10 Reasons Why John Cena’s WWE Legacy Is Disastrous
4. Selling Off Selling
John Cena, as we've touched on, occupies opposite ends of the selling spectrum. He either flails in agony in the opening stages of his matches, having suffered little in the way of damage, or shrugs off the cumulative effects of an arduous match as if they were nothing.
Cena, having carried the company on his back for aeons, is the standard bearer. That is to the detriment of a fading art. Slowly, insidiously, standards have slipped across the board. In WWE today, if a performer blasts an oponent with their finisher from a great height, you can always just counter it with your own, instantly. If they jump from the height of Hell In A Cell, and through a table built throughout history as a deadly weapon, they can literally walk, not limp, onto the next TV show. Even if they absorb multiple finishers, they can always kick out of the next one for a cheap pop. This is because, under Cena's watch, the moves don't hurt, and the moves don't matter. In-ring strategy barely matters; moves all too often are deployed to suck up to a crowd - a strategy Cena used, year after year, to get himself over.
Much like the wider company's corporate mentality, content supersedes art.