Look, I started writing this on Monday night so that I have everything fresh in my head when I start doing the recaps, but there's been so much that's changed this week that I don't even have a whole lot of interest in recapping Raw in the usual detail because this week was most definitely about the events on Smackdown. But here's Raw in a nutshell:
- It was made official early Monday that the Raw Women's Championship match between champ Ronda Rousey, Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair would indeed be the headlining match at Mania. So that's a good thing... or at least it was as of Monday night and a good portion of Tuesday. We'll get to that later.
So literally the only Mania-related news from this episode is that HHH is going to quit if he can't beat Batista, Jost and Che are going to get the lack of humor beat out of them at Mania by Strowman, and Finn is going to Mania as the IC title contender. I don't count the headliner match announcement as a part of the program since it was announced well before the show.
Then we get to Smackdown and here's where things go fucking bananas in ways that are both good and very very very stupid. I'm going to first address all of the unimportant things so we can do a deep dive into the more interesting things:
- Kurt Angle came over to take on A.J. Styles. It was a No Contest because Randy Orton hit an RKO Outta Nowhere on Styles, and that was the happiest I've been watching a match of Kurt's in the last 12 months.
- Joan Jett is going to play "Bad Reputation" live at Mania for Ronda because money is a good thing to have.
- Miz cut a terrific promo about how he wants a Falls Count Anywhere match against Shane at Mania. Shane came out with 6 security guards, Primo Colon, Shelton Benjamin, and Sanity (sans Nikki Cross) and said he wanted to hurt Miz's dad more than he did at Fastlane because he helped spawn Miz by making the double-backed monster with Miz's mom and Miz attacked everyone while Shane looked on.
- Rey Mysterio came out with his unusually tall son Dominic again and said he was going to beat Samoa Joe for the US title at Mania, and no one really cared because this is not the match people wanted to see.
- The IIconics inform everyone that they'll be part of a 4-Way tag match for the Women's Tag titles at Mania against Boss 'N Hug, Natalya and Beth, and Nia and Tamina, so basically confirming my worst fears about this match.
Okay, so that's all the relatively inconsequential things. Now let's get into the big stuff, and I'm going to start with the good thing because I have less to say about the good thing than I do the bad thing:
The New Day came out at the top of the show and sounded like they were giving a farewell speech because they're extremely unhappy about how Kofi's been treated by Vince in regards to a title opportunity against Daniel Bryan. Vince comes out and says they're not going to quit in protest. Daniel and Rowan come out and Daniel seems like he's the real "Authority" figure here because he's been the snake whispering in Vince's ear re: KofiMania. Words are exchanged and basically the outcome is that Xavier and Big E have to fight in a Tag gauntlet match to earn Kofi (who is barred from ringside) the opportunity to go to Mania against Bryan. Now, I know I've talked a lot about fantasy booking (in fact, you can see my whole fantasy booking for Wrestlemania here) and what I was really hoping would happen (and to be fair, it still might) is that if Vince tried to break apart New Day by saying that if Xavier and Big E won this gauntlet, Kofi would go, but if Kofi loses at Mania, all the members of New Day are fired, or Kofi couldn't be part of New Day anymore if he loses at Mania; something to add an even deeper level of drama to this match. But that didn't happen (yet), and New Day started their gauntlet match against Gallows and Anderson, who they beat in 49 seconds from bell to bell. Yeah, the Good Brothers are likely on their way out. The next match is against Shinsuke and Rusev. This should have been a much tougher match for New Day to win, but they still won it pretty handily with their second Up Up Down Down of the night. Then came The Bar, and they were easily the strongest of the competitors. New Day ended up getting a roll-up win, and of course The Bar was apoplectic and began beating Xavier and E down, even putting E through a table. Then came The Usos, and Jimmy and Jey seemed like they were all ready to go, but then they talked up Kofi and how much respect they had for him after so many good battles against New Day and everything he did last week, and they forfeit the match. This was a particularly terrific swerve and totally in-character for Uce because they were cheering Kofi on backstage during last week's episode, and it would have really gone against the grain if they went in there to crush the dreams of the man they were so heavily rooting for. So this was the end of the match, right? Well, of course not because after they forfeited, Bryan and Rowan destroyed their dressing room and came out to be the final team to beat. Before the match even officially started, Daniel and Erick laid waste to E and Xavier, but they dug down deep; Xavier hit D-Bry with a from-the-apron tornado DDT outside the ring, and E rammed Rowan into the ringpost about 18 times and then threw him over the announce table and buried Rowan, who was the legal competitor, under the announce table and New Day won by countout, and Kayla confirmed with Vince as he was leaving that this indeed puts Kofi in the match against Daniel at Mania! This, in and of itself, was a very good thing that was made better by a post-show backstage segment that's on WWE.com where Kofi, Xavier and E all talked about how emotional they were when the win happened and how much they all love each other. You should really see it because it really hits you right in the feels.
