The Secret Truth Behind The AEW Codyverse
This was a bit of knockabout fun, but the development underscored to some that Cody was self-indulgent and without a serious, logical direction worth investing in. The Codyverse was more interesting than the above copy might convey. People spent a lot of time (probably too long) working out what it all "meant", and Cody did set himself on fire, which was cool. Cody...won the Codyverse?...by defeating Andrade on the December 1 Dynamite. During that match, he retrieved a golden shovel from under the ring. The last thing the 'Codyverse' needed was the smug, dreaded implication that it was all fake and that he'd used his political sway to become the last man standing on this mess of a chess board.
What did Malakai - remember him - get out of it?
By December, nobody cared to ask the question, and by January, after a diminished return to the TNT title picture, Cody, shockingly, was gone, citing a personal issue from which there was no resolution.
If the Codyverse can be summed up in a single sentence, that sentence would read:
A sprawling, ultimately meaningless overlap of multiple plot strands based on the emotionless and thus pointless premise of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Now, Cody, as with every other top AEW star past and present, had significant "say" in his creative direction. He gladly went along for the ride, at least for a time. You suspect the quirky randomness of that strange period appealed to his chaotic sensibilities. He liked, for a time, the "meta" of it all.
Cody is the most interesting person in pro wrestling. He can be extremely funny in a very cutting way, a mischievous guy with at times at a jet-black sense of humour. Bryan Danielson loves to lie; Cody Rhodes taught him how to lie. Cody has, variously, enjoyed torturing Flip Gordon and depicting Ted DiBiase, Jr. as a hick. The Codyverse seemed like something specific to this agent of chaos. He enjoyed the punchline of nobody knowing what the deal was.
Things have undoubtedly changed, now that Cody has absolutely perfected the role of top babyface in WWE. The man, to many young fans, is a life-affirming hero. But, once upon a time, Cody - and this makes a weird sort of sense of the Codyverse in retrospect - used to not believe in faces and heels. "There are good guys, there are bad guys, and then there are stars - and that's what you want to be", he told Ring Rust Radio in 2017 (h/t Wrestleview). He said something similar on Twitter in 2020: "Tired old tropes are even more insulting to the viewer considering I've been on their TV since I was 20. It ain't black and white, it hasn't been in forever."
In a statement that might explain the trollish aspect of the Codyverse, Cody also said to Ring Rust all those years ago: "I get to watch wrestling Twitter just sh*t itself and shut down and essentially have a heart attack".
While it was all Incredibly Cody, the secret truth is that the Codyverse did not actually exist. Or, more accurately, it continues to exist despite Cody's departure from AEW over two years ago.
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