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The full transcript for the video essay is below. ⚔
Xena started out in 1995 as the poorer sister show to Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which hosted the character’s brief but memorable debut appearance in a trilogy of episodes entitled The Warrior Princess, The Gauntlet, and Unchained Heart.
A villain-turned-ally, Xena was rescued from the footnotes of television history when the dailies for her first episode came in, and sight of her in action triggered studio executives to call for a spin-off series.
And so Xena: Warrior Princess debuted later that same year, with absolute beans for a budget, relying heavily on freelance writers and with little faith from executives. The head of the studio at the time was firmly of the belief that Hercules was the real star property. Female heroes, he told producer Rob Tapert, were not successful in television.
Yet Xena would be beating Hercules in viewership by the end of its first year, and would go on to battle for the number one spot in the Nielsen ratings as the most popular syndicated drama both in America and internationally, occasionally beating out, among other things, Baywatch. By the end of its run, it had swept up numerous awards for both soundtrack and costume design, including multiple New Zealand Television Awards and Emmy nominations.
Filmed in New Zealand with both American and Kiwi cast and crew, the show aired for six years under executive producers Rob Tabert, Sam Raimi, and RJ Stewart. It featured two protagonists - a reformed ex-murderous warlord and her young innocent sidekick - as they went up against Greek Gods, mythical monsters, and the Warlord of the Week.
And this show had everything: Ass-kicking. Gay rights. Ngila Dickson’s costumes. Helen of Troy. Bruce Campbell. Comedy. Norse gods. A bomb-ass soundtrack. Heartbreak. Lord Celeborn as an ethnically ambiguous warlord. A Footloose episode. Homelander as the future King David of Israel. Betrayal. Gina Torres as Cleopatra. Jesus, kind of. Karl Urban playing like five different characters. Jesus again, kind of. Lao Tzu’s boss-ass wife. Trans rights. 90’s special effects. Xena teaching Hyppocrates how to be a doctor. Excalibur. Censored episodes that may or may not have aged well, we’ll talk about it. Beauty pageants. Lesbian vampires. Haldir of Lothlorien in a turban. Musical episodes. Time-traveling archeologist reincarnations. Doppelgangers.
The show was breaking the fourth wall before it was cool. Historical accuracy? We don’t know her and we don’t care to. Xena ran so that the crowd chanting “We Will Rock You” in A Knight’s Tale could walk.
Anyway, the eponymous hero was played by Kiwi actress Lucy Lawless, who made her debut in 1989 on the New Zealand sketch comedy show Funny Business, and since the end of Xena has gone on to recurring roles in, among other things, Battlestar Galactica, Spartacus, Parks and Recreation, Ash vs Evil Dead, and most recently My Life Is Murder - plus cameos in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and a particularly memorable episode of The Simpsons. She was also in Eurotrip.
There are a lot of behind-the-scenes factors that account for Xena’s success, but a lead actor can make or break a show, and Lawless, the last-minute replacement for British actress Vanessa Angel who dropped out of the project due to illness, was a fucking powerhouse from note one.
It was pilot season in the television industry, and following Vanessa Angel’s departure, the production team found itself scrambling for a replacement. Others were offered the role, but the proposed three-episode arc simply wasn’t worth leaving Los Angeles for the duration of filming. In the end, they just grabbed a local actor who had appeared briefly in a recent episode of Hercules, dyed her hair black, and put her back on set.
In Lucy Lawless’s own words, she was the lucky local kid who got the gig, and in her hands, the character became immediately iconic. Nearly six-feet-tall with broad shoulders, a deep voice, a first-rate murder glare and some absolutely fucking feral fight-scene energy, her portrayal allowed the show to soar out from under Hercules’s shadow and into groundbreaking - and bar-setting - campy action-hero legend.
The show’s secondary protagonist was a peasant runaway and aspiring bard named Gabrielle. Sidekick, moral compass, comic relief, and eventual love interest, Gabrielle was played with warmth, charm, and wonderful comedic timing by American actress Renee O’Connor.
