After a year of dominating NXT as the Tag Team Champions, The Ascension got the call up to the main roster toward the end of last year, and were promptly made to look like fools. The creative team chose to have The Ascension paint their faces, prompting the fans to accurately draw unfair comparisons to other painted tag teams like The Legion of Doom and Demolition. Rather than shy away from it, the creative team leaned into it, having The Ascension make asinine claims that they were already better than those aforementioned legendary teams. The announce team would then bury The Ascension for these claims. This is that throw them in the deep end and try to make them drown booking style that Daniel Bryan had to deal with early in his WWE career, but while Bryan was talented enough to overcome it, The Ascension have succumbed to it, and are floundering in the preliminaries.
