YMMV / Matt Hardy

• And You Thought It Would Fail:
  • Many who first saw "Broken" Matt Hardy could hardly believe that this gimmick would become the hottest thing in TNA and one of the hottest gimmicks in pro wrestling in general when it first came out.
  • The cinematic matches that were created by the Broken Universe were first derided as WTF on the highest level. Now it's seen as a turning point in showcasing brilliant stories thanks to Wrestlemania 36's Boneyard Match and Firefly Funhouse Match.
• Angst Dissonance: Get your awesome and incredibly popular Version 1 gimmick wrecked because WWE creative thinks the fans are responding too positively to it? Watch one of your best friends steal your girlfriend and get fired for complaining about it? Get rehired only to be stuck on jobber-to-the-stars duty for a year? Get stuck on jobber-to-the-stars duty for another year because you do something that gets The Undertaker angry? Watch said former best friend become a huge superstar specifically because he went behind your back and stole your girlfriend while you're losing matches? Get fired because you gained weight because of an illness? Wrestle another two years with another injury before getting the needed surgery? Watch you brother's drug related transgressions get forgiven repeatedly by WWE and TNA? "LOL, Fatt Hardy needs to man up and lose some weight." He may have enjoyed rubbing his "Iconic" heel gimmick on Twitter a little too much, but it's not without reason.
• Author's Saving Throw: The use of the "Broken" gimmick in All Elite Wrestling was overall poorly received outside of a few standout moments for a few reasons, including it not being as unique in a promotion that generally lets wrestlers carry their own gimmicks, the pandemic meaning an absence of crowds to carry "Broken" Matt Hardy's existing popularity, and an infamously botch-filled feud with Sammy Guevara that both wrestlers came out of looking worse. After this, Hardy switched to his "Big Money Matt" gimmick and took more of a manager role as head of the Hardy Family Office, which was better received as a much better fit for AEW's roster, and for being the kind of gimmick that doesn't need big crowd reactions to get over.
• Awesome Music: Not exactly like the "Moonlight Sonata III", nor the "Obsolete Suite" that he used in TNA, but his opening under his Woken persona, "The Deletion Anthem", still counts for the sheer hammy feel, largely thanks to Matt's intro.
• Broken Base:
  • His TNA World Heavyweight Championship heel run in 2016. Is it a fitting redemption for a man who's recovered from the mess he'd made of his life over the years, an ideal foil to the rise of EC3 as "wrestling's greatest hero", and a refreshing heel turn that for once doesn't involve Jeff in its motives? Or is it another case of an over-the-hill WWE-established guy being pushed as the top star above more capable homegrown talent, and TNA has done the "face wrestler chases the world championship only to turn heel immediately after winning it" scenario one time too many?
  • "Broken" Matt Hardy: A brilliant psychotic character, a comically hammy performance, or both? The jury is out on this one. He's been winning fans with this gimmick to the point that as of April 2018 he now leads House Hardy, Brother Nero included, as popular babyfaces.
• Crazy Is Cool: Broken Matt Hardy is probably the most accurate and literal example in pro-wrestling history. How else do you explain Matt and Jeff wrestling with a kangaroo that has the ghost of Joe Frazier, Matt speaking like Captain Jack Sparrow on way too many drugs, putting his two-year old son Maxel in a wrestling match which he won, or his father-in-law slash gardener Senor Benjamin being his own personal Q and Hyper-Competent Sidekick?
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Senor Benjamin, Matt's personal gardener and Reby Sky's real-life father, has gotten hugely popular with fans for his deadpan reactions to "Broken" Matt's antics.
• Fan Nickname: Fat Hardy, sometimes spelled with two Ts.
• Fountain of Memes: "Broken" Matt Hardy, without question, and like a certain other fountain of memes in professional wrestling Matt himself is incredibly self-aware of it too.
• Growing the Beard: It's clear that Broken Matt was just Matt and Jeff auditioning for a last run in the WWE. And it worked. TNA is a sinking ship and they know it. Still, with that said, TNA gave them a platform to do WHATEVER craziness they can dream up. So you have Hologram #BROKEN Matt!
• Ham and Cheese: He definitely has a lot of fun with his self-designed Broken/Woken gimmicks, which feature bucketloads of scenery-chewing and Evil Laughs.
• Harsher in Hindsight: That storyline in Impact where he fell off a platform and smacked his head stopped being funny when it happened to him for real during a match with Sammy Guevara.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • As "Version 1.0", Matt Hardy would make weight to be around the expected size depending on whether he was challenging for the Cruiserweight Championship or the WWE Championship.
  • During a match between Matt and Rey Mysterio Jr. in 2003, a fan can be seen holding a sign saying "V1 HAS BEEN DELETED".
• Hollywood Pudgy:
  • Matt is quite possibly the best-known male example. He's constantly made fun of for his weight gain (especially with Scott Steiner quotes). Even dropping the weight hasn't stopped the criticism.
  • In one vlog he explains that his weight gain was due to digestive problems, and has gone on many diets to drop the weight. The diets all included grapes. In one vlog, he was shown working out fairly hard (one might consider it a little too hard), and stating he would be on a diet guaranteed to help him in weight loss, but after that showed up in TNA just as pudgy as before, if not worse.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Grapes.
  • What does Scott Steiner think of Matt Hardy?
    "HE'S FAT!!!"
  • Pretty much every catchphrase he uses as Broken Matt Hardy. He's so self aware of this that he deliberately spreads it via his social media presence:
    • <insert person/group>, I KNEW YOU'D COME!^note From the contract signing for the Final Deletion; the scene where Jeff confronts Matt, who was playing the piano.