And rounding out some but not all of the extensive recurring cast were also Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi, Hudson Leick, Karl Urban, Danielle Cormack, and the late, great Kevin Todd Smith.
The show also helped prep the New Zealand industry for the juggernaut that would be the Lord of the Rings, with Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, and Ngila Dickson all working on Xena before going on to receive Academy Awards for LOTR. Dozens of cast members and stunt crew featured in both productions. Sam Raimi went on to direct some of the most successful superhero movies of all time with Spider-Man. Xena’s main stuntwoman Zoe Bell would go on to double Uma Thurman on Kill Bill and earn a place as one of Hollywood’s most iconic stunt workers, while riding double Dayna Grant would work on Wonder Woman and Mad Max: Fury Road and eventually start her own stunt school.
A cult favorite among scores of fans from every walk of life, Xena: Warrior Princess is still upheld today as one of the best shows for women in television history, and the show’s impact is hard to over-state.
If you enjoy The Witcher on Netflix and want a genderswap where Geralt actually treats Jaskier with respect, or liked the battle scenes in Wonder Woman but thought you’d prefer a character with more grit who had committed multiple war crimes, or you love characters like Arya or Brienne on Game of Thrones but want more sapphics, zero rape and a much worse budget, Xena is the show for you.
So. This is the deep dive that no one asked for.
Toss a Coin to Your Warrior Princess
Xena the Warrior Princess is born in Amphipolis, in northern Greece, to an innkeep mother and a father of mysterious origins. As the story goes, when a local warlord attacks her village, the teenage Xena encourages her peers to fight back rather than surrender and her younger brother Lyceus dies, as do many other men from their town, leaving her first in line to bear the blame. Alienated from her own people, she decides they need a standing army as protection from further attack; then she takes the surrounding towns as a buffer; then she begins raiding along the Thracian coast. Ten years down the line, with multiple bitter betrayals, a secret child, crippling injury, and a lot of death under her belt, Xena is a rampaging psychopath who mostly refuses to kill civilian women and children, but definitely kills everybody else.
And then - and here we catch up to the trilogy of episodes that were her first television appearance, still in fledgeling form, as an antagonist on the show Hercules - she plots to kill the son of Zeus. He turns out to be a little out of even her league and she fails, finds herself in a moral quandary over the life of an innocent, loses her army, and finally turns her back on the evil deeds of her past.
Important to note here that Xena was initially meant to die after the completion of her three-episode arc, but her character was so goddamn good that they yoinked her from the storyline and gave her a self-titled show instead.
At the start of Xena: Warrior Princess, our eponymous former-villain is ready to give up violence - and perhaps her life - altogether, when she sees a group of villagers being captured by slavers and decides to rescue them. This is how she meets her soon-to-be best friend Gabrielle and they wander the land together, defeating evil and helping the innocent, all the while Xena is aware that nothing she ever does will fully balance the scales of redemption.
Women in Action: By the Numbers
Xena: Warrior Princess was in many ways an action show before anything else. A part of Universal's “action block,” it was heavily influenced by Hong Kong martial arts and wuxia films; particularly Brigitte Lin’s Bride With The White Hair, a film from 1993 about an orphan turned warrior on the path of bloody revenge.
And the place of importance that both the character of Xena and her show hold in the history of fighting women on-screen is legitimately hard to exaggerate.
To quote an Entertainment Weekly article from the year 2000, published upon news of the show’s coming cancellation, "The warrior princess was always allowed to be mean. Not ”steal your boyfriend” or ”diss your outfit” mean — which had been the usual lot of the TV tough girl — but ”mess with me and I’ll crush your skull” mean."
They’re not wrong, but the show wasn’t just groundbreaking because it featured an actress in armor.
While the number of female-lead action franchises have always dragged significantly behind film and television viewership demographics, according to audience gender surveys, moviemakers and showrunners have been handing weapons to the occasional scantily-clad actress for ages.
And this is where we’re going to talk about not-Xena for a bit.
