic) has him sound utterly chilling, like he's some sort of insane maniac one could find in real life.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Bray's gimmick— a backwoods cult leader from the bayou with a flair for Southern Baptist Preacher themed rhetoric and implied supernatural overtones— is very similar to themes present in HBO's smash hit True Detective that debuted a few months after Bray was turned loose on the WWE.
  • Ho Yay: He had quite a bit of this during his feud withDean Ambrose. During one backstage segment, after he ambushed Ambrose and hit him with the Sister Abigail, he actually starts petting Ambrose's head, in a rather intimate manner◊.
  • I Knew It!: Let’s just say no one was too surprised when Bray turned out to be the White Rabbit.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • After his return for the "Firefly Fun House" promos in May 2019, many fans joked about Bray having been spending way too much time in the Lake of Reincarnation or that it's Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: WWE Edition. Since the segment regularly gets more views than anything else on RAW going by Youtube's stats and viewer reactions, there's also a ton of jokes about Bray getting injured due to having to carry the entirety of the program.
    • His mental deconstruction of John Cena at the Firefly Funhouse Match in WrestleMania 36 has been compared to the Scarecrow segments in Batman: Arkham Asylum where The Scarecrow psychologically taunts Batman himself through fear toxin-induced hallucinations.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
  • Narm:
    • Frightening as Bray and his domination of The Undertaker and Kane could be, the promo in which he claimed to have sucked their souls and demonstrated it by summoning their lightning and fire all over the ring can be seen as too over-the-top. It switches Wyatt from a subtle Maybe Magic, Maybe Mad cult leader to something straight out from HUSTLE.
    • Bray's first feud with Randy Orton, in which Orton pretended to be Bray's follower before turning on him, was rifle with this:
      • Bray once ambushed Randy backstage with a horde of sheep-masked acolytes, who restrained Randy in front of Bray. This was creepy and impressive in the finest traditions of the Ministry of Darkness. What was not fine was when Bray stepped forward and started brandishing what looked like a black-painted ping-pong paddle with a couple of red popsicle sticks stuck to it in the shape of an X and waved it around Randy for some kind of weird mumbo-jumbo ritual. Even worse, the next week Randy had somehow gotten hold of the prop and taken it back to the ruins of the Wyatt compound where Sister Abigail was supposedly buried, where he proceeded to jam it into the ground to symbolically "impale" her.
      • The subsequent match between Bray and Randy at WrestleMania 33 did nothing to dispel the narm that had settled over the whole feud, as Bray displayed his new "powers" by causing maggots and centipedes to appear in the ring through the incredible mystic arts of PowerPoint projections. It looked incredibly dopey.
      • As if WWE was trying to constantly outdo themselves with ever more ridiculous Narm, the two then had a "House of Horrors Match" at Payback 2017 which was almost immediately considered by many to be the worst (and dumbest) match of the year, before the year was even half over. WrestleCrap actually preemptively awarded it the Gooker award for 2017 on the basis that they couldn't even imagine things getting dumber from here.note 
  • Never Live It Down:
    • The infamous "House of Horrors Match" he had with Orton.
    • His Hell in a Cell match against Seth Rollins at Hell in a Cell 2019 and his match against Goldberg at Super ShowDown 2020 are most remembered as the one-two punch that symbolized WWE ruining the credibility of "The Fiend" character; the former going to a no contest despite the match's stipulation stating that it can only end via pinfall or submission, and in the latter Wyatt losing to Goldberg in a Squash Match.
  • Older Than They Think: Wyatt being a masked character as The Fiend got a try beforehand in FCW (NXT's predecessor) as Windham Rotunda briefly experimented a gimmick known as "Axel Mulligan" - which was basically Husky wearing a hockey mask reminiscent of Jason Voorhees, with a handful of Bray Wyatt's in-ring mannerisms. Suffice it to say, the 2019 version is several magnitudes better developed and scarier, but some of the seeds of his current and previous gimmick were there all the way back in 2011...
  • Rooting for the Empire:
    • Toward the end of his NXT run, Bray Wyatt was triggering deafening pops just by showing up. This has mostly carried over to his time on the main roster as well. To put this in perspective, the sheer awesomeness of the gimmick earned cheers even when the Family was going up against DANIEL BRYAN.
