👯♀️👩🏻❤️💋👩🏼😈MALICIOUS COMPLIANCE😈 👩🏻❤️💋👩🏼👯♀️
Xena Warrior Princess: Here She Comes Miss Amphipolis - Review
Well, I watched an episode of Xena. That's pretty much all I got.
Well, that was an episode.
Um.
I have no words.
None. My thoughts are gone.
I don’t know what I just watched. I watched a… something. It was… What was this?
I have no idea. So let’s just start from the top, I guess.
Um, Xena and Gabrielle are walking along a beach. A long romantic walk on the beach? Perhaps? Maybe.
You know what? They were out for a romantic stroll and they were…
12 notes
·
View notes
@girl4music I will join you in celebrating the timelessly magical experience of watching and loving Xena: Warrior Princess. And/but, I, like you, must take all day to get it out. Idk where or how to start. More accurately, I know I’ll have more to say than just in one post. I’m literally only on tumblr bcs this platform lets me experience this show in ways I haven’t found elsewhere. I’m new to tumblr. I’m also *technically* new to Xena. I watched sporadically when it aired, but as I was only 5 when the first season started, I didn’t have a lot of control or wherewithal re: my tv consumption. I found Xena again in college, like 10 years ago now, and was hyper fixated on it for maybe 6 months. And then I found it again this year when I was just feeling so low. I feel like a show has never lifted me as much as Xena has in 2024. I have literally not consumed any other visual media this calendar year. (Jk I watched some Spartacus, and on Sunday this week I watched the newest dr who season). But I don’t really wantttt to watch anything but xena. The story is fantastic. The character growth is phenomenal. The love they express may be one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. This show has everything I want and need: strong women who love and support each other. Who are there for each other beyond all else while simultaneously not sacrificing their best selves: rather, using that love to become their best selves. It has action it has love it has mythology it has comedy it has horror it has *history* it has growth it has personal exploration it has Romance and romantic exploration it has family dynamics it has rift shit it has beauty it has anger and hatred. It has human emotion. It explores dynamics between and amongst women. It has power passion and danger. I have more to say but luckily it’s only 9/3 for me right now and I have over 24 hours to write my love letter to this show (and also ostensibly the rest of my life. Bcs I feel I won’t stop digging the eff out of this show for quite some time). But for now I simply say thank you, Xena and Gabrielle.
Happy 29th anniversary to the pilot episode of XENA.
Original air date: September 4th, 1995.
Directed by Doug Lefler. Written by Robert Tapert.
Lead starring Lucy Lawless as Xena.
and Renee O’Connor as Gabrielle.
I will watch and write meta about other TV shows.
I will watch and write meta about other TV ships.
But nothing I watch or write meta about in this world will ever come close to matching my fan passion and loyalty to the TV show ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ and the TV ship Xena and Gabrielle. They are my one true love.
What ‘Sins Of The Past’ does once you’ve seen the whole TV show and watch the episode back over is it shows you how intertwined these soulmates already are as the event of them meeting saves their lives and once you are aware of the wheres and whys of this - the show itself completely changes into something more valuable than you initially saw and understood. I recommend people go back and watch it and only view it as a love story from the very beginning because the way it hits you when you do is just mind-blowing.
They set up a beautifully complex and layered WLW love story between Xena and Gabrielle without really realizing that that’s what they were doing because it’s such a very natural and authentic queer storytelling of two strangers that find home in the soul of each other.
"There’s not a word yet, for old friends who’ve just met” is a lyric in a song written by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher from ‘The Muppets Movie’. Writer and co-executive producer, who wrote many of the most formative episodes of ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’, Steven L. Sears affectionately ascribes that lyric to Xena and Gabrielle because he believes it perfectly describes the incredible soulmate connection that the two main characters share right from the very beginning of the TV show. And I would have to say that I agree with him on that because no matter what alternative Universe, Uber timeline, reincarnated lifetime or afterlife it is, they meet each other and they develop an attraction to and affinity for each other that seemingly goes way beyond basic friendship and romance and they have a dynamic that is so strong, so substantial and so damn profound that the studio gave up on censoring them. It’s a dynamite chemistry that can be felt so viscerally that you can watch the episodes countless times over and still pick up on fresh new things about the way these two characters are with one another and how they balance and complement each other so perfectly that they’re basically the human representation of yin and yang. And you can read my Xena and Gabrielle: Character study thesis to learn what I mean by that.
