AEW Five Fingers of Death 1/13 - 1/19 Part 2

Athena vs Thelka Stardom 1/13/25

MD: I really shouldn't have sat on this for so long. I thought it was great. The same Athena, just in a different environment, with a different opponent, with a different layout, and a bit of a different role. This was "ace" Athena and honestly bodes well for All In if they're going to go Athena vs Mercedes like some people are thinking.

She was as giving as I'd seen her in this run to start too. Thelka, who was already under her skin coming into it, slapped her right from the get go and sidestepped so that Athena went tumbling. She tossed her into the chairs and really didn't look back for a number of minutes. Athena had a couple of bits of hope (such as one where Thelka, always vocal, had been jawing with the ref) where she started to fire back but she got cut off. It wasn't until she was able to fly across the ring with a kick while Thelka was on the top that she really took over.

She controlled for a while after that, a lot of hugely impactful shots with a real sense of vengeance (goddess scorned sort of stuff that she's so good at) before things opened up and became more back and forth. Athena was just a little more creative than usual here, supplementing her usual offense for the setting. It didn't always work but they did an admirable job turning it into perceived struggle when it didn't (I'm fairly certain the straightjacket powerbomb didn't work as planned but they recovered so well and so fluidly it hardly mattered).

Down the stretch she really did feel like an Ace, with HATE coming in and Athena able to dispatch them with relative ease. It gave Thelka a temporary advantage but in the grand scheme of things, it made Athena look larger than life on the road to the magic forearm and the O-Face.

I'll be honest. Not a ton of people saw this. I write about Athena's matches all the time and it took me a month+ to see it. There's no reason why this couldn't be a good part of a blueprint for a Mercedes match at All In if they want to go that route, just with a bit more of her particular style and some more crowd pandering for the homestate Texas crowd. I'm glad I went back for this one.