It was Dr Caroline Heldman who popularized the term “fighting fuck toy,” which she uses to refer to hyper-sexualized characters that may seem empowered, but whose agency has been entirely stripped for the sake of making them into a sex object instead of a complex subject.
Sometimes we can even see a character evolve in or out of this state; one who is introduced as intelligent and comparatively utilitarian, but is later, even if temporarily, silenced and displayed as eye candy. Similarly, there are examples of the opposite; where a character’s introduction featured more shallow characterization and frequently put them on display for voyeuristic enjoyment, but who under the care of a different creative team were allowed to flourish and become more three-dimensional. And more practically dressed.
Comic writer Kelly Sue DeConnick similarly coined the “Sexy Lamp Test,” namely the idea that if you can remove a character, no matter how badass, from your piece of media and replace them with a sexy lamp, without this having any effect on the plot, then your character has no real agency.
And admittedly, some small part of that “fighting fuck toy” trope may be a characteristic of the action industry in general - Rambo doesn’t exactly market itself on three-dimensional emotional complexity and Hollywood has frequently pressed ludicrous and unhealthy expectations of fitness onto its male action stars. But Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, and today’s plethora of superheroes - these legends of the western screen rose to fame through their ability to sell their action scenes. Not their ability to look good in heels and a bra while occasionally waving around a sword that they shouldn’t have the muscle to lift.
Today, the pantheon of successful female action heroes who have been allowed to get dirty, look ugly, and wear utilitarian gear - who display both a complexity of character and the ability to throw a convincing punch - is always growing, but that growth is slow.
Flashback to the year 1964; the film, starring Sean Connery, would be the first major blockbuster of the franchise; the poster featured a naked woman in repose; and the tagline was, “James Bond is back in action! Everything he touches turns to excitement!”
Based on Ian Fleming’s novel of the same name, Goldfinger launched a public craze for the franchise, and it had some of the most iconic and enduring elements of Bond; Oddjob’s chakram hat, the line "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" and the Bond Girl whose name just barely scraped past American censorship - Pussy Galore.
These days, if you’re talking about complex, well-written characters in film, Pussy Galore isn’t the first to come to mind. The titular villain’s right-hand-woman-turned-reluctant hero and love interest, Pussy Galore was played by Honor Blackman, formerly of the British secret agent show The Avengers.
On one hand, well. Femme fatales with few layers - both in personality and in clothing - are a dime a dozen in Bond films, but there is a lot that modern audiences might not remember about the character.
Honor Blackman had learned basic judo for The Avengers, in a studio full of practitioners who had never taught a woman before. After a childhood using what she called her “terribly good uppercut” to protect her brother from bullies, Blackman spent two seasons of the show executing judo throws on concrete floors before giving up the reigns to Diana Rigg. When she went on to Goldfinger, her judo coaches went with her, and fans at the time remembered her as tough and intelligent, one of the first actresses ever to portray any form of martial art on the western screen; she had brought Bond to his knees and this was shocking, however briefly.
The next year, she published Honor Blackman’s Book of Self-Defense; and while most of the techniques aren’t workable in any sort of day-to-day circumstance and the picture demonstrations all feature the author in high heels and tight dresses, it was still an absolute rarity on bookstore shelves at the time.
An article in Life Magazine, 1966, said that Blackman was encouraging, quote, “pretty young things” to take up judo, promised readers that she wasn’t a man-hater, and assured them that Blackman only did her judo training before appointments with her hairdresser.
It would take ten years to establish the first proper action woman on film, though, with the rise of Pam Grier in blaxploitation films like 1974’s massively influential Foxy Brown.
To quote Grier, “The 1970s was a time of freedom and women saying that they needed empowerment. There was more empowerment and self-discovery than any other decade I remember. All across the country, a lot of women were Foxy Brown. They were independent, fighting to save their families, not accepting rape or being victimized... This was going on all across the country. I just happened to do it on film.”
And if there’s an ocean of change between Pussy Galore and Foxy Brown, there is an entire world between any Bond Girl and Ellen Ripley, who first debuted in 1979’s Alien.
