Html.Raw renders what it is given without doing any html encoding, so with ViewBag.div = "<div> Hello </div>";:

@Html.Raw(ViewBag.div);

Renders

<div> Hello </div>

However, when you have encoded characters in there, such as ViewBag.Something = ">"; the raw version of that is >. To get back to actual html you need to Html.Raw(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(EncodedContent)); as you’ve said.

If Html.Raw did do the decoding then it would be confusing, and we would need something that didn’t do it.