WWE wrestler Ivar is one half of the popular wrestling tag team The Viking Raiders, who are currently known as The War Raiders. Ivar and Erik were initially a part of NXT, from where they got called to the main roster.
Their transition to the main roster happened after Wrestlemania 35, but were named as The Viking Experience. The name change and the rebrand didn’t go the way the WWE Creative team expected it to go, and after a lot of pushback, they were renamed to The Viking Raiders once again. This lasted for a good five years, and then both of them had to be taken off programming following an injury.
The Viking Raiders Undergo Rebranding Upon Their Return to WWE
After their return to the Stamford-based promotion, The Viking Raiders were reintroduced as The War Raiders, something which sat extremely well with their fans and their popularity skyrocketed almost immediately.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, he spoke about this continuous rebranding and how the company handled their creative direction.
He said, “When I had this opportunity to do the singles run and it was going well, I had a conversation with Triple H where he said, ‘Hey, how about we start pulling back off of the heavy Viking stuff, slowly peeling some of those layers off so we can tell more stories with you.’ I’m like, Oh, that’s great. So as we started to do that, I got hurt again, and then Erik and I were ready to come back. I think we were actually scheduled to return in Calgary at Raw.”
He further added, “At the last second, they pulled our travel and said that we’re gonna hold off for now. Oh man, here we go. They’re like, ‘No, nothing bad. We want to hold off. We want to have better creative for you.’ And then the next week, we got a phone call, Hey, how do you guys feel about coming back as The War Raiders? And we were like yeah that sounds good. That sounds really good.”
This goes on to show that the WWE Creative team is actually attentive to what the fans need and how the wrestlers perceive the storylines surrounding their character. And it is because of this very reason that the current storytelling has reached such great heights.
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