In the years between Ripley’s first appearance and her return for the equally iconic sequel in 1984, Sheena bombed in theaters and swept the Razzie nominations; and Red Sonja was released shortly after to equally terrible result, neither of them favorable entries in the short, shaky list of notable film heroes.
A new icon wouldn’t arrive until 1991, when the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day propelled the gun-wielding, chain-smoking Sarah Connor to legendary status.
And this is about where the list maxes out. In fact, in Hollywood, it seemed that between the mid-70’s and early 90’s, Pam Grier, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hamilton were not only at the top of the female action pack, but almost made up its entirety.
According to this 2016 research paper entitled The Deevolution of Female Protagonists in Action Cinema, 1960–2014, there were 255 American action films in the 1980’s; 91.8% of them had male leading characters.
Meanwhile, some of the biggest blockbusters of the 80’s had been Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Batman, Rocky, Rambo, fucking Beverly Hills Cop. It was the decade of Lethal Weapon and RoboCop, of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris.
And yet by 1995, when Xena first aired, the list of American female action heroes was still painfully short. The Long Kiss Goodnight wouldn’t debut for another year, The Matrix for another four, Kill Bill for eight.
In eastern cinema, the story was a little bit different. Heroines had been appearing in action films for decades already, from early wuxia films of the 60’s to the the kung-fu craze of the 70’s, the stunt-heavy films of the 80’s and the Hong Kong action cinema of the 90’s, which influenced Hollywood filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and shaped much of the fighting styles seen on Xena.
As an example, by 1992, Malaysian dancer-turned-actor Michelle Yeoh had already cemented herself in legend on Supercop, where an all-out stunt war with Jackie Chan led to her jumping a motorcycle onto the top of a moving train without a wire. After the success of Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx in ‘95, Supercop finally saw a wide American release in 1996; the next year, Michelle Yeoh would appear as a Bond Girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, her mainstream introduction to a western audience. Now, over twenty years later, she has been in some of the biggest action movies to hit American screens, and with Everything Everywhere All At Once releasing in 2022, maybe also one of the best films in recent memory.
And yet for actresses in America, to quote Star Trek Voyager’s Jeri Ryan in 1999, “If you’ll notice, the film industry hasn’t exactly capitalized on the success of action women. There was Sigourney Weaver. And Linda Hamilton. And…well, that’s about it.”
So, what about television of the day?
In Gender and Women’s Leadership: A Reference Handbook by Natalie Greene, the author neatly graphs Nielson rankings of the top 10 broadcast television programs on the four biggest channels for American network television.
In the 1950’s, excluding repeats, only three of those shows - a whopping 6% - weren’t led by men, and more than half of the women on television were portraying housewives.
In the 1960’s, the number rose to 14%, and then in the 1970’s, to 24.5%. Yet in ‘73, the year of Roe v. Wade, in an article for TV Guide, Leonard Gross reported that network executives were struggling to see the appeal in expanding these roles on-screen, with a CBS official reportedly asking, and I quote, “Who wants to see a prime-time series about a woman?”
The same year, author Betty Miles, who penned "Channeling Children: Sex Stereotyping in Prime Time TV," ran a small study of the 16 top-rated evening broadcast programs at the time. According to her findings, men in action-adventure programming outnumbered women by six to one. Furthermore, fewer men displayed what she called “incompetent” or “bungling” behavior.
The Bionic Woman was a rare superhero show which featured as its lead Jaime Sommers, a character of immense physical strength who often used that strength - as opposed to her sexuality, a more common feature of Charlie’s Angels - to achieve her ends. In both cases, they generally received their orders from higher-ranking men, but like the police duo Cagney and Lacey a decade later, they were notable heroes of the small screen.
In 1982, the National Commission on Working Women sponsored its first “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” report, where it discovered that out of television’s top-ranked twenty-five shows and twenty-five newly introduced series, men still made up roughly two thirds of all on-screen characters. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of these were also young and white.
