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Where The Fiend Comes From | Explained | PartsFUNknown

Special thanks to Kyle Scarborough for talking to us for this video!
Follow him on Twitter here: @ScarboroughTWTC

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In Part 2 of our three part series on 'The Fiend' Bray Wyatt, Laurie takes us for a rummage around the Firefly Funhouse's closets in the hopes of finding the kayfabe story for the Fiend's existence.

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Transcript
00:00 [SCREAMING]
00:03 No pigment in his skin.
00:05 Thin yellow hair.
00:06 White.
00:07 Yellow like a cat.
00:09 Long yellow hair, pallid white skin, and glaring yellow eyes.
00:16 The alligator slaying swamp creature
00:17 that Bray Wyatt described back in 2015
00:20 seemingly sets up the character he would become in 2019.
00:24 A beast of unimaginable strength with a maddening howl,
00:28 but also a caring streak as it did not seek
00:32 to harm the young Bray Wyatt.
00:34 In fact, it was a part of Bray Wyatt.
00:38 You are the man in the woods.
00:40 Whether this twisted visage is a reflection
00:42 of the eater of worlds, or the creation of a frightened mind,
00:46 or just another fabrication from a master storyteller,
00:51 the bender of words is hard to tell.
00:53 The fiendish implications of this ghost story
00:56 are hard to miss, though.
00:58 But was this a master stroke of foreshadowing,
01:01 or was the fiend just a retcon of some other idea that
01:04 would have played out as part of cult leader Bray Wyatt's lore?
01:08 That's what I'll be trying to work out in this video
01:10 as I go panning for truth in the swampy waters of Bray's
01:14 elaborate lore.
01:15 I'm Laurie, hailing from partsFUNknown,
01:18 and this is The Fiend Explained.
01:21 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:25 [HEAVY BREATHING]
01:28 Getting to the bottom of who or what the Fiend actually is
01:36 isn't a very easy task.
01:38 There's no official history for him,
01:40 no necronomicon of where the demon came from,
01:43 if he even is a demon.
01:46 WWE.com's bio for the character says
01:48 that the superstar known as the Fiend Bray Wyatt
01:51 seems to have stepped out of the collective population's
01:54 nightmares and into our reality.
01:57 And though we may never know the full extent of his madness,
02:00 what is certain is that he never forgets
02:04 and is out to evoke an unmerciful reign of terror
02:07 on all who dare let him in.
02:10 The new look Wyatt seemed to retain
02:12 some of his more unsettling and unstable characteristics,
02:16 and soon he would reveal his terrifying alter ego
02:20 known as the Fiend Bray Wyatt, complete
02:23 with a gnarled face mask that weaved its way
02:26 into every WWE fan's worst dreams.
02:29 Wyatt made clear that this new nightmare was just beginning.
02:34 And that's all we get, little more than hints
02:36 from WWE superstar Grimoire.
02:38 For all of Wyatt's demands for us to let him in,
02:40 he's been keeping us out of what's actually
02:43 happening within the walls of the Funhouse,
02:45 offering no clear narrative origins,
02:48 and instead just letting the hints and the legend
02:50 and the Easter eggs pile up like some sort of pre-patch Animal
02:53 Crossing.
02:56 So needless to say, there are going
02:57 to be some logical leaps of imagination
02:59 as we explore the mounting mythology of Bray Wyatt.
03:02 Now, an obvious place to start is the Man in the Wood story,
03:05 which is why the video started there.
03:09 Uploaded to WWE's YouTube channel for Halloween 2015,
03:12 this ghost story predates the Fiend by a good four years.
03:16 But as I said up top, contains a description of a monster
03:20 that appears eerily similar.
03:22 And it's a video that a lot of WWE fans
03:24 have rediscovered and taken as proof
03:27 that the Fiend character was in the works for quite some time.
03:30 Something that was mentioned to me
03:31 when I spoke to Kyle Scarborough, the sketch artist
03:34 who helped Bray to design the Fiend's mask.
03:37 I remember watching that.
03:38 Fans online started to notice the similarities in the story.
03:43 I believe it was long, blonde or yellow hair,
03:45 and these bright colored eyes.
03:48 It wasn't until a fan pointed out the similarities
03:49 between that and the Fiend that I thought, oh, wow.
03:52 So I kind of learned how far back his ideas are,
03:54 honestly, at the same pace everyone else did.
