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Unless WWE has an incredible swerve up their sleeves that is sure to polarize fans in a major way, it sure looks like the WWE's White Rabbit is going to be none other than Windham Rotunda, the man known to Fed fans by a variety of different names, from Husky Harris, to the “Eater of Worlds,” to The Fiend, and most overarching of all, Bray Wyatt.
Though the veteran performer isn't exactly known for being into Alice in Wonderland iconography to the same degree as, say, Karrion Kross, the third-generation performer has been consistently lauded as one of the most creative minds in the professional wrestling industry and thus should be able to put together a strong, cohesive story that will keep fans coming back for more should he be afforded creative control without constant interference.
And yet, not everyone is excited to see Wyatt return to the WWE largely because some fans weren't particularly big fans of The Fiend in the first place. They dislike the magical non-realism, the unusual presentation, and the lack of traditional matches that were associated with his run, especially when handed a championship belt.
One of those fans is The Wrestling Observer's Bryan Alvarez, and he gave one heck of a requiem of the masked man's last run in WWE on Wrestling Observer Live.
Bryan Alvarez pumps the breaks on The Fiend's WWE hype train.
Free to discuss his potential of return of Wyatt as he so sees fit, Alvarez dug into the third-generation wrestler's most beloved creation, The Fiend, with impunity.
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“Well, all I know is this,” Alvarez prefaced. “I have nothing against the human beings that play the roles of Alexa Bliss and Bray Wyatt, but as a fan, people ask me all the time, ‘if this wasn’t your job, what will you watch?’ Well, I can tell you for a fact that if this were not my job, The Fiend and The Female Fiend, I’d have been done. Done! That and the 24/7 and this horrible booking I’d- done, I would have been done during that period. So no, I would not have been clamoring to stop watching my favorite football game (winks) to come back and watch the return of The Fiend. Maybe it’ll be better next time, I’m willing to give it a chance.”
Now, for long-time listeners of The Wrestle Observers' oeuvre of digital content, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise – Alvarez was no fan of the final booking run of Vince McMahon and was particularly tough on the stuff featuring Wyatt, Bliss, and her doll Lilly. Still, the veteran wrestler-turned-journalist has softened up on WWE as a whole since Paul “Triple H” Levesque took over creative, and it's nice to at least hear that he's willing to give this next run – should it actually come to pass – the old college try.
Mike Sempervive, Alvarez's Wrestling Observer Live co-host, is a bit more excited about the prospects of a Wyatt return, should WWE handle it correctly.
“…one of the problems with the Bray Wyatt character in the way that it became constructed was it couldn’t go away,” Sempervive posits. “They didn’t want it to go away because it sells merchandise or this or that, like, it probably would have been better off having a three-month run, and then the evil is killed, and then he comes back again three months, four months, five months later when you have a reason for it to. You can still sell the merchandise, you can still do that stuff. When he was a Jim Jones type of cult of personality character with these minions behind him, that’s still a little bit more believable and relatable and think there’s a lot more you can do with that. You know, I just saw a clip where RAW was facing SmackDown, I guess it would have been for Survivor Series, and it was Owens and Jericho, and they were doing the list, and Bray Wyatt was right there. He was in his hat and everything, he had the dumb blue shirt on, but it’s like he was still a pro wrestler, and when you went into a different dimension with him, like, that was okay, but like, to some people it’s only going to have so many legs, and to see Randy Orton’s face get burned off and they don’t sell it, and now this guy is actually literally incinerated, it’s like, for a lot of people it’s still something that’s way too far over the top and for the people that really like it, that’s cool, but I have a feeling that like we’ll see what happens this time around, but I think if you dial that back and actually plug some evil realism back into the d*mn thing it may be a little bit better off.”
The Fiend as a sort of 80s slasher villain who turns up every so often, causes some mischief, and then leaves? Now that sounds like a good idea. It probably isn't the path WWE is planning on going down, but a cool idea nonetheless.
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