Thunder Rosa says the characters in AEW are edgier than what fans will find anywhere else, and that the wrestling itself is on another level too. Speaking to The Rockin’ Ride Home, Rosa was asked what separates AEW from other promotions.
“I just think the characters are completely edgy in comparison to other places, and also the level of wrestling is completely different than other places,” Rosa said.
AEW has carried a TV-14 rating since its launch in 2019, which gives the company room for more adult storylines and more violent matches than a TV-PG product allows. That has extended to the women’s division, where AEW has regularly booked hardcore and stipulation matches. The gap Rosa is describing has narrowed somewhat since she started, with WWE’s Raw moving back to a TV-14 rating in 2023 after roughly fifteen years of PG programming.
Rosa has been at the center of several of them. The best-known is the Unsanctioned Lights Out match against Britt Baker on the St. Patrick’s Day Slam edition of Dynamite in March 2021, the first match of its kind in the company’s women’s division, a bloody match at Daily’s Place that was widely praised at the time and helped establish that AEW would book its women’s division the same way it booked the men’s. The two met again at the following year’s St. Patrick’s Day Slam, where Rosa won the AEW Women’s World Championship from Baker in a steel cage match.
Asked later in the interview whether she ever second-guesses herself during a hardcore match, Rosa said the thought does cross her mind, but that she uses it as motivation.
“Yeah, absolutely. But then I think about, okay, let’s make this memorable,” Rosa said. “So it means something not only for me, for my partner, but also for the story and what we’re trying to tell.”
Rosa also described AEW’s live events as intimate in the same interview, saying that fans who have been to one already know what she means by that.
Rosa worked for Stardom, Impact Wrestling and the NWA, where she won the NWA World Women’s Championship from Serena Deeb in 2020 and held it into the following year, before AEW bought out her NWA contract in July 2021 and signed her full time. She had already been appearing for AEW under that arrangement, including in the Baker feud.
Her AEW title reign ended without a match. She vacated the championship in August 2022 after a back injury, with Toni Storm holding an interim version of the title in her absence, and she did not wrestle again in the company until 2024. She has worked a lighter schedule since, splitting her time between AEW and CMLL, where she is the current Mexican National Women’s Champion in her first reign. She also holds the Riot Cabaret Women’s Championship.
The women’s division Rosa is describing has changed a good deal since 2021. AEW crowned its first Women’s World Tag Team Champions following a tournament that began at Fright Night Dynamite last October, and the roster has added names with backgrounds in harder styles, including Thekla, who came to the company from Stardom. AEW has continued to run stipulation matches in the division rather than treating them as one-offs.
Rosa holds a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked in social services before wrestling full time. She also founded her own promotion, Mission Pro Wrestling, which runs in Texas.
