The Eternals are one of Marvel's strangest groups, and Thena is one of their most
fascinating members. A scholar, a warrior, and an immortal, her life spans eons. We're
here to explain her entire story, from her ancient origins to her unique relationship to Greek myth.
The Eternals are an immortal race of super-beings, created through experiments on
early humans. Those experiments were conducted by a group of ultra-powerful pseudo-deities known
as the Celestials, some of the first creatures to ever exist in the Marvel universe.
The universe itself, called the First Firmament, created a group of servants. This group soon split
into two: the Aspirants and the Celestials. The Aspirants were loyal servants, who wished for
nothing more than to serve. The Celestials deviated from the First Firmament's plan, wanting
to create lives of their own. This led to a civil war between the inhabitants of the cosmos. In the
end, the Celestials triumphed. The First Firmament and its Aspirants beat a hasty retreat into other
fragmented universes, leaving the Celestials to tinker with the Marvel Universe as they pleased.
The Celestials landed on Earth eons ago and set to experimenting upon early humanity.
What resulted were two offshoot groups:
The uniformly beautiful and enormously powerful Eternals, and the dramatically mutated Deviants.
The Deviants' resentment of humanity led to an adversarial relationship with Earth's inhabitants,
while their mutation allowed them to build an advanced civilization in record time. In
short order, the Deviants built a vast and cruel empire. At the same time, the Eternals
voted to remove themselves from humanity, building isolated cities away from the rest of the world.
"We were instructed not to interfere with any human conflicts unless Deviants are involved."
Both of these outcomes displeased the Celestials,
who flooded the Earth upon their return. Thena, the daughter of Eternals' leader Zuras,
who was born as Azura around this time in the city of Olympia. Though she's thousands of years old,
she's considered quite young compared to many of her immortal brethren.
Jack Kirby created the Eternals with ancient Greek myths in mind. Icarus became Ikaris. The god of
the forge Hephaestus became Phastos. The goddess Circe became Sersi. To be clear, the Eternals are,
in most cases, not the gods they are mistaken for. Most of those gods actually exist in the
Marvel universe. One exception is that Sersi appears to really be the mythical Circe.
Generally speaking, though, the Eternals are frequently confused for their Olympian
counterparts. The Eternal known as the Forgotten One was often mistaken for Hercules,
who he's actually been buddies with since ancient Greece. It follows,
then, that Thena, daughter of an immortal named Zuras,
who led a city called Olympia, was mixed up with the goddess Athena, daughter of Zeus.
Centuries ago, the Greek gods decided to put down roots, only to find the Eternals already
established in Olympia. The two groups met and noticed the striking resemblance.
A deal was struck in which the Eternals would act as the Greek pantheon's representatives on Earth.
They would visit with humanity in the gods' stead, leaving the deities to
their pocket dimension of Mount Olympus. To seal the deal, Zuras decreed that his
daughter's name would change from Azura to Thena. She came to be worshiped as Athena,
goddess of wisdom, war, and handicraft. She even inspired the construction of the city of Athens.
The name stuck with her, and she's continued to use it.
Thena might not be as much of a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist as Phastos,
but she does view the fighting between the Eternals and the Deviants to be essentially
pointless. That viewpoint only grew stronger when she met and fell for a Deviant named Kro.
Kro and Thena met in ancient Babylon, where Kro had an opportunity to slay Thena. He
refused. Love grew between the two, but Kro and Thena knew to keep their relationship secret.
Their partnership is known to few, even as it carried on for thousands of years. They
eventually had children together, after reigniting their relationship during the Vietnam War.
Using her Eternal powers, Thena implanted the resulting twin children in a human woman
to continue to keep the relationship secret. They were born as Deborah and Donald Ritter,
seemingly ordinary humans. As Eternal-Deviant hybrids, they were anything but.
Having to keep up appearances of fighting an eternal war while secretly being in love with
your supposed enemy takes its toll. At times, Kro's actions brought Thena and Kro into direct
conflict. Kro attacked New York City, leading bands of Deviants through the city streets.
Zuras knew that he would have to fight the Deviants yet again,
and sent his daughter to help put down the Deviant uprising.
