Mustafa Ali Retcons WWE's Entire RETRIBUTION Storyline
In which a phenomenal salesman tries to convince you it was bad on purpose.
Mustafa Ali uploaded a promo to the @TheMessageWWE Twitter account prior to last night's WWE Raw, effectively retconning the entire divisive RETRIBUTION storyline.
Sitting in a darkened room, RETRIBUTION's leader asked the audience to "imagine being judged because of your name" and "being mocked because of how you look." From there, he claimed to have given his stablemates "names and masks so that they, too, can know how it feels" to be ridiculed for their monickers and appearances, and "see the world the way he sees it."
"Imagine that," he said as he leaned back. The camera then panned out to reveal T-Bar, Reckoning, Mace, and Slapjack's masks sitting on a table before Ali - and the promo came to an end.
Ali's delivery was obviously incredible here, as he remains one of the most underrated talkers in wrestling at the moment, and he deserves credit for trying to make lemonade from mouldy, rotten lemons. However, WWE asking its audience to do the creative team's work for them by blindly accepting that RETRIBUTION's aesthetic was dumb by design is a huge stretch and borderline gaslighting.
None of this covers the stable's useless booking patterns, either.
Here's Ali's promo in full:-