Now, the only thing that is really not working for me (but I understand why they're doing it) is how much they're changing Daniel Bryan's character. A few months back, after he became champ, he was cutting promos on Vince, telling him that he and all the other Baby Boomers have ruined this planet. Now he's besties with Vince? That's an inconsistency that I don't care for, but I get that they're just trying to make Daniel an even bigger heel than before. These are the kinds of things they do on the "Road to Wrestlemania" and I'm sure that parts of Bryan's character had to be rewritten in order to account for the organic build of Kofi. So while I'm not a fan of it, I can still appreciate why it's happening.
That's the good stuff. Now for the bad.
After the New Day did their thing with Vince and Daniel, they cut to Becky backstage doing an interview with someone I've never seen before (to be fair, I don't know many of the backstage people) about how she still doesn't understand why her main-eventing Mania match includes Charlotte. Ronda brings the title, Becky brings the people, but what does Charlotte bring? A legitimate question. At that moment, Charlotte heads out to the ring, in her ring gear, and says that she's going to prove why she's in that match, and we get a commercial (real quick, so many commercial breaks sucked ass during this broadcast). When we're back, Asuka comes out and we find out that their match is actually a title match for the Smackdown Women's Championship! To be fair, this was a great match and it did prove why Charlotte should be in the match. She and Asuka went at it and it was excellent.
However...
After a lot of back and forth, Charlotte finally put Asuka in the Figure 8 and Asuka... tapped out. Charlotte Flair is once again the Smackdown Women's Champion. What a huge "Fuck You" to Asuka. Asuka has been the most under-used and under-appreciated member of the Women's division since her call-up from NXT, and for whatever reason, Vince booked her match at Mania 34 to end her undefeated streak to Charlotte, and since then, Asuka hasn't felt like a legitimate threat to much of anyone. Even her winning of the title at TLC against Becky and Charlotte was tainted by the interference of Rousey, although that was in service of their story and not of Asuka's and that's the real tragedy here. This win has reduced Asuka's presence on WWE to a footnote. When people look back on Asuka's career in WWE, they're going to see this massive undefeated streak and that's all, because she's been booked into either being a bragging right for Charlotte and Carmella, or as a supporting character in a bigger story, and that does not speak highly of WWE's apparent championing of the Women's roster, and the fact that Rousey, Flair and Lynch are main-eventing Mania has been reduced to lip service since apparently, not a fucking soul in WWE knows how to book more than one women's story at a time. Sure there's a "story" for the Women's Tag title match, but there's no drama to it because every women's story on the roster has come at the expense of Ronda, Becky and Charlotte.
This leaves me with a lot of questions:
1. If they're allowing the Smackdown Women's Champion to compete in a match for the Raw Women's Championship, why did they have Becky drop the title to Asuka at TLC to begin with? They could have just booked Charlotte as the winner of the Rumble. Sure it wouldn't have gotten the big pop, but hell, they still could have put Becky in the Rumble anyway and had her win, title and all. There's nothing in the rules that says a title-holder can't compete in the Rumble; it's just not something they do, and I get that, but this is still not a real sport. It has real athletes doing incredibly hard and frankly, I don't believe that it's hyperbolic to say, also life-threatening work just to entertain a whole bunch of people that likely spend a good deal of time bitching about it online (just like I'm doing here), but it's still pre-determined. So they can do literally anything they want to do as long as it's physically possible.