Though Thena was ultimately successful in stopping the Deviant attack,
Kro still believed he accomplished his goals. The Deviants
deeply hated the Celestials after years of being treated as second-class beings.
They believed that their attacks would inspire a widespread hatred of anything from outer space.
Feeling that he had done what he set out to, Kro accepted a truce with the Eternals.
Leading the Eternals When the Celestials came to Earth once again, the
leader of the Eternals made a shocking decision: He attacked them. Zuras believed the Celestials
would destroy all of humanity if they found Earth lacking. All of the world's semi-immortal beings,
including the Asgardians, worked to turn back the Celestials for their own reasons.
When the Eternals formed the Uni-Mind, a merging of their consciousnesses,
with Zuras at the center, it left the leader particularly vulnerable. When
the Celestials struck the Uni-Mind with a powerful bolt of energy,
Zuras was killed. Thena assumed command as Prime Eternal, until she was forced to abdicate.
Ikaris, one of the most hot-headed Eternals, never accepted Thena as the Prime Eternal.
And he carried quite a bit of sway in Olympia. He repeatedly challenged Thena for her throne.
And though Ikaris was unsuccessful, Thena struggled mightily with the responsibility
suddenly thrust upon her. She struggled with the idea that the same fate that met her father
might await her and suffered beneath the weight of being without her father for the first time.
It also didn't help that Kro had placed a device on her that very subtly manipulated
her decision-making to favor the Deviants. Thena was dedicated to keeping her people safe,
but her love for Kro, the influence of his device, and her general anxiety came
to a disastrous head when she attacked Ikaris to save Kro from certain death.
Ikaris took the opening, defeated Thena, and took over as Prime Eternal.
Thena was one of the many Eternals who had their memory wiped when the Eternal Sprite
manipulated reality. Totally ignorant of her past and powers, Thena lived life as a human
researcher, working for Stark Enterprises. She was knocked out of her mortal reverie by Ikaris,
who had broken Sprite's spell and needed the help of the remaining Eternals to stop
another Celestial plot. While living as a human named Ike Harris, Ikaris had been captured and
vaporized by Deviants. When his body reformed in the Eternals' abandoned city of Olympia,
he realized that all of the Eternals were suffering a similar case of memory loss.
"We need to find the others."
Thena and Ikaris traveled around the world to find their former companions,
all living as everyday humans, and eventually stopped the emergence of a sleeping Celestial
living underneath Los Angeles. After their victory, Thena decided to live alongside the
human son she'd had in the interim, over the objections of her fellow Eternals.
After millennia of life, Thena died alongside all the other Eternals in a 2018 "Avengers" story.
A group known as the Dark Celestials attacked Earth while the bodies of
regular Celestials began to rain down upon the planet. Tony Stark traveled to Olympia to check
on the Celestials' most famous experiments, and found the dead bodies of the Eternals.
In a dying monologue, Ikaris explained that the Eternals weren't sent to Earth
to protect humanity: At the beginning of the attack, they learned that they
were placed on Earth to cultivate humanity as a viral weapon. Ikaris tells Iron Man,
"We are a lie, Tony Stark. We Eternals were great fools. We weren't here to protect you. We were ...
to cultivate you. Your ... virulence. To them, to the space gods, you ... are a useful pathogen."
This knowledge drove the Eternals mad. As Ikaris lamented, they couldn't handle learning the truth,
and it destroyed them. Of course, this is comics, so all the Eternals, including Thena,
came back to life in the 2021 "Eternals" series.
The Eternals are one of Marvel's more obscure properties, and yet, an Eternals movie came to be,
meaning people around the world will soon know all about Ikaris, Sersi,
and all the rest of the gang. That includes Thena, who will be played by Angelina Jolie,
one of the most famous actresses on the planet.
"Hi."
"Hello."
Jolie has said she's committed to bringing a realistic version of the immortal warrior
goddess to the silver screen. As she told USA Today, she's explored everything from ballet
to swordsmanship in an effort to get the graceful fighting of Thena down. She said:
"She's a warrior. I'm going to have to work
very hard to give the Marvel Cinematic Universe the Thena they deserve."
Thena is a one-of-a-kind character who deserves an actress of Jolie's caliber.
She might be soft-hearted enough to fall for a Deviant,
but so too is she a legendary scholar, warrior, and leader.
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