WWE shouldn’t have booked an Alexa Bliss vs. Asuka title match for Raw
When WWE announced that Raw Women’s Champion Asuka would defend her title against Alexa Bliss on the Jan. 25 episode of Raw, bad memories of The Fiend feuding with Seth Rollins in the fall of 2019 kept bubbling to the surface.
The company made so many mistakes in that Rollins/Fiend program that ultimately ended Rollins’ babyface run. They sped too quickly to it in the wake of Bray Wyatt’s alter ego’s memorable debut at that year’s SummerSlam against Finn Balor — Rollins was only Universal Champion for a couple of months by that point, too — and they made the expedited pace of the story worse by sticking the two inside Hell in a Cell (because, in WWE, the calendar now dictates when Hell in a Cell is necessary, not the tenor of the narrative).
An invincible horror movie monster vs. a feckless champion inside a structure built up as the most dangerous in the WWE canon. Sounds like a match a promotion should schedule after at least six months of storyline progression, not six weeks. And of course, WWE made a situation they created worse by booking a non-finish inside the cell and further diminishing that match’s credibility.
In short, everything about Rollins/Fiend was a mistake, and it looks WWE is about to make the same one with Asuka and Bliss.
Is WWE booking themselves into a corner with this Asuka vs. Alexa Bliss match?
On the Jan. 18 Raw, fans saw WWE hit many of the same bad notes when Asuka and Bliss interacted with one another throughout the broadcast. Just like Rollins did with The Fiend, Asuka walked on eggshells to avoid drawing the ire of this new, spooky version of Bliss.
Yes, you read correctly. WWE booked Asuka, a woman who has instilled fear in opponents with a simple stare in the past, to be afraid of ALEXA BLISS. Then, when it came time for the two to wrestle in the main event, guess what we saw?
If you guessed “Alexa Bliss treating the Raw Women’s Champion like how Aaron Judge treats a batting practice fastball”, step up and claim your prize. After a few minutes of good back-and-forth action, Bliss decided to enter a Fiend-like fugue state and, as though she was playing WWE 2K with the sliders turned up, no-sold all of Asuka’s attacks and executed every bit of offense she wanted to hit before ending the proceedings with her variation of Sister Abigail — hence why she’s getting a title shot on this week’s show.
As Bruce Lee Hazelwood pointed out last week, this would’ve worked better had we seen this side of Bliss at any point in the past — her only other match in this role came against Nikki Cross, where Cross dominated most of the match before Bliss won with one move. The shift to becoming this world-beater who can dominate anyone she sets her mind to was too jarring to buy into, especially considering that Bliss is about as physically imposing as a department store mannequin. And we still don’t know whether Bliss is a babyface or a heel!
It comes off as more hokey than horrifying, and for a champion like Asuka who has received the always-frustrating “world champion who the company doesn’t see as a top star” push, it further reinforces their flawed view of “The Empress of Tomorrow”. It doesn’t help Bliss, either, as booking someone that strongly over top stars will make her matches less compelling (what’s the point of watching her matches if her opponents have little to no chance of winning?) as time goes on.
So, how will WWE dig themselves out of this hole they’ve dug for themselves? Well, they’ll probably do what they always do: book a non-finish.
At least if they go that route, it won’t be in a match with no disqualifications or count-outs, but this is a lazy crutch that the company leans on way too much; if you don’t want either wrestler to lose at this juncture, then don’t book the match. Non-finishes can work sparingly, but going to them over and over only makes fans less excited when future matches are announced — why bother anticipating a big match if you don’t expect to see a definitive conclusion?
Next. Dear WWE Creative: For the first time in a long time, I enjoyed RAW. dark
Rather than doing that, they could’ve saved this for the Royal Rumble pay-per-view — Asuka still doesn’t have an opponent for that show — or another event down the line. But instead, WWE put it on this episode of Raw and like everything that preceded this match, it’s all happening too soon.