The fact that Kurt Angle is this close to winning is an utter disgrace and indicative of a complete lack of understanding of what constitutes wrestling on the part of the people who participated in this thread. Utterly shameful. Any comparison between Cena and Angle that places Angle in the same league or even the same planet as far as abilities are concerned is laughable, in other words, Cena is galaxies ahead of Angle at this point in regards to anything wrestling related.
EffectsofRaven, in particular, has done an excellent service to the discourse by utterly demolishing the Angle related markdom and nonsense.
PHX said:
And therefore created a situation never before created for a top face in the history of wrestling where every crowd is split between him making a with him or against him situation. If anything that just adds to his legacy not against it.
You are right, that Cena's legacy as a result of his reactions is rather unique, however, he is not the first person to get these sort of reactions. Other top stars, such as Hogan, and Rocky have gotten these sort of reactions before. What makes Cena unique, unlike his predecessors, is that, the WWE is actually PERFECTLY happy with his reactions. They actually learned to accept it and use it to their advantage. You have to understand why Cena gets the reactions he does. At the end of the day regardless of whether you come to boo him or cheer him, the WWE makes money and they are perfectly aware of it. It is all part of a generational conflict. It is about the leftover Attitude Era fans VS the New Fans. No matter what Cena does, the new fans will cheer him, and this much is evident when Cena goes against most current generation wrestlers -- he gets the majority of the cheers.If Cena however, goes against an old school wrestler(HHH, Taker, HBK, Jericho etc.) he gets booed because of the Attitude Era fans.
Cena isn't the problem, it is just the nature of the product. If Cena became a heel, and adopted the values of the Attitude Era crowd, he would earn their cheers and favour but the New Generation would boo him and we are back to 50/50. The problem is that the WWE is going through a generational change, similar to the early 90's when Hogan got boos(see Royal Rumble 92 as an example) and cheers, because the fans really loved the Hulkster but had grown up to a point where they wanted to move past the cartoony 80's stuff, so you got the 50-50 split. The same stuff is happening here.
In his current capacity, in this generation, Cena is a great avatar of the generational shift. Remember, after the WWE had to go through a epochal change after the collapse of the Attitude Era, so naturally, there is some conflict between the fans and the product. There is nothing wrong with this. Cena still gets the an extremely loud reaction(it isn't whether you get positive or negative reactions but that you get them, which is indicative of the fans caring), does fairly well for the ratings, and merchandise and the additional PR stuff. There really isn't a problem, as some smarks would like to pretend with regards to his role and the reactions it receives.