3 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (12 January - Results & Review)

1. Bad Trope Trifecta

WWE Raw Lyra Valkyria Bayley Rhea Ripley Iyo Sky Roxanne Perez Liv Morgan
WWE

Anyone looking for evidence that WWE’s creative team is cooked, look no further than the opening segment of Raw on Monday night, where the geniuses that book this show fired off a barrage of company favorite tropes to get things started.

New Women’s Tag Team Champions Rhea Ripley and Iyo Sky came out to celebrate their victory last week and lay down the challenge for any contenders. This brought out a steady stream of women’s tag teams. The order isn’t important, and neither is what they said, because none of that mattered.

All that mattered is that this promo train led to a Wild, Pull-Apart Brawl™, which in turn led to a triple threat tag match being announced for later in the night, with the winners being named number one contenders. The only tropes the braintrust left out were making this the main event and having it somehow end ambiguously so everyone “earned” a title shot.

It’s just lazy, paint-by-numbers booking, and it feels like that’s all they’ve got in the chamber. It’s not even worth raging about or going on a rant.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.