La coupe du Monde: Wrestling Wrap Up: Bray Wyatt Might Become Sister Abigail

Plus, The Shield finally reunites, Elias covers Alice in Chains, Nia and Alexa are friends again, and more.

What if there was a .gif where someone never stopped kicking Roman Reigns? The world would be a shinier, more hopeful place, right?

Okay, so Miz's kicks don't look like they hurt and Roman's wearing that hard plastic chest guard. It's not ideal. We take what we can get. Let's forge ahead and not look back.

Thank you to everyone who hit me up on Twitter and FB with kind, supportive, loving words for the Wrap Up's 10th Anniversary. It's been a long twisting, snarky road filled with Daffneys and Phone Dogs and Anus Preparedness Awareness. One that began on October 1st, 2007 when my friend Eric was all like "You still watch wrestling, right?" So I got a gig doing a weekly thing where I tried to make wrestling - its highs and lows (mostly lows) - funny and relatable. I tried to make our fandom funny and relatable. No one else was doing it at the time so I figured "What do I have to lose besides a dignity that was so barely present one could argue that it never existed at all?"

Then somewhere along the line I decided to cram as many non-wrestling related images into the mix as I could muster, creating a confusing, confounding collage of chaos an idiocy. Thank you all for reading. You can't even imagine what it feels like to hear that the dumb things I do inspired someone else to write dumb things too. Or even - bah gawd! - wrestle. That's insane. Be careful out there, you guys.

Moving on here, let's talk about the sublime gift I received on this, the 10th Wrappaversary.

WE'RE GETTTING SISTER ABIGAIL! AKA - ALL I'VE EVER WANTED IN THIS LIFE!

Okay, so there's a catch. Several catches in fact. A melange of catches. Here's what I tweeted last Monday right after Bray's first rocking chair speech, when it seemed like he was going nuts, mentioning "she" over and over...

You know what? The only way we’ll get Sister Abigail is if Bray snaps and becomes her. And you know what? I’ll take it! #raw

— Bat Fowler @NYCC (@TheMattFowler) October 3, 2017

But then, after Bray's second Rocking Chair breakdown, one of the women wrestlers down in NXT, a one Sage Beckett, posted this...

Sage, I had to remind myself, was in the Mae Young Classic, having lost to Bianca Belair in the first round.

So this was pretty awesome. Someone was going to move up to RAW and actually portray Sister Abigail. And why is this so ding dang important? Because it's wrestling and you can't give someone a creepy backstory that contains a ghoulish malevolent relative, who gets a finisher named after her, and not have her show up for real. You just can't. I don't care if she's "dead." That's easy enough to fix. This is the longest, most torturous Checkhov's Gun in existence. You can't mention that Bray had a sinister seminal mentor/loved one and then never have them arrive. That's not wrestling at all. Imagine if Kane never showed up alive to face Undertaker?

We came close to a Sister Abigail sighting last spring when Randy and Bray hung out around her burial shack and did sexy, ritualistic things with her bones. I thought she might pop up then, but it was a no-go. I also figured that if THAT storyline wasn't the thing that brought her to the main roster, I didn't know what could.

Also, here's the thing with wrestler call-ups now. Who just shows up on RAW or SmackDown without already having a solid NXT identity? A "Sister Abigail" would mean someone would have to either come in from the outside and circumvent NXT (that sweet sweet Mike Kanelis deal that's...not working out so well) or someone would have to change their established NXT persona. Which would be weird and diminish, ultimately, Sister Abigail's impact. Nikki Cross would be amazing, but it would mean that she'd have to sort of squash all she's accomplished with SAni†Y.

Obviously, and y'all know this more than anyone, my pick for Sister Abigail, years back, was Daffney. She had already retired from the ring at the time but if WWE needed Abigail to be a ringside worker, like an evil valet or manager, she could have done it. We've waited too long now though, unfortunately, which removes Daffney from even phantom consideration. Sage looks like a good fit though. She could come up and play Abigail. And if anyone was hinky about her doing a gimmick swap they could even play out a possession storyline. Like Sage becomes the vessel for Abigail's spirit or some s***.

But then I discovered, thanks to the ol' Google, that Sage is goddamn "Rosie Lottalove." Yes, the same woman who Daffney wrestled in a dark match for TNA where she got critically hurt. Daffney suffered many an injury over the years, bad breaks and concussions, but it was her match with the inexperienced, right outta Team 3D wrasslin' academy Rosie, where Rosie, who was about hundred pounds heavier than she is now, sat down on Daffney's sternum and crushed her that spelled the end for Daffney's in-ring career.

So now the top candidate for Abigail is the woman who is a huge part of Daffney not being a wrestler anymore. OH IRONY YOU CRAP SANDWICH. What a turn of the screw. A freakin' poopy-flavored lollipop. Some sort of Monkey's Paw s***, I swear.

By the way, I hope you all took notes just now about how I managed to make this all about me. It's an art. I'm quite proud.

Anyhow, Sage tweeted that out and I was happy to be getting a real-life Abigail but cosmically and karmically torn about who the part might be going to. One of the main reasons I've wanted Abigail for a while now is because, after the WWE totally flubbed Bray Wyatt being a cult leader and ruined that whole potential, bringing Abigail into the mix was the next best way to get him over and on a main event level. Getting a new bodyguard or valet, as you know, can do wonders for a career and I was looking for both storyline closure and a bump for Bray.

NOW THOUGH, if you care to circle back to my tweet above, the current rumor (despite Sage's tweet) is that Bray WILL be Abigail after all. That he's going to basically "Norman Bates" it up and show up to TLC as Abigail. In some sort of garb that hopefully doesn't look too ridiculous.

I mean...

I'll take it? I guess? It's an actual acknowledgement of Abigail as an entity. It's a cool way to keep the Bray/Finn feud going (even though they never seem to count non-PPV wins, as Bray beat Finn clean on RAW before SummerSlam) that actually taps into a part of Bray's story that doesn't involve his usual higgledy piggledy gobbledygook. We'll see. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might get what you kinda sorta asked for but in a different form that's meant to mock you on a personal hurtful level.