03:55 For fun, just on paper,
03:58 and just doing some digital manipulation stuff,
04:00 I did a kind of a caricature-esque sketch of the Fiend,
04:05 if he was slightly more modified to look like
04:08 the description from that ghost story we were talking about.
04:11 And I threw it up online, like, hey, you know,
04:13 Fiend, the Man in the Woods.
04:15 The amount of people that was getting messaging me
04:17 or even commenting, I think, saying, I knew it.
04:20 It's been confirmed.
04:21 I'm just drawing for fun.
04:23 - Chances are that the Man in the Woods
04:24 is just another scare in Wyatt's arsenal,
04:27 another myth from the master manipulator.
04:29 But there is always the possibility
04:31 that Wyatt expected to morph into this swamp creature
04:34 at some point in his run before deciding
04:37 that the cult leader character had fully run its course.
04:40 Instead, I reckon it's likely a loose end
04:42 that Bray Wyatt decided to tie into his reformed
04:45 and reimagined wrestling persona
04:46 when Firefly Funhouse hit screens.
04:49 Not only taking that striking image
04:51 to become the look of the Fiend,
04:52 but also weaving in a bunch of other callbacks
04:55 and references to that ghost story,
04:57 like the sound of the Fiend.
04:59 (fiend howling)
05:02 The harrowing howl of the Man in the Woods
05:05 forces Bray to clap his hands to his ears lest they bleed.
05:09 Likewise, each appearance of the Fiend
05:11 is accompanied by a screeching wail
05:14 that drowns out all other sound in the arena,
05:17 while the character itself brings its hands to its ears,
05:20 first and foremost to listen to the angel or devil
05:22 on its shoulder telling it to hurt or to heal,
05:25 but also mirroring that moment from four years earlier.
05:30 So it could just be an example of accidental foreshadowing
05:33 or just a clever callback,
05:34 or it could have been the plan all along.
05:38 That's kinda half the fun here.
05:39 And it's a tricky little mechanic
05:41 that Bray has played with quite a lot
05:42 during this period of reinvention,
05:44 teasing greater meaning to seemingly irrelevant details.
05:48 Back in May 2019, Bray decided to illuminate his Fireflies
05:52 with an overlooked Easter egg from the Funhaus.
05:56 Fun game time.
05:57 Bet you didn't know that in 2015,
05:59 I did eight consecutive backstage promos
06:02 where one sentence didn't belong in each of them,
06:05 but together they make up a secret message.
06:08 No one ever found it.
06:10 You guys never look hard enough.
06:12 First one to get it wins a prize.
06:14 - What makes you smile?
06:16 - I know you're listening.
06:18 - Let me in.
06:19 - We don't belong here!
06:21 - What happened to you was such a tragedy.
06:26 - Limbo is no place for a soul like yours.
06:30 - I believe I've found the answer.
06:32 - The angel with the burned wings is waving you on home.
06:36 - And it turns out that each line taken
06:38 from those eight promos would make up the title
06:41 and the theme of an episode during season one
06:45 of Firefly Funhaus.
06:47 And I don't know about you,
06:47 but it also sounds to me like one side of a conversation.
06:51 And this is just a theory,
06:53 but do you think it's The Fiend talking to Bray Wyatt?
06:57 Now the most obvious clue is the voice asking,
06:59 let me in, which is The Fiend's catchphrase.
07:02 But the other reason I think this could be The Fiend
07:04 talking to Wyatt are the lines,
07:06 what happened to you was such a tragedy.
07:09 Limbo is no place for a soul like yours.
07:12 Now the tragedy could be seen as Wyatt's career
07:15 so far marred as it was by high profile loss
07:18 after high profile loss,
07:20 an act that was actually so over with the crowd,
07:23 but never given the push by management
07:25 to truly reach the stratosphere.
07:27 And Limbo could be a reference to that too,
07:30 stuck neither here nor there,
07:31 somewhere between main eventer and stooge.
07:35 WWE clearly obsessed with continually using Bray Wyatt,
07:39 but never actually giving him the push he needs.
07:42 But it could also be a reference to that transitional period
07:44 between cult leader Bray leaving screens
07:47 and Funhouse Wyatt emerging from the shadows,
07:50 a dark period where The Fiend found him.