2. Is this, as potentially rumored, a plan to merge the Women's singles titles into one?
3. If that's the case, why are they even bothering with a brand split?
4. If not, if one of the competitors wins, do they win both titles? Admittedly, that would be a really fun idea for a few weeks, but the novelty of any of these women walking onto either show with both titles would have a very limited shelf life. If this ends up being the case, then yes, I would absolutely 1000% book Becky to win, and have her relinquish the Smackdown title so that Charlotte and Asuka can rematch for it and this time, have Asuka win it one-on-one. If they do end up merging the titles, that would be the worst possible thing they could do because it invalidates all this talk of having a "Women's Evolution" in WWE because we're back to half the roster fighting for two titles: a singles title and a tag title. It is absolutely possible, and I would add that it is essential, to have two Women's singles titles. It's a matter of actually building up the Women's division. Hire more known and experienced talent. Build them up in the same way that you anyone in the Men's division. It can be done; they just have to want to do it.
5. If it's not going to be a multiple title match, why did they book Charlotte to go over in the first place? The smartest and easiest way to book this was to have Ronda come out, punch Charlotte in the face while she has Asuka in the Figure 8, and that way, Asuka keeps her title and Charlotte has a better claim on being in the match against Ronda. It's become less exciting over the last several weeks because you can tell that Vince and Creative are throwing a lot of darts at this board to see what sticks in order to hype up this match as much as is possible when they didn't need to. The fans were already down, and the normies were either going to tune in or they weren't. Now we have an overstuffed match that has far too many moving parts and frankly, I don't trust WWE to make this work the way it should.
6. If you didn't have a Mania-worthy match for Asuka, don't make one. Or if you felt that the show was going to be too long, don't make the match. It's that simple. WWE works best when things are simple, and things are no longer simple. Would it suck to not have Asuka defend at Mania? Frankly, it would have been disappointing, but they could have done a triple-threat against Mandy Rose and Sonya Deville. She could have gone one-on-one against Naomi. Literally anything but this. They could have had another legend come out of retirement to have this match, or given this spot to Beth Phoenix instead of having her muck up the Women's Tag match.
7. This is wildly speculative, so massive amounts of salt need to be added to this, but I've been hearing some unsettling and wild rumors about Dana Warrior being very involved in the Creative end of the Women's division and I'll explain what I mean: we all know that The Ultimate Warrior was a massive homophobe and quite possibly a racist. Dana seems to be cut from similar cloth, and the reason that Vince booked this match to have Charlotte go over (and this decision was made the day of this match) was essentially a directive from Dana to fuck over Asuka because she's a POC. And the rumor that she didn't want to have Sonya Deville in a match for a title is because of her carrying on her late husband's legacy of discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. Again, that's a rumor, and I don't know if it carries any weight at all, but it might be worth a look.
Ugh. I'm just so fucking frustrated at this point regarding this whole situation that I can't even write anything more about it.
So while I know this one ended, well, angrier than I had initially laid out, I'm hoping that the next week and a half will at least pep me up a bit as far as how Mania shakes out! And that's it for my recap of Raw and Smackdown Live! Come back tomorrow for my recap of NXT, and probably in the course of the next week, I might have my Hopes and Predictions column for Mania, but honestly, I'm probably only going to be doing one for TakeOver New York since I've already had my fantasy booking of Mania column. I guess you'll just have to wait and see!
Until next time, kids...
- It was made official early Monday that the Raw Women's Championship match between champ Ronda Rousey, Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair would indeed be the headlining match at Mania. So that's a good thing... or at least it was as of Monday night and a good portion of Tuesday. We'll get to that later.