    • Brother Nero, it's OVAH!..."Oh SHIT!"^note From the Final Deletion, the part where Jeff fights fire(works) with fire(works).
    • "IT'S A DILAPIDATED BOAT!"^note From the Final Deletion, Matt runs to cover himself into an old boat from Jeff's fireworks.
    • "DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!"^note And with this, he joins the ranks of Teru Mikami and the Cybermen
    • You fade away and classify yourself as OBSOLETE!!! (OBSOLETE!!!)^note A line from Peroxwhy?gen's "Obsolete" song he appropriated. For the record, Peroxwhy?gen is Jeff's own band.
    • <insert person/thing> is OBSOLOETE / You OBSOLETE MULE!^note Following the former. "Obsolete Mule" is also used against Matt's enemies.
    • AGEEN and AGEEN and AGEEN and AGEEN!^note From a threat made towards his brother Jeff.
    • That meglomaniac in New York, MEEKMAHAN!
    • Meekmahan's Show.
    • I have a PREMONITION!
    • The Honorable Ring.
    • The Bucks of Youth and the OMEGA Man.
    • The Day of New
    • The New Wrestling in Japan.
    • Subterranean Lucha.
    • The man with three H's.^note From Total Nonstop DELETION!'s Tag Team Apocalypto match, after he and The Hurricane shoveled dirt onto the Helms Dynasty.
    • Le Hole of the Ass^note Since his appearance in All Elite Wrestling, he has referred to Jericho's "Le Champion" moniker as this.
  • Keyboard Matt
  • CHAIR OF WHEELS? MOWER OF LAWN?^note From the Uitlimate Deletion, the scene where Matt decides which thing he's going to use to hurt Bray Wyatt.
  • GENGHIS KHAN
  • "And fuck that owl."^Explanation The new management that arrived at TNA in 2017 (which would eventually rebrand the company into Impact Wrestling) didn't endear itself to Matt by asking him to virtually sign them the entire ownership of everything related to the Broken Universe, which would result in Matt and co. leaving the company. Matt's wife Reby Sky would sum up the situation in the aforementioned quote in a social media message (in reference to the new management in question, Anthem, using an owl as their corporate logo).
  • "You don't understand. How hard. It is to be. Matt. Hardy..."^Explanation Inspired by a series of videos Matt has released in 2019, showing him in rather mundane situations, followed by the said statement ad verbatim.
• Never Live It Down:
  • When it was discovered that his girlfriend Lita was cheating on him with friend and frequent on-screen foe Edge, Matt had something of a meltdown and got fired by talking about the affair publicly. Since then, Matt's been stuck with the stigma as the guy who Lita cheated on and never got over it. And it was obvious he hadn't gotten over it, seeing as he taped a reenactment of the break up and posted it on YouTube almost four years after they broke up.
  • He hasn't been able to live down being the guy WWE released for being fat.
  • Some of the language he used during the storyline with Edge and Lita was inappropriate for a sympathetic babyface. Primarily, in his return promo after having been fired, he wished death upon them via a car wreck and completely lost the crowd.
  • The fake suicide note. That incident made Jeff Hardy the more responsible Hardy brother, and that was the same year as Jeff's infamous Victory Road 2011 disaster.
• Older Than They Think: Matt was actually the first WWE Superstar to start a Web Original series, pre-dating Zack Ryder's Z! True Long Island Story by 6 years, and The Miz and John Morrison's The Dirt Sheet by 3 years.
• Smurfette Breakout: Even his ex-girlfriend Lita was remembered better and far more fondly than him. Lita's well known for her relationship with Edge (the guy she cheated on Matt with), which would give Edge the biggest push of his career, propelling him into superstardom. The whole Love Triangle thing being the one stain of her career, enough time had passed for her to even be considered and eventually immortalized in the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014, one year after her kayfabe arch-rival and real life best friend Trish Stratus.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: After the fake suicide note, he worked the hell out of putting his life back together, reinventing himself as an iconic heel on some promotions and apologizing on the others. And any doubts about Matt's ability to get over with the crowds were put to rest as soon as the "BROKEN" gimmick became highly popular, to the point of eclipsing his brother Jeff.
• The Scrappy: While his brother is a Base-Breaking Character due to his drug problems, Matt had been the universal whipping boy of the IWC ever since the Edge/Lita controversy. The fake suicide publicity stunt did him no favors.
• Win Back the Crowd: "Broken" Matt Hardy, not just for Matt, but as a prominent part of this for TNA itself. Within the span of a year, he's gone from being considered an absolute joke to being considered a creative genius, managing to reinvent himself as one of the most entertaining wrestlers of 2016. He's even eclipsed Jeff's popularity for the first time since the glory days of the Version 1 gimmick, and even received positive media attention. It's gotten to the point where Seth Rollins can innocuously say the word "Obsolete" on WWE Raw in a backstage interview segment and the crowd will instantly burst into "DELETE!" chants. He is so popular, he received thousands of Presidential votes in the controversial 2016 US elections. The man is OVAH!
• X-Pac Heat:
  • Even though they claimed to have wanted him when his brother was in Ring of Honor, the ROH bots treated Matt Hardy pretty roughly. However, when they saw Matt was going to keep all his ROH dates despite being rehired by WWE, they started to take a liking to him. Jeff Hardy remained a punchline at Ring Of Honor live events though.
  • Matt Hardy was met with X-Pac Heat anew when he returned to Ring of Honor and had to prove himself worthy, again. However, when he returned "Broken" he received a massive pop, suggesting that ROH fans have finally accepted him into the promotion's lore, or his "broken bandwagon" simply grew that much.

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