The discourse around the new group is growing, but nobody is asking the fundamental question, are Uncle Howdy and the Wyatt Sicks heels or faces?
The old saying is that hurt people hurt people. There is no part of the adage that quantifies the relationship between personal grief and inflicting pain.
Bo Dallas must be hurting badly if the two are intertwined. That makes sense, too.
Losing a loved one and somebody you admire is beyond painful. When that loss happens to somebody who it feels as though had more to do, it compounds the pain.
Pro-wrestling, all of it, could be better at telling these stories. Triumph, anger, pride, hubris, defeat, joy; all of those are in the lexicon of emotions that bookers and performers have mastered entertainers.
Grief isn’t one of those emotions, and to make matters worse, most other forms of entertainment do a positively horrible job depicting grief. Any psychologist will tell you that as an emotion, it is tricky and manifests in ways that are hard to predict or understand.
Yet WWE is handling it better than some mainstream content. Dallas, in particular, cut a career-defining performance.
With that context, it is safer to say that maybe a brother processing a significant loss is actually meant to be our sympathetic hero—perhaps Uncle Howdy and The Wyatt Sicks heels, but maybe not.
“What am I supposed to do, let him become a mausoleum?” – Bo Dallas
For some people, the first priority after a loss is remembrance. The fear of losing the memory of their loved one becomes a loss on par with the initial tragedy.
Dallas relates this incredibly sympathetic view as his primary explanation for why. When asked why he is back and why The Wyatt Sicks is running amok on Raw, he cites his brother’s legacy and how he is keeping it alive even though he is not.
Fighting to honor a loved one is 100% a face motivation. In fact, WWE’s biggest babyface just completed his story of honing his late father.
When Cody Rhodes won the title, he did it because it was a tragedy that his father never got to hold the title himself. Why is bringing Bray Wyatt’s vision to life while honoring his memory any different? Truthfully, it is not.
Another note is the victim that Wyatt Sicks targeted. How are Uncle Howdy and the Wyatt Sicks heel when they attack a heel in Chad Gable?
Gable viciously abused and abandoned his family, which is not something that Uncle Howdy would take well, given his connection to his brother. How could somebody who feels so raw and abandoned about losing a brother allow a man claiming to be a father to his pupils to abuse them without recourse?
Why would we, as wrestling fans, not root for that wrestler to get what they so clearly deserve? The answer is we would.
Wrestling fans typically want the villains on the roster to get their comeuppance in the form of a beatdown. Nothing about the debut, on paper, is heelish.
Yes, some staff took a beating. Our in-ring heroes have punched their way through innocent people to get a rival before. It is the of that night carnage that makes it clear WWE wanted this to feel different.
“They wanted to forget about all of us…we made them remember.” – Bo Dallas
Undercutting the pain and loss, all of the sympathetic attributes we can relate to as people are something more sinister. For example, why are Joe Gacy, Dexter Lumis, and Nikki Cross involved?
Well, because this is a union born of anger and vengeance. He spits like venom in his promo that they wanted to forget about all of us before coldly pointing out what we all know.
He and his friends made them pay for that, made them remember. This reveals a more traditional wrestling motive, one that is very heel-dominant.
The talents feel ignored. They made sure that again. While Bo’s vengeance could still be rooted in grief, it could also be about WWE’s ignoring his obvious talent for so long or until it was too late.
In Dallas and Howdy’s segment, there is another very subtle note of jealousy. He is not jealous of Bray, although that could be an issue deep in the real emotions of Taylor Rotunda (the performer behind Dallas).
He directs his anger at the WWE Universe. A lot of us have felt the stinging loss of Wyatt. He had a lot of very lovely and caring fans, and he had connected deeply with them throughout his career.
Having lost a close family member myself somewhat recently, I can attest that the jealousy isn’t totally uncommon. Even if your loved one isn’t a renowned wrestling star on television, it can happen.
Well-wishers you may barely know come to share their grief and, as a close family to the departed, you often find yourself being a source of their comfort. That jealousy of them, needing you to be a shoulder while simultaneously feeling alone yourself, can get intense.
Although it isn’t unreasonable, it is still petty jealousy to begrudge people the chance to grieve. That makes it very much heel behavior.
It Doesn’t Matter if Uncle Howdy and The Wyatt Sicks are Heels
Are Uncle Howdy and The Wyatt Sicks heels? If you asked most fans, the answer would be yes.
Also, it wouldn’t be shocking to see the five of them listed as top heels on Raw‘s internal roster. None of that matters, though. The simple and wrestling-friendly emotions are all tangled into a web of mayhem as a means to accurately describe grief.
It is the ultimate shades of grey scenario. These characters are not stuck between the binary options of good and evil. Instead, it is characters that express both with ease.
In the real world, there is no one-dimensional heel or face; nobody is all of anything, and grief is both destructive and sympathetic. It is debilitating and cathartic. It is both.
Bray Wyatt being at the center of this story is fitting. Both literally and figuratively, this story and stories like it couldn’t have happened without Wyatt.
There is a criticism of Wyatt and the Wyatt Sicks that they are not fully grounded in reality. The real world increasingly feels like a work or as if it’s trapped in kayfabe, to use wrestling parlance.
In the mayhem of our times, surrealism is often the only way to relate to more significant themes. All of us in the WWE Universe and beyond have had to grieve recently—the loss of Wyatt is the loss of time generally.
Loss is universal. Sometimes, that loss helps us connect with our neighbors. But secretly, truthfully, we’ve all felt a rage too, haven’t we?
Does that make us heel? That’s hard to say. But heel or face, we can understand the group’s actions. It’s to be expected. Hurt people, hurt people.
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