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I'm with Destor on this.
Emma's been fired before. Her 2014 comedy run didn't work, so they turned her heel. that was fun because Emma is nice to look at in NXT, but it meant nothing on the main roster. They fired her and brought her back because she was liked backstage. Then they tried Emmalina, which I admit I thought was going to make her a relative star for them, but she couldn't pull that off. Then she whinged about not getting any chances. I thought she might have been done then. They gave her a chance, she does alright, until it's time for her to get someone over, and she can't do it.
That's the job of a heel. Al Snow says it's their one job, but wrestling has broken down and become something a lot less focused than that. But that's what those matches were definitely for. How anyone can argue against that is beyond me. Asuka is making her debut, Emma is there to make her look good.
What is undeniable is that Asuka was less over coming out of these matches than she was going in. You can't tell me those matches got a fever pitch where the crowd was going ape-shit for Asuka finallly beating Emma. There may have been a smattering of applause or whatever, but her biggest pop was on entry because of who she was. Emma made her look worse. By the definition of what a heel worker is supposed to do, she didn't do her job. This is where you can fork, because the question is whether or not this is her fault.
On one hand, I want to lean with Destor. I don't think things are blocked out as exactly as people think they are. I really doubt an agent would have told Asuka to do the Ankle Lock, for example. I don't think Emma would have gone long or anything, but I think the particulars would have been largely up to them. And it didn't work. Twice.
The other side of this is that Emma may not have had as much freedom as we're saying, in which case, she probably should have pushed for a smarter match. She has not been booked well, so the very idea of her going six minutes with Asuka becomes a challenge. There's only so much cache you can have when you've been a joke for so long. But the company has clearly never had plans to use her seriously.
At the very least, I think Emma is at least guilty of not really having the mind to know what she was going to do was going to be suicide. It reminds me of when Bayley cut that promo that the crowd was begging her to stop, and she just kept going. Call it "doing your job" all you want, I think as a performer, an artist, a worker -- or however you want to look at it -- you've got to have good instincts, and Emma displayed that in the ring she just doesn't have them.
If she is responsible for leading those matches, then she's probably not a very good worker, and if the only role you have for her is making other people look good, and she can't do that, then what use is she? It'd be nice if everybody could be the top star in the women's division, but you've only got so many places. Emma is not shooting to the top of their list, so she had to be good in the Val Venis role. Except she wasn't.
Maybe she would have been better off staying in NXT (not that this is the purpose of NXT), or staying babyface, because then other people can make her look good. Maybe she should have been booked better if they want her to be the sort of main roster enhancement girl they want her to be. I keep going to say that it would be tough, but I really don't think it would be if she knew how to work a bit better. If she did the exact match they told her to do, then it is a bit more problematic, because it was doomed to fail in the first place, but then again, Emma was doomed to fail in the first place too.
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