John Cena’s eventual retirement has crept ever closer over the last several years, but few could have presumed that final run would include a character turn. Whether you’re a long time supporter, fan, detractor or generally indifferent, the run on its own matters. It demands your complete attention because the run in question involves someone absolutely synonymous with WWE.
Cena is not my G.O.A.T., but it would be ignorant to deny what he’s meant to WWE. His accomplishments matter, as do his championships, merchandising metrics, and community/charity work. When you take it all into account, storylines aside, that immeasurably matters.
In addition to his wrestling career, obviously for the last several years he has leaned into acting. This has been a whole new avenue to travel down. In that we also must accept that fans who only know him from Hollywood will be joining us in his final WWE “role.” There will also decidedly be many watching the product entirely because of the headlines with Dwayne Johnson and Cena’s names side by side. That’s without even discussing the implications of their wrestling story, and more broadly their past.
Before even touching on the gravity of his character turn, we need to understand the audience that could be watching what’s to come over the next several months. We are in a moment where arguably the biggest wrestler of the last 20 years is retiring, bringing in audiences from Hollywood to merge with WWE’s fans to witness the showcase of his “Last Dance.” That is foremost an opportunity to grow the WWE base akin to how their Netflix deal is a net positive for growth.
On its own merit, Cena’s Jordanesque “Last Dance” is an event unto itself. It’s a moment in time that demands your attention. The totality of this final run is what matters. That’s true whether you’re a weekly or casual viewer coming along for his last five knuckle shuffle.
The “Heel Turn”
Ahead of Elimination Chamber I said CM Punk and John Cena felt like the most likely to sell out. Each had their own reasons narratively, but Cena felt the most plausible for a number of reasons. Those motivations can be boiled down to fundamental emotions, namely pride, generally his own egoism, and more precisely insecurity regarding his legacy.
Absorb that for a moment and consider we’re talking about Mr. Hustle, Loyalty and Respect. Sixteen time champion. Hollywood star who posts motivational messages on social media and has granted over 650 wishes for the Make-A-Wish foundation.
Beyond pride and ego the question of “why” needs to be answered. I think there are two key points here. First, as his character has often pointed out, he’d been unable to win a televised singles match for quite some time. Fundamentally ask yourself: how much “hustle” can you maintain in the face of failure? Perhaps at some point, your foundation cracks and you’d be prone to taking a shortcut or two out of desperation. Maybe you’d even sell your soul to achieve your goal. For the ultimate “real” babyface to turn requires an equal grounding of his motivations so that the “why” makes sense.
Coupled with that, for himself and many others to consider him one of the greats in spite of recent struggles, you could argue he feels disrespected by a business and its fans that no longer need him. We’ve found replacements, and now WWE isn’t the only game in town. This is all leads to a growing sentiment of not putting enough respect on his name and accomplishments. When he’s not around? Out of sight and out of mind. When he returns, it’s all sunshine and rainbows, colurful gear, and a little gab followed by a loss and another exit stage left.
Taking all of this at face value, let’s say the man who criticized WWE talent for not being able to step up and fill his shoes suddenly feels slighted by the reality WWE no longer needs him. It’s fine with Roman Reigns, Cody Rhodes, Gunther and all of the other top level talent. Maybe the perennial good guy and former 16-time world champion has become a bitter man whose status as an obsolete afterthought has led him to want his pound of flesh before mic dropping from WWE broadcasts for the final time.
The “why” is what matters. Not the preface, nor the moment shin met groin and the beatdown that followed. That’s the effect, not the cause.
We got an answer on Raw Monday night.
It’s His Time Now
In the fallout of Elimination Chamber, I saw some social media postings from podcaster Chris Van Vliet. In his post he recounted a conversation with Cena where he said WWE was close to turning him heel in 2012. They had the music and gear ready to go, but balked at the last minute. Instead we continued to get Mr. Hustle, Loyalty and Respect against Brock Lesnar, Undertaker, AJ Styles, Roman Reigns, the Rock, and the Bloodline as a whole. He took the wins and losses with equal grace and humility, even when he claimed his 16th world title, and especially when we wanted him to go away.
And yet, he never turned heel. Even now when we made it “so easy for him” to break his facade. Instead the John Cena of 2025 is the most advanced version of his character, and with the experience to adapt his persona what we were given as he took the microphone in the ring on Raw is arguably the most complete version of his character. He’s neither face or heel; he’s an abstract. He’s a human being prone to ups and downs, successes and failures, with the effects of each having a lasting impact on his frame of mind. That includes a genuine emotional response to fan interaction within the wrestling context. To a degree it’s novel, but it’s also a variance of Cody Rhodes’ AEW Cena-lite perspective.
Regardless, that doesn’t automatically make the “why” or impetus for the turn inherently make sense. Cause and effect demands a direct response to the stimulus, and where that’s concerned the tone of the promo missed key beats and for now requires us to suspend disbelief. It also requires a degree of psychoanalysis to get to the heart of the turn.
A Human Response
The first thing we need to acknowledge is that pulling the veil back on Cena’s underlying humanity beneath the persona requires us to look at Cena “the character” outside the lens of it just being a wrestling story. In terms of it being a cut-and-dry action and response occurrence, it didn’t execute particularly well. Cena’s promo and motivations require some unpacking. Bluntly put the explanation was flimsy and a very well articulated “you people” promo. It didn’t meander like they can, and it was decently structured but the content fell into familiarity on the surface. That aspect of the moment was a disappointment.
