There’s a great scene in the first of many “Futurama” finale episodes where the Robot Devil says, “You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel. That makes me feel angry!” Apparently, as Cody Rhodes discovered, you also can’t just say “I will not turn” in pro wrestling, because the fans think that’s a little too on the nose.
The American Nightmare is entrenched as a top WWE star now, but he wasn’t quite at that level toward the end of his time in AEW. For a big chunk of 2021, Rhodes was doing programs with the likes of QT Marshall, Malakai Black and Sammy Guevara, not quite at the level of the company’s main event players.
Most of all, however, fans seemed to want to boo Cody at the time and he just straight up told them he wasn’t going to do it. It was a strange bit of business that broke even pro wrestling’s dubious fourth wall, and … it didn’t really work.
On a recent episode of Notsam Wrestling (h/t WrestlingNews.co for the transcription), Rhodes explained his thinking for trying that approach in the first place, as well as his thoughts on why it didn’t land.
I think at the end of AEW, I was talking to my students about this the other day, it’s just a case of, I have never underestimated our audience in a sense. That’s why I use a lot of big words and promos and people will say, ‘Oh, he’s talking down to them.’ No, they’re not. They’re not down. Like these people, some of them are doctors. Some of them are lawyers. Some of them are industrial workers. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean they’re not educated, like the wrestling audience is as educated as any audience. But at AEW, I think trying to do what I was doing there at the end was just a bit too meta. ‘Hey, the thing we want is you to turn heel’, so for me to do that, to turn heel, is by saying verbally out loud, ‘I’m not going to do it’, which is being a heel, but that didn’t work …
Rhodes added that the part of it did work was a match with Ethan Page where the crowd seemed to be split, and that he loves “polarized crowds” that are part of “the [John] Cena era of our industry,” which is right when Cody was coming up.
That said, Rhodes certainly understands the difference between “we’re booing because your character has made us dislike you” heat, and the much less desirable “we’re booing because we wish this was not happening” variety. Even if he might have been unwillingly floating toward the latter two years ago, it’s hard to argue that it caused him any long term consequences considering he’s recovered pretty nicely since then, thank you.