Their relationship is incredibly well-written in that it’s so carefully and conscientiously slow-burned and evolved from friends into lovers that it will make it impossible not to ship them together. Believe me - even if you’ve seen Xena before, you haven’t seen it like this. You haven’t seen it as a WLW love story from the beginning to the end. But once you do, you will be attached to it in ways that will make you just like me.
That is… Lifelong dedicated to and enamoured with it.
This is a TV show that finished airing in the year 2001 but it’s been my everything since I first discovered it at 5 years old just flicking through the UK channels bored out of my mind or so my parents have told me.
I cannot even begin to imagine of who I’d be without this TV show and TV ship in my life and I know no other will ever come close to it or them for me for the rest of my life. So all day today I am spending my time celebrating not just the TV show’s anniversary of its pilot episode but also Xena and Gabrielle’s anniversary of meeting and becoming the greatest love story ever told in TV art/entertainment history. They’re iconic and legendary in the LGBTQ community for a reason. That reason is that they’re the first and, honestly, still the best WLW/queer representation that can ever be witnessed and engaged with on the TV screen. The factors as to why that’s true are many,… but mainly… it’s because they were allowed to exist and evolve together as the only lead main female characters in such a way that no other WLW ship on TV ever would or could do so again. They may have been severely censored as an explicit romantic and fully maintext confirmed and committed couple on screen but the creators never let that prevent them from providing a depiction of an all-encompassing love that was much like a romance and still went beyond a romance. Xena and Gabrielle’s love went way beyond the boundaries of romance. I’m not ever saying it’s not that. I’m just saying that it’s more than that and that’s exactly what makes it even more romantic than anything else ever created at least in the TV format and paradigm it was.
Since then, the landscape has changed so drastically that TV WLW/queer ships are never given what they got. Which was a 6 seasons, 22-24 episodes-long epic journey of them just being each other’s absolute EVERYTHING. You can see, hear and feel every single moment of that in who Xena and Gabrielle are as both individual main characters and as a main character dynamic because they do not ever neglect any real and raw aspect about them. The only thing you do not ever get to see between them - although it is heavily implied often - is sexual intimacy. That really is not a loss because everything else that should or needs to be there is there way more than it is with any other WLW/queer TV ships in any other TV shows because they’re lead main characters. In fact… they’re the only lead main characters that are credited throughout the entire run of ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ and, honestly, sometimes I do wish TV ships in other TV shows would censor themselves every now and again so that they would be forced to dig deeper into the nuances and details as much as they did with Xena and Gabrielle.
I know many would disagree with me here but I’m adamant that the censorship helped them more than it hindered them because what you got instead with them was such a powerful representation of true love that didn’t have to rely on sex to represent it. I know that they couldn’t be shown to be sexually intimate because it wasn’t allowed to be sexual. Nowadays it can but I find that sex is used too much now when it shouldn’t be because a real life WLW/queer ship is more than sex and that’s why Xena and Gabrielle is still better representation even in this day and age.
It’s a combination of queer censorship, unbelievably strong chemistry between the leads and the creator/cast/crew’s sincere intention with queer storytelling that gave us the truly EPIC WLW love story that we got with XENA and I wouldn’t have it any other way because, for me, that is everything I could ever want.
So if you love this TV show and TV ship, please join me in celebrating the timelessly magical experience it is by writing meta about what these things mean to you.
XENA: “You know, I’m sending you home in the morning.”
GABRIELLE: “I won’t stay home. I don’t belong there, Xena. I’m not the little girl that my parents wanted me to be. You wouldn’t understand.”
XENA: “It’s not easy proving you’re a different person.
*Gabrielle eyes her curiously, Xena throws a bundle of blankets at her, gestures to the other side of the fire*
You can sleep over there.”
XENA: “You know, where I’m headed, they’ll be trouble.”
GABRIELLE: “I know.”
XENA: “Then why would you want to go into that with me?”
GABRIELLE: “That’s what friends do. They stand by each other when there’s trouble.”
XENA: “All right, friend.”
53 notes
·
View notes