07:54 'Cause as Bray himself said in the build
07:55 to his match with John Cena at WrestleMania 36,
07:58 at some point he stopped trying to shut the voices out
08:02 and he decided to start listening to them.
08:06 He let them in.
08:08 So it begs the question,
08:13 is The Fiend just a voice in Bray's head
08:16 or is it an entity that's taken up residence
08:18 in the vessel of Bray Wyatt?
08:20 Because Wyatt's former gimmick seemed deeply rooted
08:23 in religious iconography,
08:25 a preacher talking about angels and demons and all that.
08:28 From the crucifix pose in the middle of the ring
08:30 to name-checking Milton's Paradise lost in the build
08:33 to the match with The Undertaker,
08:35 to the name of his prophet, Sister Abigail.
08:38 Now the motherly hand of the Wyatt family
08:40 was a figure shrouded in mystery.
08:43 Bray always said that she was a real person
08:45 who took him in and cared for him.
08:47 Randy Orton said that he found her grave
08:50 when he burned the Wyatt compound to the ground.
08:52 Though Bray then later said that she was alive and well
08:56 during his feud with Finn Balor.
08:58 That was before the whole Norman Bates,
08:59 ooh, mother thing that thankfully
09:02 never actually came to fruition.
09:03 But Bray cosplaying his dead sister did seem to suggest
09:06 that Abigail was a figure who was only alive
09:09 in Bray's mind.
09:10 Though we did actually get a glimpse of Abigail
09:12 in the WrestleMania 36 match in the Funhouse.
09:15 Though you could argue that because the Funhouse exists
09:17 in some sort of other space,
09:19 it's kind of unlikely that the Abigail that we saw there
09:22 would be quote unquote real.
09:24 Now in religious terms, Abigail was the name
09:26 of one of the seven Jewish female prophets
09:29 which may just seem like a coincidence
09:31 considering that Wyatt's Abigail was said to soothe him
09:34 with prophecy of his reign to come
09:36 and helped him to believe that he was a god incarnate.
09:39 And I wouldn't usually put loads of stock
09:41 in connections like that because loads of names
09:44 come from the Bible.
09:45 You got Adam, Mark, Benjamin, Grace, Daniel, Samuel,
09:50 or Samael and that's actually one of the reasons
09:53 I put a little bit more stock in this theory
09:55 because when Bray was feuding with Matt Hardy,
09:57 he took a little dip in the lake of reincarnation
10:00 and came out cleansed of many of his heelish tendencies.
10:04 And to announce that he was a changed man,
10:06 he proclaimed, "Understand something, plain and simple.
10:10 "To me, Abigail was a delicious poison,
10:13 "an intoxicating, overwhelming poison.
10:16 "But Abigail don't live here no more.
10:19 "I am Samael."
10:21 Now Samael is the name of an archangel
10:23 with grim and destructive duties.
10:26 In Jewish beliefs, he is the angel of death
10:30 and also a fallen angel or an angel with burned wings.
10:35 Now Samael is often lumped in with Satan
10:38 due to his fallen angel status and his reaping duties,
10:41 but he is also said to be the Lord of the fifth heaven.
10:44 So simultaneously, good and bad,
10:47 sort of stuck in limbo between good and evil.
10:51 Now where have we seen something like that before?
10:54 Add to all of that religious significance
10:57 the fact that fiend literally means evil spirit or demon
11:01 and the fact that the door to the Firefly Funhouse
11:04 is marked with Abandon Hope, all ye who exit here,
11:08 paraphrasing the inscription of the gates of hell
11:10 in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy,
11:12 and then the personal hell that John Cena went through
11:14 in the Funhouse at Mania, you add that all up
11:17 and it kinda seems like Bray's innocent little kid's TV show
11:21 might exist in Inferno.
11:22 Or at least potentially Purgatory,
11:24 because if you're abandoning hope to exit,
11:26 you'd probably be entering hell.
11:29 Thing is though, for all this talk of angels and demons
11:32 and monsters and kings, Bray has actually undercut
11:35 this mysticism on multiple occasions before,
11:38 at one point even teasing his own insanity.
11:41 (dramatic music)
11:44 (upbeat music)
11:54 During that period of limbo
11:56 before the Firefly Funhouse version of Bray debuted,
11:59 he posted very sparsely on social media,
12:02 but when he did, it was cryptic and obscure.
