Mustafa Ali Perfectly Explains Retribution’s Motivation With Just One Photo

The Retribution faction has been on WWE television for a few months now, but beyond a few promos about the group wanting to tear the WWE there hasn’t been much in the way of character development. More specifically, it was never explained why Dominik Dijakovic, Shane Thorne, Dio Maddin, Mia Yim and Mercedes Martinez — all wrestlers who have previously appeared on either Raw or NXT — would suddenly want to put on masks, start up a gang and tear down everything in sight. On Wednesday Mustafa Ali, the group’s newest official member and leader, took to social media with a single photo that suddenly explained the members’ motivation.

Ali captioned the photo by writing, “They asked ‘Why?’ We asked ‘Why not?’” The photo features five moments from the members’ careers — when Ali was on the brink of winning Money in the Bank only for Brock Lesnar to appear and casually toss him aside, when MVP introduced Thorne as one of his clients only to drop him weeks later, when Dijakovic was decimated by Karrion Kross as part of the build towards the NXT Championship match with Keith Lee, when Maddin tried to protect Jerry Lawler from Lesnar only to get F5’d through a table and replaced on the Raw commentary team and when Yim was replaced at NXT TakeOver: WarGames when Dakota Kai attacked her backstage.

As of now, it’s unclear why Mercedes Martinez (new name Retaliation) was not included on the list. On Tuesday Twitter user @domo_adams1997 posted a lengthy thread breaking down the character motivations of each character even further, to the point where he got a shout-out from Dijakovic (T-BAR).

Do you think Retribution is turning a corner now that their motivations are clear and have Ali as their leader? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!