Brandi Rhodes Reveals Reason For Nightmare Collective Breakup

Brandi Rhodes made an appearance on Wrestling Observer Live and she discussed why the Nightmare Collective has been done away with.

The Nightmare Collective was the target of a large portion of criticism from AEW fans. The group included Brandi, Awesome Kong, Mel, and Luther and recently saw Brandi and Kong go their separate ways.

“The Nightmare Collective became the Nightmare Collective, there was no original ‘hey let’s do a Nightmare Collective where we have all these people and they’re doing all of these things’ there was never that. The original thing was supposed to be me managing Awesome Kong.

Unfortunately, you can lay out a huge trajectory of things you want to do and sometimes things just happen that don’t allow that to happen and one of the things was I noticed that Awesome Kong was not physically feeling great. And she’s my friend so I would never want to ask somebody to work in a capacity where I know they’re going to hurt themselves so what then happened was more of a greater group discussion of ‘okay well what do we do here’ and the Nightmare Collective came to be.

One of the things we claim at AEW is that we let our artists play their music the way they want to play it. I’m one of the artists that’s part of the nightmare collective and I started to see that the music was not playing how I liked it.

I didn’t feel it. I started to notice audience members were on the same page as me, I was starting to feel like ‘I’m not really understanding this’ or some things that are happening are happening too quickly for people to really keep up with this or it was a nice idea but we don’t have the time to explain it how people want to explain it so I think a big misconception is AEW made changes, not at all, I did. 100% because if I’m going to do something I want to be happy with it, and I was not happy with it. I was not happy with me in it I wasn’t happy with other people as far as how they were being portrayed and perceived…

Obviously, as we saw last week in a very serious show and a very serious moment we saw what people perceive as normal Brandi back. Kinda just made more sense to just let it lie in that aspect where it was… That gives us some closure but what it doesn’t do is tell us anything about Mel and Luther who are very much here. So that’s something interesting for people to look at as ‘hey whats happens next there’ it doesn’t mean its dead just because I’m not there. It just means I personally did not see myself as an asset to that situation. I wanted to do something fun and creative to kind of give some storytelling to that that I think was really necessary, and I’m good with that now.”

Brandi was involved in the segment on Dynamite which saw Cody receive ten lashes from MJF. She appeared largely out of character and it seems that was the end of the Brandi Rhodes character in the Nightmare Collective.

Brandi was seriously miscast as a heel anyway. She is one of the most underrated babyface promos in the business as shown by some of her work on AEW’s Road To… series. Now she has the chance to start again and portray herself differently.

If you use this transcript make sure to credit WrestleTalk.com.

What do you think of Brandi Rhodes in AEW? Let us know on Twitter!

• nightmare collective
• Awesome Kong
• Brandi Rhodes
• AEW

Share this article with friends