- Ronda, Becky and Charlotte were in a Beat The Clock challenge. Ronda set it at 1:25 beating Sarah Logan, Charlotte couldn't beat Ruby Riott in time, and Becky pinned Liv with 7 seconds to go. Becky rules.
- Then Finn qualified to face Bobby Lashley at Wrestlemania by winning a 1-on-2 handicap match against Bobby's single-serving partner, Jinder Mahal, who naturally ate the pin because Jinder.
- Then it was Aleister Black and Ricochet vs The Revival in a non-title match, and Kicks and Flips (that's what I'm calling Ric and Ali this week) beat the Raw Tag champs by a beautiful Black Mass to both Dash and Dawson and Ric hitting a 630. The match isn't official yet, but I'm confident they'll be challenging FTR at Mania.
- Drew came out, called Roman out by talking about his wife and kids; Roman came out, beat him up until Drew punched him in the dick. This set up Dean wanting to take Drew on in a Last Man Standing match.
- Then Sasha and Natalya had a good match that was interrupted by Nia and Tamina (sur-fucking-prise), and Beth stood tall in the ring at the end after hitting the Glam Slam on Tamina.
- The Hart Foundation is going in the HOF this year, and Natalya cried. It was sweet.
- Because of the urging of Braun Strowman, both Michael Che and Colin Jost will be in the Andre Memorial Battle Royal because reasons.
- Elias stood outside of Madison Square Garden in the rain and cold and someone stole his guitar case because New York City.
- Baron Corbin beat Apollo Crews and no one cared.
- Seth and Paul Heyman cut hella good promos on each other.
- Kurt Angle vs Samoa Joe because they feuded in TNA. Angle looked like he was going to have a heart attack at literally any moment (as usual), but he reversed the Coquina Clutch into a pinning predicament and won. There is nearly nothing I want to see more than Kurt having his final match so I don't feel sad anymore.
- Triple H cut a more comedic than usual promo on Batista using Spice Girls lyrics and it was pretty funny. Batista wants Hunter to put his career on the line at Mania, and he said sure. So it's No Holds Barred, and effectively a Career-vs-Career match since this is the last time we'll ever see Dave compete.
- Drew and Dean have their Last Man Standing match, and it's decent but nowhere as good as their Falls Count Anywhere match from two weeks ago. Drew wants to keep stabbing Dean in the eye. He puts him through a table and hits him with a Claymore to keep him down for the 10-count.
- Then Finn qualified to face Bobby Lashley at Wrestlemania by winning a 1-on-2 handicap match against Bobby's single-serving partner, Jinder Mahal, who naturally ate the pin because Jinder.
- Then it was Aleister Black and Ricochet vs The Revival in a non-title match, and Kicks and Flips (that's what I'm calling Ric and Ali this week) beat the Raw Tag champs by a beautiful Black Mass to both Dash and Dawson and Ric hitting a 630. The match isn't official yet, but I'm confident they'll be challenging FTR at Mania.
- Drew came out, called Roman out by talking about his wife and kids; Roman came out, beat him up until Drew punched him in the dick. This set up Dean wanting to take Drew on in a Last Man Standing match.
- Then Sasha and Natalya had a good match that was interrupted by Nia and Tamina (sur-fucking-prise), and Beth stood tall in the ring at the end after hitting the Glam Slam on Tamina.
- The Hart Foundation is going in the HOF this year, and Natalya cried. It was sweet.
- Because of the urging of Braun Strowman, both Michael Che and Colin Jost will be in the Andre Memorial Battle Royal because reasons.
- Elias stood outside of Madison Square Garden in the rain and cold and someone stole his guitar case because New York City.
- Baron Corbin beat Apollo Crews and no one cared.
- Seth and Paul Heyman cut hella good promos on each other.
- Kurt Angle vs Samoa Joe because they feuded in TNA. Angle looked like he was going to have a heart attack at literally any moment (as usual), but he reversed the Coquina Clutch into a pinning predicament and won. There is nearly nothing I want to see more than Kurt having his final match so I don't feel sad anymore.