I would also argue it was missing an emphatic point. The whole moment might have been served better if after Rhodes left the ring, instead of sheepishly leaving the ring Cena could have cemented his self-indulgence by proclaiming he was going to win his 17th championship, and for the first time, he was going to truly do it for himself. That’s a dynamic that Cena is talented enough to believably pull off with conviction. Perhaps it will come as the story progresses, but at the moment the conviction we saw throughout the promo tapered off into a whine we didn’t need. It’s still early, so let’s see where this goes.
There’s also another dynamic we need to watch for. We need to understand, if we accept this story as being a human-driven character moment, that right now Cena is second guessing his actions. Right now. It’s possible that was the impetus for Cena to stand there and take Rhodes’ systematic dissection. There’s potentially more here than at first glance. On its own merit it would be unfair to fail the turn immediately. I’m hardly a Cena fan but no one can truthfully say this was the most non-sensical about-face. This isn’t that simplistic.
‘Villainous’ Cena is a product of our own making
WWE and Cena are asking us to acknowledge the relationship between fan and idol as inherently toxic, one-sided and egocentric. That dynamic between you, me, and someone like Cena is amplified when we account for the fact he has been so publicly present, done so much charity work, and has been so polarizing. In that respect, what he said is true and his response is the effect deriving from our collective interactions with him. Whether they have been positive or negative, that character revelation is the product of how Cena subjectively feels he has been treated, used, despised, loved, exploited and ultimately cast aside throughout the last 25 years.
Woe is him? Yeah, that’s the point. His character perceives us as selfish and callous, and while he buckles under the weight of himself, all we can do is define his actions by how we are affected by them. That’s the foundation of the entire arc–we don’t actually care about his “why.”
Cena’s actions at Elimination Chamber are the product of it all; it’s a human response to being asked to do every appearance, every piece of charity, headline every card, carry the WWE flag from each and every arena to Hollywood and back again. His “turn” is a justified effect of having to thanklessly carry the load, continually resuming the mantle when asked, and at the end of the road still not being granted respect and gratitude. It’s the result of being undervalued as a 16 time world champion measured against Ric Flair even though Cena is a better human than Flair ever was.
That’s the point, and the cherry on the sundae is that through it all Cena never wavered until now. He never misstepped, never stopped smiling or trying to please. He stood tall for kids, inspired a generation of fans and worked hard to represent himself in a way that could be aspirational. And we booed him for it as much as we cheered him while wearing his merchandise from one arena to the next. While we did both of those things, while we took from him and bled Cena “the man” dry, we didn’t give the kid from West Newbury, MA. a second thought. The relationship was toxic, one-sided, and almost parasitic. Whether you bought his latest piece of merch, or hung on every syllable of his latest motivational social media post it’s always been one sided.
The value of his “why” is open to interpretation, but the reasoning is fair and valid.
The Last Dance
These early machinations are not perfect, but it is not without merit. At the core of his actions rests the simplicity of us having to face our actions and the monster we’ve created through our vampirism and indifference. We created this “John Cena” as much as he’s responsible for creating the facade he kept up to his own detriment. This John Cena is broken and is no hero, nor is he a beacon of goodwill and charity. He’s a man who’s had enough of our bullshit, and is ready prove himself to be great with one final story before disappearing on his own terms.
That’s where the value of this story is — we’re facing the product of our own belief that we can say and do what we like because we have a platform online. That is ultimately what catalyzed the breakdown of his character, and his response is the equivalent of his beaten humanity biting back. It is a stretch? Definitely. Concurrently, it is more complex than the average “turn” and shouldn’t be looked at just from that lens.
Before simply writing it off, this last run’s misdirection and its unusualness need to be noted. Moreover, we need to acknowledge that as easy as it would have been for he and the company to merely do a victory lap, they’ve chosen violence. Although they could tell a simple story of perseverance in the pursuit of greatness while hammering home the value of trying your best and giving it your all, that’s boring. Instead they’ve chosen to rip Cena’s values from our clutches, the same mitts he claims took and took from him, and turned “hustle,” loyalty,” and “respect” inward to inspire himself to be true to his own nature. This isn’t Cena turning against us so much as it is him turning away from the responsibility he self-destructively carried to his own detriment even as fans turned toward new idols for their slogans and life lessons.
This is beyond a face vs. heel dynamic. It’s a story about what it means to be a person and the responsibility of what that means. It’s the right to live and make your own choices, to self-determine your pathway, and above all have the freedom to make mistakes. The value in that is the lesson learned from the journey; what we learn about ourselves. I think that’s the story being told here. Regardless of where we sit today, we will be different, evolve and learn in the days, weeks and months to come. His character will too. While the genesis of these two moments are hyperbolic, who’s to say the ending will be the same?
Being a person in this world every day carries with it no direct path forward. We’re just people acting and interacting in a constant give and take. Maybe the moral at the end of this will be to treat people better, understand each other more and be inspired to become better people. Perhaps at the end we will learn it’s OK to both internalize his credo and apply that to how we interact together in order to “rise above hate.”
Who knows what the path is, and we probably won’t see whatever turns are coming on 2025’s winding road. However we need to understand that this story is both unique and a reflection of the reality we may not want to face. Secondarily to that, this story is occurring at a level we scarcely see. Although it’s easy to simplify this as another heel turn story in wrestling, its capacity is far beyond that simplification. This still could turn out to be a dud, but I suspect that because Cena has dared to shake up the paradigm, this could be a generational, human-focused story we discuss infinitum as a catalyst for how we view wrestling characters as people.
