In Sports-Entertainment you can take a couple of different approaches on how you book a storyline. Those two ways are the simple and straight forward way, which you can call the “Easy” way or you can book a storyline that has more twists and turns to it, which you can call the “Intriguing” way. On the February 28th edition of Smackdown Live, they took the next step in the storyline between Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton and took it in a direction that many were expecting, but at the same time weren’t. What I mean by that is that everyone figured that WWE was going to take the easy route when it comes to what everyone thought was going to happen and that was Randy Orton suckering Bray Wyatt in and dropping him with an “RKO Out of No Where”, which has been the staple of the career of Randy Orton. Everyone will admit that was what they were expecting on how the turn was going to go down, which as I mentioned would have been the easy way of doing things. The best part about Sports-Entertainment or Professional Wrestling, however you which to define it, is having moments that get you talking, that get you thinking and that is exactly what WWE accomplished on Smackdown Live, they got people talking about the story they were telling. I can promise you, if Randy Orton just showed up on Smackdown Live and did the “RKO Out of No Where”, there wouldn’t be much conversation about it, because we all knew it was coming, we all were waiting for it, but instead they took this storyline and made it extremely personable.
There can be a lot said about the character of Bray Wyatt. There are those who find him extremely fascinating. There are those who believe he is just a rip off of The Undertaker and there are those who believe that his character is some where in between. You can say some of the antics of Bray Wyatt are cheesy, but that also can be said about a lot of the characters in wrestling, including the beloved Undertaker, as some of the things he did in his career you could consider cheesy, yet people accept it, because he is The Undertaker.
People talk all the time wanting to see more than one dimensional characters, they want to see characters that you can believe in, instead of one dimensional characters that cut standard promos and show no real emotion what so ever. What we saw on Smackdown was the next evolution in the character of Bray Wyatt, based on the actions of Randy Orton.
Since the beginning, the one thing that Bray Wyatt truly believed in was the spirit of Sister Abigail. While many would just take his talk about Sister Abigail as him just rambling about this being that we know nothing about, to the character of Bray Wyatt, it meant the world to him, it was the one thing in live that made him something other than a heartless cult leader who wouldn’t care about the rest of the world burning down around him. The heart of the Bray Wyatt character has always been tied to the spirit of Sister Abigail, which is why someone as calculated as Randy Orton knew exactly how to attack Bray Wyatt on a level that was extremely personal. When you know how to attack the heart of a person, you make them weak, you make them vulnerable, but you also make them real and on Smackdown, they were finally able to humanize the character of Bray Wyatt to the point where you could actually feel sorry for him. You could say that Bray Wyatt look stupid for trusting someone like Randy Orton and you wouldn’t be wrong to think that, but at the same time, you look at it from the perspective of Bray Wyatt, who welcomed this person in to his family, shared his stories and his weakness with, because he believed that he was someone he could truly trust, making again Bray Wyatt someone who is more human than we originally thought.
Adding different levels to the Bray Wyatt character only allow him to evolve as a character and it also allows him to connect to the audience on a more deeper level, which if you tell the story correctly, it should allow people to care more about the character. It also adds more to the feud between Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton, instead of it being person A challenging person B for the WWE Championship because person B won the Royal Rumble. Instead, you have a storyline leading in to the biggest show of the year, in which Randy Orton not only destroyed his family, by splitting up the bond between Bray Wyatt and his most trusted ally, his brother, Luke Harper, but by also destroying the one thing that he held closes to his heart, the spirit of Sister Abigail.
For those advocating for more stories, look past the cheesiness of Randy Orton burning down the Wyatt Family Compound and look at the deeper meaning and symbolism of what it meant to Bray Wyatt the character, like you do on any other television show or movie, where when something of personal value is destroyed, you feel for that character in a normal television show or movie, it is the same thing in wrestling, when you see something they love destroyed, you should feel for the character, as well as see why that made them more vulnerable than you ever imagined.
