WWE star Daniel Bryan recently spoke with The UK’s Mirror to promote his new book “Yes!: My Improbable Journey to the Main Event of WrestleMania.” Down below is an excerpt from that interview in which he talks about his strong connection with the WWE Universe:
“I’m not sure. We’ve entered this new phase in wrestling, where the fans acknowledge – and because WWE has done it for so many years – that what WWE is, is entertainment. Long gone are the days of you getting into trouble for saying that wrestling isn’t real. I prefer to use the term wrestling fiction. And so there is this acknowledgement that what they are watching is fiction. So fans don’t get as invested as far as like, for example if someone is really beating someone really hard. It’s not the same as it was in the 1980s when the Four Horsemen were beating on Dusty Rhodes. It’s a different vibe from the crowd. But there are still very real things that the fans catch on to. They think ‘this particular guy we like, and he entertains us, so we want to see him succeed, but the fiction is not allowing him to succeed’. And they think ‘it’s not that he’s not succeeding because he isn’t good enough to succeed, he’s not succeeding because whoever has decided to write the story, has written him out of this story’.
There is this realisation that by cheering they may have the power to change that. I think last year specifically it was almost the case that the fans didn’t know, they didn’t know if they could change it. But it’s very powerful, this idea is powerful. Imagine if you could watch a movie and as you’re watching the movie you realise that the supporting character is actually your favourite character, and you want him to be the guy who saves the day. And, somehow, by yelling at your TV screen or something like that, you could actually change how the movie pans out. That would be incredible! In wrestling you can.”