- Triple H cut a more comedic than usual promo on Batista using Spice Girls lyrics and it was pretty funny. Batista wants Hunter to put his career on the line at Mania, and he said sure. So it's No Holds Barred, and effectively a Career-vs-Career match since this is the last time we'll ever see Dave compete.
- Drew and Dean have their Last Man Standing match, and it's decent but nowhere as good as their Falls Count Anywhere match from two weeks ago. Drew wants to keep stabbing Dean in the eye. He puts him through a table and hits him with a Claymore to keep him down for the 10-count.
So literally the only Mania-related news from this episode is that HHH is going to quit if he can't beat Batista, Jost and Che are going to get the lack of humor beat out of them at Mania by Strowman, and Finn is going to Mania as the IC title contender. I don't count the headliner match announcement as a part of the program since it was announced well before the show.
Then we get to Smackdown and here's where things go fucking bananas in ways that are both good and very very very stupid. I'm going to first address all of the unimportant things so we can do a deep dive into the more interesting things:
- Kurt Angle came over to take on A.J. Styles. It was a No Contest because Randy Orton hit an RKO Outta Nowhere on Styles, and that was the happiest I've been watching a match of Kurt's in the last 12 months.
- Joan Jett is going to play "Bad Reputation" live at Mania for Ronda because money is a good thing to have.
- Miz cut a terrific promo about how he wants a Falls Count Anywhere match against Shane at Mania. Shane came out with 6 security guards, Primo Colon, Shelton Benjamin, and Sanity (sans Nikki Cross) and said he wanted to hurt Miz's dad more than he did at Fastlane because he helped spawn Miz by making the double-backed monster with Miz's mom and Miz attacked everyone while Shane looked on.
- Rey Mysterio came out with his unusually tall son Dominic again and said he was going to beat Samoa Joe for the US title at Mania, and no one really cared because this is not the match people wanted to see.
- The IIconics inform everyone that they'll be part of a 4-Way tag match for the Women's Tag titles at Mania against Boss 'N Hug, Natalya and Beth, and Nia and Tamina, so basically confirming my worst fears about this match.
Okay, so that's all the relatively inconsequential things. Now let's get into the big stuff, and I'm going to start with the good thing because I have less to say about the good thing than I do the bad thing:
The New Day came out at the top of the show and sounded like they were giving a farewell speech because they're extremely unhappy about how Kofi's been treated by Vince in regards to a title opportunity against Daniel Bryan. Vince comes out and says they're not going to quit in protest. Daniel and Rowan come out and Daniel seems like he's the real "Authority" figure here because he's been the snake whispering in Vince's ear re: KofiMania. Words are exchanged and basically the outcome is that Xavier and Big E have to fight in a Tag gauntlet match to earn Kofi (who is barred from ringside) the opportunity to go to Mania against Bryan. Now, I know I've talked a lot about fantasy booking (in fact, you can see my whole fantasy booking for Wrestlemania here) and what I was really hoping would happen (and to be fair, it still might) is that if Vince tried to break apart New Day by saying that if Xavier and Big E won this gauntlet, Kofi would go, but if Kofi loses at Mania, all the members of New Day are fired, or Kofi couldn't be part of New Day anymore if he loses at Mania; something to add an even deeper level of drama to this match. But that didn't happen (yet), and New Day started their gauntlet match against Gallows and Anderson, who they beat in 49 seconds from bell to bell. Yeah, the Good Brothers are likely on their way out. The next match is against Shinsuke and Rusev. This should have been a much tougher match for New Day to win, but they still won it pretty handily with their second Up Up Down Down of the night. Then came The Bar, and they were easily the strongest of the competitors. New Day ended up getting a roll-up win, and of course The Bar was apoplectic and began beating Xavier and E down, even putting E through a table. Then came The Usos, and Jimmy and Jey seemed like they were all ready to go, but then they talked up Kofi and how much respect they had for him after so many good battles against New Day and everything he did last week, and they forfeit the match. This was a particularly terrific swerve and totally in-character for Uce because they were cheering Kofi on backstage during last week's episode, and it would have really gone against the grain if they went in there to crush the dreams of the man they were so heavily rooting for. So this was the end of the match, right? Well, of course not because after they forfeited, Bryan and Rowan destroyed their dressing room and came out to be the final team to beat. Before the match even officially started, Daniel and Erick laid waste to E and Xavier, but they dug down deep; Xavier hit D-Bry with a from-the-apron tornado DDT outside the ring, and E rammed Rowan into the ringpost about 18 times and then threw him over the announce table and buried Rowan, who was the legal competitor, under the announce table and New Day won by countout, and Kayla confirmed with Vince as he was leaving that this indeed puts Kofi in the match against Daniel at Mania! This, in and of itself, was a very good thing that was made better by a post-show backstage segment that's on WWE.com where Kofi, Xavier and E all talked about how emotional they were when the win happened and how much they all love each other. You should really see it because it really hits you right in the feels.