Fast forward nearly a decade, when according to an article published by the New York Times, the same study now looked at 555 characters on 80 network shows for the 1989 to 1990 season. On screen, women now made up 43% of all roles, the closest it’s ever come to half on network television. And, quoting the same study, “Despite some exceptions, the study says, women are often still depicted on television as half-clad and half-witted, and needing to be rescued by quick-thinking, fully clothed men.”
There were apparently also more aliens - as in, actual extraterrestrials from outer space - on broadcast TV than Asians, Latin-Americans and Native Americans combined.
Similarly, by 1997, the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University was co-sponsoring the annual “Boxed In” report to track gender statistics both on-screen and behind the camera in the United States. At the time, a time when women accounted for roughly 50.81% of the American population, they again only held only 39% of all speaking roles on broadcast television.
By the early 2000, lovers of genre content had Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape. But even here, plenty of these characters were technically playing second fiddle to a lead actor.
Throughout each decade, the majority of these shows were in the comedy/sitcom category, as opposed to drama or action, and the statistics are even worse behind the camera. Even on Xena, only a handful of episodes per season were usually written by a woman, and only five episodes were ever directed by one.
So, what about your characters in positions of power on-screen? What about your captain, your boss, your general action hero?
Just as Xena was kicking into production in mid-1995, Kay Koplovitz, CEO of USA Networks, was noted as saying that female characters who were too strong could be, and I quote, “intimidating, off-putting, and overbearing to men and women.”
So let’s examine that a little.
We’re only talking about television here, but what television presents as social or political standard often influences attitudes in real life; children and adults both are taught and impacted by on-screen behavior, and the easiest example of this is usually the Jaws Effect. Coined by Dr Christopher Neff at the University of Sydney, the Jaws Effect refers to the film’s massive and highly detrimental impact on how the general public viewed the shark species. It directly influenced an upkick in large-scale hunting, government-sponsored shark culling programs, and the impeding of shark conservation efforts. More than 100 million sharks are now killed each year.
So when we look at the visibility statistics on screen as well as behind the camera in America, we are to some degree examining the social mindset of that era.
In 1965, women made up only 2% of the US Senate; that number would barely improve until 1993, and by the time Xena aired in 1995, the number had come to a then-all-time high of 9%.
We're still only at 27% today, by the way. Only three of these are women of color.
Anyway, television.
Opportunities for actors of all kinds have advanced decade by decade, but much like the on-screen portrayal of People of Color or members of the LGBT+ community, this has happened slowly, in fits and starts, often through periods of progression followed by conservative groundswell.
When the original Star Trek series premiered in 1966, its main message was a hopeful one; that the world of the starship Enterprise and its crew had evolved past prejudicial cultural barriers, representing a brighter, more hopeful tomorrow.
Among the crew was Starfleet officer Nyota Uhura, played by the late, great Nichelle Nichols. She will be remembered as a trailblazer in a number of ways. Uhura wasn’t an action hero and she wasn’t first-billed on the show, but she was a technician and an officer; she spoke multiple languages, worked on the bridge of the Enterprise, and in 1968, she also was one half of what is commonly referred to as the first interracial kiss on American television, only one year after Loving v Virginia legalized interracial marriage across America.
Surprisingly, Nichelle Nichols had initially planned to leave the show earlier than this - Star Trek was not a ratings darling, and far less of a utopia behind the scenes than viewers might have suspected. She had to deal with her lines being regularly cut from the script, as well as prejudice both off the set and from Star Trek executives. She had been offered other work on Broadway, and was set on taking it.
Yet in 1967, at an NAACP function, she was introduced to a man who called himself her “biggest fan” and had apparently been intent on meeting her in particular.
That man was Martin Luther King Jr., only a short handful of years past the March on Washington and the marches in Selma, Alabama for voting rights. Nichols’ immediate comment was, “I wish I could be out there marching with you,” and Dr King’s response was, “You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for.”
