Shane Helms recently returned to the WWE and resumed his role as a producer. A producer can do many things for the company, as Adam Pearce recently revealed.
Some of those things can be the work in helping give the superstars things that enhance and add to their characters, and according to Shane Helms, he can be credited with a recent change in Asuka that has added to her character over the last year.
Helms was a guest on the ROH Strong podcast, and he spoke about the creative process of the WWE. He had been active in the storyline with Asuka and Kairi Sane behind the scenes, and Helms says he pitched the idea of Asuka using the green mist like many Japanese stars before her.
“It was my idea for Asuka to start using the mist, and we had a lot of fun with that. This was a great story. So that was when her and Kairi Sane were turning heel that night and they’ve never been heel. Kairi Sane specifically never had and so I tried to think of something for them to do. It needed to be somewhat heelish but they haven’t — there’s no reason for them to go full murder-mode heel yet, you know what I mean? And they were already called The Kabuki Warriors. So for me, it wasn’t a big stretch. I hear ‘kabuki’, I think of old school Kabuki, there’s the mist. For me, that was my train of thought. But then I had this weird idea in my head. I said, ‘Is it weird? I mean, I don’t want to assume all Japanese wrestlers [can] do the mist.’ You don’t want to stereotype either so I wanted — I had to dance around how to ask Asuka about this and finally I just said, ‘Let me just go ask her. Let’s see what she says,’ and she got super excited about it and she told me she had did it once before and I was like, ‘I knew it!’ And so now, I got to figure out — and I don’t want to give away the secrets of the mist but there’s certain items you have to purchase because of it, and so, and that was a very entertaining conversation in and of itself. But it came off super well. That was fun.”
Helms has just returned from furlough, and even if Kairi Sane is no longer active on television, she’s now working for the WWE in Japan as a trainer and ambassador.
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