Introduction

[BYRON BRUCE IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER]

Byron Bruce has been wrestling since he was two or three. He was a wrestler all through school and through four years of college. He was very nearly an NCAA champion, losing a difficult match in the finals while struggling with an injury. From middle school on, he was an avid student of catch wrestling as well, largely because his middle and high school wrestling coach, Eric Anderson, ran a gym in his Iowa hometown called Anderson Catch Wrestling ("ACW") in which he taught the dying art of catch-as-catch-can. Watching that gym struggle to succeed, while strip-mall Karate and Taekwondo schools in the same area made huge amounts of money, was formative for Byron, who thought this was an injustice. In his view, this kind of "no shoes pajama fighting" was inferior to wrestling and catch wrestling, both technically and as a means of self-defense. He sought to prove it--he would challenge schoolmates who were training martial arts to backyard fights to prove their martial arts were bullshit and wrestling was king, and he won every fight, taking special relish in humiliating his opponents as much as he could before submitting them or getting them to admit their skills were fake.

This won his coach's gym a few more students, until a BJJ gym moved into town in Byron's junior year of high school. The school immediately attracted students away from ACW, and Byron made the mistake of challenging a standout greenbelt to a match to prove BJJ was fake. Despite outweighing his opponent substantially, Byron wasn't able to submit the kid--he controlled him nearly the whole match, but finally his opponent slipped to his back and choked Byron unconscious (he refused to tap). ACW was already dying, but Byron blames himself, and BJJ broadly, for its failure and closure a few months after his defeat. He became especially obsessed with proving wrestling and catch-wrestling were better than BJJ after that point, his antipathy eventually extending to Judo and Sambo and related fighting arts, and to most striking arts other than boxing.

After college, Byron got into MMA. He didn't much like not getting to wear shoes in the cage, especially since he knew this was a holdover from traditional martial arts, but he saw MMA as an opportunity to prove wrestling's dominance. And prove it he did. He was undefeated both as an amateur and as a pro fighter, but before he could challenge for any significant belt, a more lucrative opportunity arose: professional wrestling. That remains his day job, along with teaching young wrestlers and catch wrestlers the art he champions.

Byron still challenges martial artists to fights and grappling matches to prove to them, and to anyone watching, that wrestling is the best martial art, and that any other art is a waste of time. These matches are ordinarily in front of audiences, but for underground consumption, and Byron loves for them to have stakes--the more humiliating the better. Because the whole point (and in Byron's mind, the whole myth) of martial arts is that they teach skills that help the weak defeat the strong, he is more than happy to fight and crush smaller guys.

While Byron is absolutely villainous, and can be quite cruel, he does have a code. He will not fuck or otherwise sexually interact with anybody who hasn't agreed to it, and he will stop any sexual contact the instant somebody asks him to. He thinks it's dishonorable to go back on a deal--if the match allows him to fuck you, he expects you to deal with it if it happens--but he will not hold people to those elements of any deal. For this reason, he respects those most who accept their full punishment, and the lesson he means to impart with it: that they were wrong that they could defend themselves.

[STORY PREFERENCES]

[SUBSTANCE]

Open to a lot of ideas, but would need a strong reason to depart from the following:

(1) Byron is a big, strong, extremely skilled and athletic heel. He's going to win nearly every match in brutal and humiliating fashion. Challenge him if you are looking to write a story in which you are not only beaten but controlled and humiliated in a custom-designed manner on which we collaborate. That's his purpose.

(2) Pretty open in terms of match structure. Byron has an ego, so he's unlikely to do a one fall match against an opponent he sees as deeply inferior to him. He'll request a handicap, because this allows him to further display his dominance, and increases the humiliation of the person he defeats. Ironman-type matches with consequences that scale with points are great. Squashes and runaway victories are definitely preferred, except against extremely strong opponents. Byron prefers pro matches, but will do NHB or submission if needed.

(3) Byron is a bad guy, even if he doesn't see himself as one. That said, as noted above, he won't allow sex as a stake to slide into rape. He also won't kill. No poop or pee either.

(4) Byron is not a fantasy character--this is not a shade on fantasy, it's just not this particular character's thing.

[STYLE]

(1) Collaboration before we start the match. Not interested in not knowing who is going to win going in, not interested in it being unclear what we are trying to do with the match. Totally cool if we improvise certain beats, but want to work out the fundamental plot of the match in advance.

(2) Descriptive writing, both in terms of the in-ring (and out-of-ring) action and in terms of character psychology and motivation.

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Start of membership: 2025-12-17