Over the past couple weeks, Asuka has been transitioning to a babyface, along with her partner Kairi Sane. She was awarded the WWE Raw Women's Championship on the May 11, 2020 edition of Raw after Becky Lynch announced her pregnancy. Asuka, of course, won the women's Money in the Bank match the previous night, but she was unaware that the match was actually for the title instead of a contract for a title shot.
The rumor surrounding this face turn is that WWE wants a babyface as its Raw Women's Champion, in part because both of the top challengers, Shayna Baszler and Nia Jax, are heels. While Asuka has worked as a babyface before, she had a creative resurgence over the past couple months as an off-the-walls cartoon style heel.
For the most part, Asuka's main roster run has been less than stellar, and it may not be a coincidence that she's spent most of that time as a babyface. She got off to a promising start on the main roster, as she won the first ever women's Royal Rumble match. However, that promise proved to be short-lived when she ended up losing her SmackDown Women's Championship match against Charlotte Flair at WrestleMania 34 -- a questionable decision on WWE's part, considering that Flair then lost the title anyways only two nights later. Even when Asuka did win the title back later that year, she was really only a transitional champion to get the title off of Lynch and back onto Flair.
For whatever reason, Asuka has mostly remained as an afterthought in her time on the main roster, even when she joined forces with Kairi Sane to form The Kabuki Warriors alongside their manager, Paige. As long as they were babyfaces, they weren't really getting much recognition. It wasn't until they won the Women's Tag Team Championship in October 2019 and turned on Paige a few weeks later that they finally started to gather some attention. Even then though, it was still inconsistent -- until Asuka finally saw the best phase of her main roster run when she started acting like a zany cartoon character during the empty arena era. It showed what Asuka was capable of, but will this character still work with her as a babyface?
The fact of the matter is that Asuka just has not had much luck as a babyface, and if history is doomed to repeat itself, things might not look promising for her new face turn moving forward. It seems like Asuka's heading into a program with Nia Jax at the moment, and assuming that she retains her title through that feud, it's uncertain as to what would be next for her or even how she'd look by the end of the feud.
As long as she doesn't dial her character back -- especially once the WWE goes back to having crowds at its events -- Asuka's new face run might not be a bad thing. However, if Asuka's latest title run is to succeed, she needs to keep acting like the wacky cartoon character that earned her the title run in the first place.