Athena On How Her WWE Name & Character Came Into Being

On a recent edition of The Sessions with Renee Paquette podcast, ROH Women’s Champion Athena reflected on her Ember Moon character from her time in WWE.

In September 2015, Athena signed a contract with WWE and was assigned to the NXT brand. On November 4, 2021, she was released from her contract, ending her six-year tenure with WWE.

Athena stated that the initial Warrior Goddess vignettes in NXT were a surprise to her. She also discussed narrowing down her name preferences to ‘Ember Moon.”

You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:

On finally settling on the Ember Moon name in NXT: “So it was Ember Moon, Ember Palmer, Ember Reese — playing off my husband’s name, my name. The final two were Ember Moon or Reese Palmer. I thought ‘Reese Witherspoon, Reese Palmer works.’ So those were the last two names I got to pick from. We didn’t really know where it was going and everything flowed together right as the first vignettes happened.”

On not knowing or being told the initial Warrior Goddess vignettes were for her: “Honestly, I had no clue it was me in the first vignette at all. When you’re in the system, as we like to call it, the PC system or whatever, they were telling me ‘oh, this war goddess thing will never work,” I was just just doing something normal at the time. I just kinda ditched this ‘superhero-vigilante’ style character and went into something else. I literally remember watching TV and seeing this ‘the stars align for the perfect moment.’ I was like, this is cool, I wonder who this is. I get to work the next day and they’re like ‘did you see it?’ See what? I watched NXT, it was a great match. ‘No, did you SEE IT?’ What are you talking about? ‘Those are your vignettes?’ I was like whaaaaaaa? That didn’t even look like me! Do I need to change what I’m doing? ‘Yeah, probably.’”

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