    • Only increased further by his feud with John Cena. Cena's antics, and the general perception of their feud by many being that Wyatt's performance is the only thing standing in the way of Cena burying yet another shining young career, has now resulted in the fans eerily singing, clapping, and chanting in favor of Bray Wyatt and using the beat of Cena's own theme song for a "John Cena Sucks" song ala Kurt Angle's original "You Suck" theme meme.
    • In his debut at SummerSlam 2019, the entire audience was on his side chanting "Yowie Wowie" and "Let Him In".
    • His match against Seth Rollins at Hell in a Cell 2019 had the audience firmly by his side with the fans noisily furious when it ended in a "no contest" with the belt still on Seth. And to prove that even the talent themselves would be cheering for Bray if they could, Sean Waltman called bullshit on the de facto disqualification finish on WWE's official watchalong, and Rollins himself later described being furious enough with that ending he wanted to strangle Vince McMahon over it.
  • Shocking Moments:
    • The Fiend's entrance at SummerSlam 2019 which had the entire audience on his side.
    • The Firefly Funhouse match against John Cena at WrestleMania 36. The fact that Vince McMahon allowed Bray to expose and deconstruct one of the biggest stars he ever had so brutally and openly was enough to make jaws drop, along with the ending where The Fiend apparently wiped Cena from existence!
    • His return at Extreme Rules 2022, despite being fairly well-telegraphed by WWE beforehand, qualifies just for the staggering amount of love and grandeur put into it in spite of how acrimonious Bray's previous departure had been.
  • Signature Scene: The Fiend's debut at SummerSlam 2019.
  • Spiritual Successor:
    • He became WWE's resident "paranormal wrestler" starting in The New '10s after The Undertaker and Kane became less and less active, culminating in The New '20s with Taker's retirement and Kane being busy with his political career. Had Wyatt not passed away in 2023, it'd have been safe to assume he'd of officially become the resident supernatural wrestler of the company.
    • Mick Foley outright called Wyatt a Superior Successor to his Mankind gimmick. Wyatt even eventually took a page from Foley's book by showing he was also able to freely switch around his three most prominent personas. Coincidentally (and unfortunately due to Wyatt's untimely passing), Wyatt's career ended up with notable parallels to Foley's; both men ended as three-time WWE World Champions with their last World Title win happening at SummerSlam before shortly losing it to a long-haired dominant heel who was at the beginning stages of his tyranny. Both men had career-defining Hell in a Cell matches. Both men are known for being in an Odd Friendship Tag Team with a third generation megastar.
  • Unexpected Character: Suffice to say, absolutely nobody was expecting Bray to return in spring of 2019 as a children's show host character. He has a little of everything; Mr. Rogers, Steve from Blue's Clues, even Pee-wee Herman. And even though most fans rightly (this was Bray, after all) suspected that there was nothing but Nightmare Fuel incoming, not a single person imagined that Bray would eventually reveal his true gimmick to be a golden-eyed, slash-mouthed Monster Clown that looks very much like it could have been spawned by the Pentagon Dark era of Lucha Underground.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: Seems to have fallen into this following Hell in a Cell 2019. For years Wyatt was saddled with inept booking and took loss after loss, until the shine was off him and he seemed to be another talented performer with all the potential in the world who had been failed by the WWE system.
    Then his shocking reboot into a Depraved Kids' Show Host turned him into the biggest thing in wrestling overnight, he was put almost immediately into a title feud with Seth Rollins and looked like he was finally going to break out and become one of the company's top stars. Then his big match was ended by referee stoppage. In a Hell in a Cell match. Because Seth was being too violent. Now some fans are actively feeling sorry for the psychotic, possibly demonic, creepy Monster Clown, because of how frequently and how badly the promotion he works for has dropped the ball with him.
  • Villain Decay: His original "Eater of Worlds" gimmick suffered this after several underwhelming ends to feuds with Daniel Bryan, John Cena, and Chris Jericho. While Bray was still considered one of the better in-ring talkers, his promos started to lose credibility due to him having little impact on his opponents (particularly John Cena) and having no clear goal or focus despite what it looked like since his beginning. It got to the point where WWE attempted a retool on the entire Wyatt family, having Luke and Rowan "break free," from Bray to enter into singles competition and putting Bray into a feud with Dean Ambrose.

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top