8 Most Brutal Hardcore Moments Of WWE's PG Era
2. Orton Burns The Fiend
The pandemic was a very strange time. Nobody was really sure what was going on or what the next day would bring. So, WWE decided to try a bunch of new ideas. Some of them work, some of them didn't.
One of the most tedious WWE feuds of 2020 was Randy Orton vs. 'The Fiend' Bray Wyatt. The promotion went all out on The Fiend's supernatural character, not so much blurring the lines between fiction and reality as erasing them entirely.
At TLC, Orton and Wyatt were booked in a Firefly Inferno match. The winner would be the first wrestler to set their opponent on fire, a stipulation that hadn't been seen in WWE since 2006. They went all out on the cinematic aspects of this match, which resembled more of a student horror film than a traditional wrestling clash. The match ended with Orton dousing The Fiend in gasoline and burning him to a crisp. It was clearly a body double, but it was still shocking to see what was essentially a murder on a WWE show.
While Orton was the aggressor in this instance, he was on the other end of another shocking assault just four years earlier...