Now, the only thing that is really not working for me (but I understand why they're doing it) is how much they're changing Daniel Bryan's character. A few months back, after he became champ, he was cutting promos on Vince, telling him that he and all the other Baby Boomers have ruined this planet. Now he's besties with Vince? That's an inconsistency that I don't care for, but I get that they're just trying to make Daniel an even bigger heel than before. These are the kinds of things they do on the "Road to Wrestlemania" and I'm sure that parts of Bryan's character had to be rewritten in order to account for the organic build of Kofi. So while I'm not a fan of it, I can still appreciate why it's happening.
That's the good stuff. Now for the bad.
After the New Day did their thing with Vince and Daniel, they cut to Becky backstage doing an interview with someone I've never seen before (to be fair, I don't know many of the backstage people) about how she still doesn't understand why her main-eventing Mania match includes Charlotte. Ronda brings the title, Becky brings the people, but what does Charlotte bring? A legitimate question. At that moment, Charlotte heads out to the ring, in her ring gear, and says that she's going to prove why she's in that match, and we get a commercial (real quick, so many commercial breaks sucked ass during this broadcast). When we're back, Asuka comes out and we find out that their match is actually a title match for the Smackdown Women's Championship! To be fair, this was a great match and it did prove why Charlotte should be in the match. She and Asuka went at it and it was excellent.
However...
After a lot of back and forth, Charlotte finally put Asuka in the Figure 8 and Asuka... tapped out. Charlotte Flair is once again the Smackdown Women's Champion. What a huge "Fuck You" to Asuka. Asuka has been the most under-used and under-appreciated member of the Women's division since her call-up from NXT, and for whatever reason, Vince booked her match at Mania 34 to end her undefeated streak to Charlotte, and since then, Asuka hasn't felt like a legitimate threat to much of anyone. Even her winning of the title at TLC against Becky and Charlotte was tainted by the interference of Rousey, although that was in service of their story and not of Asuka's and that's the real tragedy here. This win has reduced Asuka's presence on WWE to a footnote. When people look back on Asuka's career in WWE, they're going to see this massive undefeated streak and that's all, because she's been booked into either being a bragging right for Charlotte and Carmella, or as a supporting character in a bigger story, and that does not speak highly of WWE's apparent championing of the Women's roster, and the fact that Rousey, Flair and Lynch are main-eventing Mania has been reduced to lip service since apparently, not a fucking soul in WWE knows how to book more than one women's story at a time. Sure there's a "story" for the Women's Tag title match, but there's no drama to it because every women's story on the roster has come at the expense of Ronda, Becky and Charlotte.