12:06 And to make matters worse,
12:07 he deleted a lot of it after he re-debuted.
12:09 Around October, after he disappeared from screens,
12:12 he wrote, "Day 23, subject is showing signs
12:15 "of progress at times.
12:17 "Violent outbursts are commonplace,
12:19 "spewing threat to our staff in multiple languages
12:22 "and reciting passages from Bible."
12:25 Seemingly suggesting that after disappearing from WWE TV,
12:28 Bray Wyatt was incarcerated in a psychiatric institute.
12:32 Then in December, he posted again,
12:33 seemingly having made progress with his rehabilitation.
12:36 "I am not a god.
12:38 "I never was.
12:39 "I'm sorry I said it.
12:40 "I was wrong.
12:41 "I know the true god now and all his power.
12:45 "I feel that I am forgiven
12:46 "for all the wickedness I have caused.
12:48 "My soul is clean now.
12:50 "My mind is clear.
12:52 "I see what I did wrong, what was done to me.
12:55 "They took it all.
12:56 "I have so many things to fix.
12:58 "I realize that I was sick.
13:00 "My mind doesn't work like other people's.
13:02 "It gets lost and attached to ideals
13:04 "that are unrealistic and poisonous.
13:06 "My next journey will be to find my true calling."
13:10 So when Bray popped back onto screens
13:12 with a wild man beard, neatly trimmed,
13:14 his hair tied back and a cozy looking red sweater on,
13:18 it seemed like the rehabilitation
13:19 and reformation of Bray Wyatt was complete.
13:22 But now with the Fiend running rampant,
13:23 it seems like he just found a different voice to listen to.
13:26 One that is setting him after those
13:28 that took it all from him.
13:30 One that has put him on a mission of revenge.
13:33 So again, what if this is just all in Bray's head?
13:38 What if the Firefly Funhouse just exists
13:41 in Bray's mind space?
13:43 Whatever that is, his mind palace.
13:45 And that would be why it's filled
13:46 with Easter eggs and references.
13:48 It would be why the puppets are named after his first gimmick
13:50 or the inspiration for his last gimmick or Sister Abigail.
13:54 It's why we see her properly for the first time
13:56 in the match with John Cena at Mania
13:58 because it's inside his head
14:00 because that might be the only place she's ever existed.
14:03 After all, in the real world,
14:04 it was Bray who was the man in the woods.
14:07 It was Bray who was Sister Abigail.
14:09 It was Bray who's even been an angel with burned wings.
14:12 Wyatt's got this big tribal wing-shaped tattoo on his back.
14:16 One that got flogged when he was Husky Harris.
14:18 Randy Orton burned down the Wyatt compound
14:20 and Sister Abigail's grave, an aspect of Bray himself
14:23 and thing that was lifting him to ascension.
14:27 The thing that was making him a God.
14:29 And now he's also the Fiend.
14:32 - The answer is the creature that lives behind my eyes.
14:36 - It all comes back to Bray Wyatt.
14:38 Abigail, Samael, the Fiend, they're all just masks.
14:43 Something to hide behind.
14:44 As Bray himself tweeted after his loss to Goldberg
14:47 at Super Showdown this year.
14:48 "Life is a circle.
14:50 No matter what beast you make of yourself
14:52 or how bright one side is,
14:54 inevitably the dark side comes again.
14:57 But the beauty of the circle is round we go."
15:00 Now the beast you make of yourself could be a reference to
15:03 or paraphrasing of a quote by famed British linguist,
15:06 Samuel Johnson, who said,
15:08 "He who makes a beast of himself
15:10 gets rid of the pain of being a man."
15:13 Bray's new character is one obsessed with his past.
15:17 - What happened to you was such a tragedy.
15:22 - Who wants to redeem his career.
15:24 - Limbo is no place for a soul like yours.
15:27 - And has become a masked beast
15:29 in order to reconcile the pain within him
15:32 for his past failings.
15:34 - Let me in.
15:35 - But then again, if it's all in Bray's bonds,
15:40 how does John Cena go there for the WrestleMania 36 match?
15:43 How does Seth Rollins burn it down?
15:45 How does the Fiend teleport around?
15:48 How does it drag Seth Rollins down to hell?
15:51 How does Bray and the Fiend
15:53 appear in the same segment on SmackDown?
15:57 Frankly, there were just too many
15:58 arcane shenanigans going on for this
16:00 to just purely be the psychotic delusions
16:02 of a troubled cult leader.
