WWE Raw: Asuka’s title win brings her uneven booking back to the forefront

Asuka is now the WWE RAW Women’s Champion and the second Women’s Grand Slam Champion, but those accolades mask some questionable decisions over the years?

As elated as fans were upon hearing Becky Lynch announce her pregnancy on this past Monday’s episode of RAW (along with the sadness of knowing we wouldn’t be seeing “The Man” on WWE television for a while), seeing Lynch bequeath the WWE RAW Women’s Championship to long-time rival Asuka delighted them just as much.

To be clear, this wasn’t a rerun of Eric Bischoff gift-wrapping the World Heavyweight Championship to Triple H back in 2002. Asuka earned the title by winning that race to Witch Mountain that was the Money in the Bank ladder match on May 10, but it did represent something of a torch-passing moment from the company’s biggest female star to the Joshi legend.

Almost immediately after Asuka became champion, folks rushed to Twitter to give the underappreciated star her flowers – the title win made her the second distaff Grand Slam Champion in company history – but, unfortunately, those accolades and the accompanying popularity have come in spite of WWE’s tortured star-making process (if you want to call it that), not because of it, especially after losing her first main roster match a couple of years ago.

Let’s not forget how, following the company scripting Charlotte Flair to end her undefeated streak at WrestleMania 34, Vince McMahon and his creative team conjured up the bright idea to have her put over then-SmackDown Women’s Champion Carmella, with each finish making her look dumber than the last.

Yes, she eventually won the title in a Tables, Ladders, and Chairs match, but even then, her triumph felt more like a plot convenience to further Lynch’s and Flair’s storyline with Ronda Rousey.

And if the finish – in which Rousey pushed Flair and Lynch off of a ladder, allowing Asuka to retrieve the belt – didn’t get that across, her virtual inactivity during her 99 recognized days as champion certainly did.

Once Flair beat her again for the title to artificially enhance the WrestleMania 35 main event, she spent the next few months floating along in a women’s tag team division the company doesn’t pay much mind to and only resurfaced in the title picture later in the year when Lynch needed someone to put her over.

Now, does any of this mean that Asuka was “buried” or treated like a complete geek? Of course not. Plenty of wrestlers would like to have won the titles that Asuka has.

However, it would take a tremendous amount of belief in WWE’s booking philosophies to not see that the company viewed her as merely a useful tool in the toolbox instead of a pillar to build the division around. Winning championships doesn’t mean much if the titles you win hold little kayfabe value or if you get treated like an afterthought for most of your reign.

But now as the presumptive top babyface in the RAW Women’s division going forward (if that heart-melting moment with Lynch didn’t cement her status as a protagonist, her antics over the last few months certainly did), she’ll now get her chance.

Aside from Kairi Sane, no one’s as equipped as Asuka to fill the Lynch-sized hole on the roster. WWE could have her lose the title to Shayna Baszler (not the worst idea) or, sigh, Nia Jax and have her chase one of them for a few months, but making that move right away would further establish that the company doesn’t see her as a tippy-top star.

That has been Asuka’s main roster reality for the last two years. But if WWE handles this right (I know, big if), this title run could be the start of a new one.