10 Best Storytellers In Wrestling Right Now
5. Daniel Bryan
If the entire goal of professional wrestling is to extract realism from its wonderful, inherent farce, then Daniel Bryan is a storytelling genius.
The Fiend is the Fiend. Creative and cool to some, campy to others, a character this audacious splits opinion, but Bryan rendered a supernatural monster exponentially more than smoke and mirrors in his series with Bray Wyatt; keenly intelligent, Bryan literally gave him his body to show the horrors expressed elsewhere by melodramatic scared-faces. The ugly red welts on Bryan's pale skin literally tethered the Fiend's mystical horrors to a plausible reality.
Even beyond that masterstroke, Bryan's sense of pacing and layout elevates him to a special realm. For your writer's money, the Survivor Series match was more impressive, and may yet prove to be the tipping point for the Wyatt character; prior to the bell ringing, the Fiend was perceived as a ruined - dead - character WWE had failed profoundly. When it sounded for a second time, suddenly, it didn't feel quite so drastic. Bryan's relentless, early attacks were believable in their high risk. He couldn't wrestle or subdue such a monster with his submission prowess; he had one realistic strategy, and deployed it to exhilarating, action-packed effect.
That's what Bryan does; everything he does has an immersive purpose to it, and he knows precisely when to do it to extract the maximum reaction.