16:04 I mean, even the Tiger King, Joe Exotic's
16:06 deluded ravings about that bitch, Carol Baskin,
16:09 had some sort of grounding in reality
16:10 because her husband did in fact go missing.
16:13 So really, explaining the lore of the Fiend
16:15 is actually kind of impossible.
16:19 Episode two and this series is already a bust.
16:23 But then again, that's kind of the point
16:24 because the conflicting origins of the Fiend,
16:26 his abilities, his reality,
16:29 are all what make the character so intriguing.
16:32 And it's basically always been this way for Bray Wyatt too
16:34 because the rambling promos of cult leader era Bray
16:37 often just diverged, doubled back,
16:39 and then folded in on themselves,
16:42 retreading the same ground so many times
16:44 that the true path forward was often obscured.
16:47 Now I said in episode one that DC's Joker
16:50 was a major influence on the design of the Fiend
16:52 and there was certainly some character traits
16:54 the two share, but this muddled history could be another.
16:59 Because of the nature of comics
17:00 and as writers take over new books
17:02 and they put their own spin on it,
17:04 rehashing, retconning, and retelling,
17:07 the Joker's origins have basically become a folk tale.
17:11 And like those traditional stories
17:13 that are passed on by word of mouth,
17:15 every single teller has a slightly different version.
17:19 But what do you do when the tale being told
17:21 is autobiographical?
17:23 - I wanna know how I got these scars.
17:25 - You wanna know how I got 'em?
17:27 Speaking of which, you know how I got these scars?
17:30 - In Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight,
17:31 Heath Ledger's Joker addresses the elephant in the room,
17:34 you know, why he looks the way he does,
17:36 on three separate occasions throughout the film,
17:39 telling a different story each time.
17:43 In the first, he was disfigured by his abusive father
17:45 for being too serious.
17:47 In the second, he mutilated his own face
17:50 as a show of solidarity with his wife
17:52 who was scarred by loan sharks.
17:54 And the third time, he begins to tell
17:56 Christian Bale's Batman an altogether different backstory,
17:59 though it's cut short by the Dark Knight flinging him
18:02 from the edge of a building.
18:04 Now, the first two tales tell of a man
18:06 who could be sympathized with, who wasn't always a freak,
18:10 while the third, unfinished tale,
18:12 might be closer to the truth.
18:14 Because the scars are a mask,
18:16 something that marks him as different,
18:18 makes people uncomfortable,
18:20 whether through fear of being caught staring
18:23 or because of the unsettling permagrin they give him.
18:27 They are ultimately another unknown-for-people-to-fear
18:30 and unanswered question, along with,
18:33 why are you doing this?
18:35 And it's that mystery of where he came from
18:38 that the Joker wields and weaponizes
18:40 to sow terror on the streets of Gotham.
18:43 And funnily enough, Bray equally has been the orator
18:45 of his own origins, from those rambling promos
18:48 on Raw and SmackDown, giving you insight
18:51 into the backwards glory of his existence,
18:54 all the way up to the Firefly Funhouse,
18:56 where he's the one hosting you, telling you what's going on.
19:00 And then every little detail that doesn't add up
19:02 from asylums to angels, every incongruity unsettles.
19:07 Because it defies the human desire
19:09 to know a concrete origin, a true story,
19:12 to be able to package Bray Wyatt up in a neat little box
19:15 and put him on a shelf and know where he is.
19:18 Instead, this is where the true horror lies,
19:20 because that is not necessarily what you get here.
19:23 'Cause admit it, finding out the exact lore
19:26 and origin of The Fiend,
19:27 is probably why you clicked the video.
19:31 (dramatic music)
19:33 Thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed this video
19:37 and diving into the mysteries of The Fiend.
19:40 If you did like it and you know someone else
19:42 whose day it might brighten in a sort of
19:44 scary clown mask kind of way,
19:47 then why not share it around,
19:48 because that would really, really help us out.
19:50 So next time on Explained, for the final part
19:52 in this three-part series on The Fiend,
19:55 we're gonna be diving into the execution of the character
19:58 and how WWE and Bray Wyatt have presented him
20:01 as a horror movie monster.
20:03 So subscribe to PFK so you're notified when that goes live,
20:06 and I will see you next time on PartsFunKnown.

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