The Superhero Who Bleeds: John Cena and the Dramatic Multiplication of Truth

When history looks back at the long, kaleidoscopic age of professional wrestling live and televised, it will find few figures as improbable, extraordinary, and indispensable as John Cena.

His in-ring career will end on December 13, 2025. The record he leaves behind is impressive—championships, main events, longevity, discipline—but none of those statistics explains what has happened around him, or perhaps because of him, over the past two and a half decades.

For in the quiet corners of the internet lie thousands of testimonies—raw, earnest, unprompted—describing a phenomenon that should not be possible. These are not reviews, nor fan letters in the conventional sense. They are confessions. “Thank you, John Cena,” they begin. “When I was young, my circumstances were not good. I did not believe in myself. But you made me believe I could still amount to something. And now, years later, I share that belief with my children.” The stories are legion. Their tone is unmistakable: gratitude, sometimes trembling, sometimes defiant, but always sincere.

We should pause over this. How can a flesh-and-blood human being—albeit unusually motivated, disciplined, intelligent, talented—become, for so many, an agent of personal rescue? What strange alchemy is this, by which a man in denim shorts, fluorescent t-shirts and a baseball cap, performing choreographed matches before roaring crowds, can accomplish what counselors, teachers and coaches could not? What category of human achievement does this belong to? Not sport. Not entertainment. Something older, something more mysterious: the realm of drama.

In the world of comic books and cinematic universes, Captain America is genuinely inspiring. The Marvel films—especially Avengers: Endgame, which is in many respects a masterpiece of cinematic drama—demonstrate the extraordinary power of fictional narrative to move, console, and galvanize audiences. Steve Rogers is noble, self-sacrificing, steady; he embodies virtues we admire and wish to see reflected in ourselves. When he lifts Mjölnir or stands alone against the armies of Thanos, the moment rings with mythic force. It is real in the way great drama is real: compelling, stirring, emotionally exact.

But even so, Captain America remains a fictional character. His heroism is enacted within a sealed imaginative world that we inhabit only temporarily. When the lights come up, the world we return to remains unchanged. Rogers inspires us, but at a distance; his triumphs live in the realm of the ideal. In the realm of fiction.

But John Cena does not dwell in that realm. He performs in ours.

The difference is not one of artistic quality—Marvel has proven that cinema can achieve genuine dramatic depth—but one of ontological status. Fictional superheroes engage and entertain by embodying hyperbolic ideals. Cena, by contrast, embodies an ideal through his own finite, vulnerable, historically situated body. His courage, stamina, and persistence occur in real time, under real conditions, before a real audience that shares the risk and reward of his dramatic world.

He does not show us what a character might do. He shows us what a person can do.

And in doing so, he accomplishes what even the best cinematic or fictional heroes cannot: he creates a truth that survives the performance, a meaning that continues to work in the lives of those who witnessed it. His drama does not end with the closing bell. It multiplies outward, changing the emotional economy of the people he touched.

If this seems like exaggeration, one need only read the testimonies. They do not resemble celebrity fandom. They resemble something closer to gratitude for survival. Cena helped children endure isolation, helped teenagers survive bullying, helped adults find meaning in broken circumstances. He probably did not intend to play this role, as such; but once the role became real to him, and to us, he played it. The audience, recognizing the human form beneath the performance, completed the work by becoming more human, and occasionally, within the context of their own lives, incrementally more heroic.

One might ask: is this not sentimentality? No. Sentimentality cheapens or simplifies emotion; Cena’s dramatic truth intensifies it. His iconic gesture—“Never give up”—would be empty if not backed by twenty-five years of visible bodily cost: surgeries, scars, losses, humiliations, comebacks. What the audience recognizes in Cena is not a slogan but a life lived as if the slogan were true.

This is why the comparison to superheroes ultimately fails. Superheroes are fantasies of unlimited power. Cena represents the opposite: the possibility that a limited human being, with the ordinary constraints of pain, fatigue, fear, and doubt, can nonetheless become a source of strength for others. His heroism is not abstract; it is participatory. It is born in the space between performer and audience, in the shared enactment of a world where resilience is not a plot device but a lived necessity.

This is why he is the world record holder for Make a Wish Foundation events. No one will ever match his record.

And here we return to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s, Truth and Method. As he explains many times in this book, in order for a play (a “Spiel”) to be true, it must absorb its participants. Cena’s drama—his stories, his feuds, his improbable triumphs and crushing setbacks—works not because it imitates sport, but because it reveals something essential about the human condition. The audience recognizes itself in the struggle. They see the shape of their own lives in the form that appears before them. And in that recognition, a deeper truth emerges: the truth that one can endure, and that endurance can be shared.

When Cena steps away from the ring on December 13, 2025, it will not be the retirement of an athlete. It will be the concluding act of one of the most consequential dramatic performances of our time. For two and a half decades, he has demonstrated that drama, when embodied with conviction, does not merely entertain. It multiplies. It reveals. It rescues.

And in this sense, John Cena has done what fictional heroes cannot. He has shown that in the fragile space between performer and audience, a human being can become—through the power of mimesis—something more than himself. A truth-bearer. A force of hope. A man whose drama became, for many, the difference between despair and endurance.

That is not entertainment. That is art. And through art, he became a superhero.