10 Reasons Why John Cena’s WWE Legacy Is Disastrous
9. A Million Smiley Faces
"Sufferin' succotash!"
"Sparklecrotch."
"Tater tots."
The aforementioned insults weren't uttered by John Cena. Not directly. But they might as well have been; those lame, unfunny witticisms were penned in the desperate and impossible pursuit of his replacement. Humour is subjective - some people, even grown-ups, might have enjoyed the juvenile insults - but objectively, they were so clearly penned by a writer - a hack writer - that they only served to bring into depressing focus the fact that WWE is a heavily scripted enterprise scripted to maintain, forevermore, a divisive status quo:
Every babyface must become a Cena clone.
His successors aren't unique and engaging performers with identities of their own. They are cookie cutter replacements churned out by a factory production line, each infected by Cena's stigma. Reigns in 2015 never stood a chance, the material he was given was that diluted, that awful. A stigma lasts; that's what makes it a stigma. Hulk Hogan was stigmatised as the enemy from the North during his early WCW stint. He was the manifestation of everything wrong with pro wrestling, and had to completely reinvent himself to break it.
In the post-Cena era of completely luxury, such reinvention isn't necessary.