![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/cena_dom_wtf.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
ICYMI: John Cena defeats Dominic Mysterio, wins the Intercontinental championship for the first time in his career, becoming a Grand Slam Champion with less than five appearances left in his career<\/span><\/p>\n Lord, I always heard that this was a possibility during the whole John Cena retirement tour, and it was always something that I had hoped really wouldn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 And with the clock winding down, I thought we had hit the point where it couldn\u2019t possibly happen on account of the lack of time remaining on Cena\u2019s tour in order to make the handoff of the IC title remotely meaningful.<\/span><\/p>\n But, the WWE is all about creating moments, and short-term bursts of dopamine for fans, and long gone are the days where openly outgoing talent would eat a shit ton of losses on the way out, including the last one, to really drive home the notion that nobody is bigger than the business, and to metaphorically pay back the industry by booting future stars by taking losses.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying John Cena hasn\u2019t been taking his share of L\u2019s over the last calendar year, and for the most part, I\u2019m of the opinion that the retirement tour has been handled pretty well and I\u2019ve found a lot of it to be enjoyable, but I have to say that the most recent development in the tour is one part, that I absolutely disagree with and do not like, at all.<\/span><\/p>\n Dominic Mysterio has been so carefully curated all year long, protected and booked so brilliantly, winning the Intercontinental championship at Wrestlemania<\/em>, and then Mexico\u2019s AAA Mega Campeonato, all while navigating through Liv Morgan\u2019s injury, the Judgment Day\u2019s tumultuous camaraderie, and being chased by guys like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta.<\/span><\/p>\n He has defeated all challengers throughout the year, and has shown tremendous growth in character, and honestly, has been one of the only male performers I really bother to keep tabs on.<\/span><\/p>\n Feeding him to John Cena, and losing the Intercontinental blet at this stage of the game is something that disappointed me tremendously as a fan, and really makes me wonder if E Creative\u2122 really has a good idea where they\u2019re going with this, or if they\u2019re just eager to check off that very last feel good accolade for John Cena, as to make sure he has every single honor there could be, even if it meant coming at the expense of one of their most valuable long-term assets in Dominic Mysterio.<\/span><\/p>\n It also takes a big crap all over all of the guys who have been chasing Dominic Mysterio throughout the year, like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta, because Dom has been going to war with them all year, cheating and beating them dirty, but then he takes a 10 minute loss to John Cena like it was 2013 all over again, and there\u2019s something about the whole act that makes me feel like a year\u2019s worth of booking has been disrespected and peed on just a little bit.<\/span><\/p>\n Like, the Intercontinental championship doesn\u2019t benefit John Cena at all.\u00a0 He literally has no time to boost it or elevate it beyond what Dom has done with it, because last time I checked, he has three appearances left.\u00a0 And I doubt that his last match will also be for the Intercontinental championship, so that means he has to<\/em> drop it within his next two appearances, and in my opinion, fewer things erode a title\u2019s prestige than rapid changes, at least not without a good narrative behind it, and I feel like the E is really pigeon-holing themselves right now with this not-well thought out Cena IC run.<\/span><\/p>\n Basically, no way it\u2019s going to any of the 16 guys in the Cena Last Match Tournament, because it defeats the purpose for having a tournament in the first place, if one of them is going to suddenly get to have a match, a title match, against him before the last match.\u00a0 And outside of them, there\u2019s really not a lot of names that are just spontaneously ready for the Intercontinental title much less worthy to get a win on John Cena, genuinely one of the greatest talents in the history of the industry, which is a topic I may touch on in a future post.<\/span><\/p>\n I feel like the only real option is to drop it back to Dominic Mysterio, where Dom will win on account of there being a metric fuckton of interference from the rest of The Judgment Day, the Americanos, and he\u2019ll win dirty with an obvious foreign object, but at that point the question is why they had to have him drop the title in the first place, other than to placate a superficial career milestone?\u00a0 They derail an extremely strong title run and snuff out its momentum.\u00a0 Even if he wins it back, the mystique of his first run is completely reset, and it\u2019ll feel like a holding pattern until the next contender is ready, instead of like the run Gunther had with it, where it just felt like nobody was ever going to beat him.<\/span><\/p>\n Either way, as much as I have enjoyed the John Cena retirement tour, I will die on this hill that him taking the Intercontinental title off of Dominic Mysterio was not the best idea, and smells more of pandering and fan service than being a careful and calculated choice that would be worthy of being in the next season of UNReal<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ICYMI: John Cena defeats Dominic Mysterio, wins the Intercontinental championship for the first time in his career, becoming a Grand Slam Champion with less than five appearances left in his career Lord, I always heard that this was a possibility during the whole John Cena retirement tour, and it was always something that I had … Continue reading I get it, but I really really don\u2019t like it<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[151,100,45,83,52,69,146,54,49,55],"class_list":["post-50938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-blets","tag-comparison","tag-fail","tag-observations","tag-owned","tag-television","tag-triggered","tag-wrestling","tag-wtf","tag-wwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50938"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50940,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50938\/revisions\/50940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}