The Secret Truth Behind The AEW Codyverse

The Blackpool Combat Club is almost as impossible to make sense of as that deranged autumn of 2021. Last year, fans were asked to support them in their feud against heels Ricky Starks and Big Bill as, concurrently, they half-killed Fénix to write him out of All In and their match against wholesome babyfaces Best Friends. Now, and this is hardly bad exactly, and the matches are often awesome, Mox and the lads are basically just really hard and fight people who'd like to think they're harder. It's not all that credible, either, since the BCC don't hold any gold. They're all talk, to be pedantic about things. Wasn't Jon Moxley a significantly better character when he was the top babyface who promised the exact nature of his victory, and then got the job done?

Isn't Jon Moxley in 2024 - a tweener character far better off as a babyface around whom the top of the card is shaped - basically what Cody Rhodes was in 2021?

The plot has been lost again. Is it called the 'Moxverse'? No: all too often, this is just how Tony Khan books.

Now, Khan is a great booker on his day, but he doesn't half love this diluted, elongated overlap. He can keep track of it, because he can keep track of around four incredibly stressful full-time jobs, but the audience can't (or, they don't care to). These are wrestling storylines, so they aren't necessarily complicated, but they're plotted in such a way that makes emotional investment difficult. Khan is at his best when plotting something like CM Punk Vs. MJF, or more recently Bryan Danielson Vs. Eddie Kingston. Khan will use tertiary characters to advance things and work around the often boring promo/brawl loop - Nick Gage, Jun Akiyama - but when the all-important onus is on a protagonist and antagonist, AEW excels.

The Codyverse was and somehow still is a Tony Khan booking quirk. The entirety of AEW is Codyverse-pilled to this day. Khan signed too mny wrestlers ages ago; into the Khanverse they go.

If there's a lesson to be learned from the Codyverse, it is that Tony Khan is much better off simplifying his storylines - Cody himself is the best evidence of this, since he is the most over star in WWE's incredible resurgence period. Despite what you've read above, Revolution looks fantastic, and not just on the basis of the match graphics - but what match is selling the show as its centrepiece?

Sting, the most unmistakable babyface in AEW, vowing revenge on the over-the-top heel punks who were dumb enough to spill his blood.

That is a universal core theme.

Tony Khan needs to stop overthinking his way out of a maze; more often than not, wrestling is at its best when plotted on a straight line.