#somewhat of a tribute to joxer the mighty

[girl4music]

I’m on to the ‘Livia’/‘Eve’/‘Motherhood’ Season 5 finale arc in my Xena rewatch and I have a question because even though it doesn’t bother me, I don’t understand why they had to do it. Why did they have to kill Joxer?

I mean it’s admirable that he went out in a heroic sacrifice trying to save Gabrielle and all but I watched the commentary for it immediately afterwards and they said that because they couldn’t figure out what to do with an old-aged Joxer that he had to die. But why?

Why not just never show up in the TV show again?

Why not spend the rest of his life after giving up warriorship with Meg and then dying naturally?

Why does the TV art/entertainment industry think that killing off a character is the only way to let them go?

Again, I’m not saying it particularly bothers me. I just don’t understand the notion that a character HAS to die in a TV show if they suddenly decide they don’t know what to do with the character anymore. Unless there’s a purpose or necessity to them dying, I don’t see why they have to. I don’t see why they can’t just still be part of the world but just never have any screen time again.

Now the question of “Is that what Joxer would want?” Considering he has a wife and children, I would say yes. I would say dying over some heroic sentiment to his best friend and unrequited love isn’t really something he would choose given the circumstances of having never seen them for over 25 years because he believed them to be dead and he started a family with Meg. If he had already moved on, then he deserved to live on. 😕

I just don’t see why he couldn’t have just done that instead of making one last noble gesture to Gabrielle.

Xena could have saved her. Xena always saves her.

Maybe that’s the answer. He wanted to be the one that saved Gabrielle this time. Even if it cost him his life. Maybe it wasn’t a choice more so than it was a knee-jerk reaction after having just gotten his friends back.

Still though, from a writing perspective, I don’t see why this had to be the way it is when they realized that they can’t really do anything with him anymore. That he is redundant so they just put him out to pasture in death.

I mean it’s not like it really mattered from a narrative development perspective either because Eve would turn good by the end of the episode anyway. All it really does is just makes it harder tor Gabrielle to forgive her. But she does because regardless of how she feels about her own domestic relationship with Eve, she loves Xena too much not to forgive her. Did they seriously just kill Joxer just so they could stick The Furies on Gabrielle to feed her deep inner feelings of distrust and anger at Eve’s murder of Joxer? That’s very thin reasoning to kill off a beloved recurring character. It doesn’t justify it.

I’m just tired of the excuses and constant need for creators to do this when it comes to long-form TV shows. It’s especially annoying when it’s queer female characters they kill off for the story and they don’t get any fucking say in it or are even aware of it. They’re just a plot device in the eyes of the creators so why would they? But to be quite honest it frustrates me in general. Queer or not. Female or not. Because they don’t have to do it. They do not have to kill off a character to end that character’s storyline. Not unless dying is the point to it.

It doesn’t bother me because it’s Joxer. It just bothers me that this is the way creators think when they know they’re done with the character. That they have to die.

Especially when they’ve already set up something that honestly requires them to live. Like a whole ass family.

The anger and grief in Virgil’s face was heartbreaking to to see when Xena kept stopping him in avenging his father. You never see Meg’s reaction to it but Virgil tells us in ‘Motherhood’ that “my mother was mad with grief” and that she had to give up the younger ones to relatives while she sorted through the immense pain she was in. While she and Virgil dealt with the affairs.

But he didn’t even get a proper burial, (not as far as we saw anyway) let alone an actual funeral. Virgil took him back home but that’s all we got to see as the audience. His farewell wasn’t important enough for us to witness.

You know the fandom make jokes that he was just “the comic relief” of the show and it wouldn’t matter at any point if they got rid of him. But I don’t think they truly believe that to be the truth. He was still important. Look at all the lives he affected positively. Meg’s specifically.

She was convinced that she could never have children in her line of work. He took her away from the shame and the hardship of being an unwilling sex-worker like he promised that he would and they had three children.

Argo - Argo was probably at a loss without her mistress but at least having a familiar face around in Joxer would soothe her pain long enough to have her own child who would go on to become Xena’s next loyal stead. Argo II.

Last but not least: Gabrielle. Although she never had any romantic feelings for him like he had for her, as she said: Joxer was special enough to Gabrielle to see her through both the best and worst times of her life. He meant a lot to her. She cared very much for him even if sometimes she was tough and cruel about it. Always picking on him. In a way - he was like the annoying but loveable brother that she never had. He was important.

Sure, he was the comic relief primarily but they did a little bit more with him in the latter half of the TV show that made him quite an endearing character and not just one to provide all the laughs. I appreciated that even if I wished they had delved into his backstory a little more than what they did. To show us why he was the way he was initially and why he ultimately chose to give up on warriorship to settle down and start a family.

Because if that was his informed decision to Meg… then he should honestly have had that as his endgame. Not to Gabrielle. Gabrielle was the long lost love that he could never have. Not just because she had feelings for Xena but because Gabrielle didn’t think of him that way. She had no romantic/sexual feelings or attraction to Joxer whatsoever. He was her friend. Nothing more. So having his last moments in the show in service to his love for Gabrielle just doesn’t feel right. But like I said above: It was probably more of a knee-jerk reaction. He saw that Gabrielle was in immediate danger of dying if she wasn’t freed and he reacted on a warriors’ instinct.

Goodbye, you loveable goof. I’ll miss you in Season 6. Your son may be ten times the warrior than you ever were, but he’ll never fill your shoes in the comedic department. That role was yours to own alone. R.I.P.