This leaves me with a lot of questions:
1. If they're allowing the Smackdown Women's Champion to compete in a match for the Raw Women's Championship, why did they have Becky drop the title to Asuka at TLC to begin with? They could have just booked Charlotte as the winner of the Rumble. Sure it wouldn't have gotten the big pop, but hell, they still could have put Becky in the Rumble anyway and had her win, title and all. There's nothing in the rules that says a title-holder can't compete in the Rumble; it's just not something they do, and I get that, but this is still not a real sport. It has real athletes doing incredibly hard and frankly, I don't believe that it's hyperbolic to say, also life-threatening work just to entertain a whole bunch of people that likely spend a good deal of time bitching about it online (just like I'm doing here), but it's still pre-determined. So they can do literally anything they want to do as long as it's physically possible.
2. Is this, as potentially rumored, a plan to merge the Women's singles titles into one?
3. If that's the case, why are they even bothering with a brand split?
4. If not, if one of the competitors wins, do they win both titles? Admittedly, that would be a really fun idea for a few weeks, but the novelty of any of these women walking onto either show with both titles would have a very limited shelf life. If this ends up being the case, then yes, I would absolutely 1000% book Becky to win, and have her relinquish the Smackdown title so that Charlotte and Asuka can rematch for it and this time, have Asuka win it one-on-one. If they do end up merging the titles, that would be the worst possible thing they could do because it invalidates all this talk of having a "Women's Evolution" in WWE because we're back to half the roster fighting for two titles: a singles title and a tag title. It is absolutely possible, and I would add that it is essential, to have two Women's singles titles. It's a matter of actually building up the Women's division. Hire more known and experienced talent. Build them up in the same way that you anyone in the Men's division. It can be done; they just have to want to do it.
5. If it's not going to be a multiple title match, why did they book Charlotte to go over in the first place? The smartest and easiest way to book this was to have Ronda come out, punch Charlotte in the face while she has Asuka in the Figure 8, and that way, Asuka keeps her title and Charlotte has a better claim on being in the match against Ronda. It's become less exciting over the last several weeks because you can tell that Vince and Creative are throwing a lot of darts at this board to see what sticks in order to hype up this match as much as is possible when they didn't need to. The fans were already down, and the normies were either going to tune in or they weren't. Now we have an overstuffed match that has far too many moving parts and frankly, I don't trust WWE to make this work the way it should.
6. If you didn't have a Mania-worthy match for Asuka, don't make one. Or if you felt that the show was going to be too long, don't make the match. It's that simple. WWE works best when things are simple, and things are no longer simple. Would it suck to not have Asuka defend at Mania? Frankly, it would have been disappointing, but they could have done a triple-threat against Mandy Rose and Sonya Deville. She could have gone one-on-one against Naomi. Literally anything but this. They could have had another legend come out of retirement to have this match, or given this spot to Beth Phoenix instead of having her muck up the Women's Tag match.
7. This is wildly speculative, so massive amounts of salt need to be added to this, but I've been hearing some unsettling and wild rumors about Dana Warrior being very involved in the Creative end of the Women's division and I'll explain what I mean: we all know that The Ultimate Warrior was a massive homophobe and quite possibly a racist. Dana seems to be cut from similar cloth, and the reason that Vince booked this match to have Charlotte go over (and this decision was made the day of this match) was essentially a directive from Dana to fuck over Asuka because she's a POC. And the rumor that she didn't want to have Sonya Deville in a match for a title is because of her carrying on her late husband's legacy of discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. Again, that's a rumor, and I don't know if it carries any weight at all, but it might be worth a look.
Ugh. I'm just so fucking frustrated at this point regarding this whole situation that I can't even write anything more about it.
So while I know this one ended, well, angrier than I had initially laid out, I'm hoping that the next week and a half will at least pep me up a bit as far as how Mania shakes out! And that's it for my recap of Raw and Smackdown Live! Come back tomorrow for my recap of NXT, and probably in the course of the next week, I might have my Hopes and Predictions column for Mania, but honestly, I'm probably only going to be doing one for TakeOver New York since I've already had my fantasy booking of Mania column. I guess you'll just have to wait and see!
Until next time, kids...
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