Yet when she admitted that she was intent on leaving the show, his response was, “You cannot and you must not. Don’t you realize how important your presence, your character is? ... Don’t you see? This is not a Black role, and this is not a female role. You have the first non stereotypical role on television, male or female. You have broken ground.”
It was the only show, he said, that he and his wife Coretta would allow their children to stay up and watch. Her role in the show was affecting how young people across the country thought, and how they saw themselves.
Nichols stayed on the show for another two seasons, and in 1977, she officially partnered with NASA on a recruitment drive for the Space Shuttle Program that brought in unprecedented numbers of female and non-white applicants. Among them were Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and Guy Bluford, the first African-American in space.
She was also inspiration for Mae Jemison, who, fifteen years later became the first African-American woman aboard the space shuttle Endeavor.
The progressiveness of Star Trek literally changed the metaphorical landscape in America, but it was not a straight-forward journey from there to the next bit of broken ground.
Jumping forward to 1989, a Newsweek cover story reacted to popular shows of the day like Roseanne and Murphy Brown by moaning that independent women were “seizing control of primetime,” and that the "video pendulum has swung too far from the blissfully domestic supermom who once warmed the electronic hearth." This according to Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which outlined what she saw as a media-driven pushback against the feminist advances of the 1970s in America.
Even within the historically progressive Star Trek franchise, it had been an uphill battle. According to Marina Sirtis, who played Deanna Troi on Next Generation, quote, “Gene [Roddenberry] thought we had one too many women on the show.” She believed that she was only saved from being fired by actress Denise Crosby’s early departure in 1988, and went on to say, “The two remaining were in caring professions. So it was okay to be on a spaceship as a woman, but you had to be a nurturer.”
Similarly, Gates McFadden who played Dr. Beverly Crusher was, quote, ‘scathing about the few times the women would be thrown together, not to work together, but to gossip,’ saying, “If the ladies did have a scene together we were dressed up in leotards talking about men.”
Then the X-Files first aired in 1993, and while it wasn’t precisely action-heavy, it was co-lead by Dana Scully as the rational, competent half of a flipped gender-dynamic partnership. A forensic scientist in the FBI who thrives at the top of her male-dominated field, she inspired the real-life Scully Effect; that is, the growing wave of girls inspired to join STEM fields by her character. Yet there was a significant pay gap between actress Gillian Anderson and co-lead David Duchovny for the first three years of the show, and Anderson spent those early days required by producers to stand physically behind, never in front of, Duchovny at all times. Series creator Chris Carter had even had to fight for her as their lead when the network originally wanted, and I quote, a “leggy, blonde model type.”
Meanwhile, Kate Mulgrew on Star Trek: Voyager, which debuted just prior to Xena’s own first appearance in ‘95, was being warned against acting, and again I quote, “too butch.” Years later, executive producer Rick Berman would say, “We wanted Janeway to be a Starfleet captain, but we also wanted her to be feminine. And those two things don’t go hand-in-hand. If you look at female military officers who make it to the rank of admiral, they tend to not be babes.”
Kathryn Janeway was the newest captain of the franchise, a fictional trailblazer. And yet it was only a handful of years before her place in the marketing of her own show was being eclipsed by Seven of Nine, a complex and interesting character in her own right who was Janeway’s crewmate on Voyager and a former Borg drone, and who wore four-inch heels every day and had to be sewn into the corset of her skin-tight catsuit before filming.
And still, this was a significant outlier. Actresses on television in this era were largely on sitcoms, not in sci-fi/fantasy, and certainly not often in the action/adventure genre.
And in September of 1995, Xena stomped onto this television scene in flat-soled boots, nearly six feet tall and the lead of her own wildly popular action show with near-unbeatable martial prowess and a decade of morally gray or straight-up evil deeds under her belt.
And don’t get me wrong, the network and the marketing knew that Lucy Lawless and the rest of the female cast were total babes. Xena wore that corset, for god’s sake, and the show did sultry and scantily-clad frequently and with enthusiasm. But there was something downright butch about the way Xena stood. The way she spoke. And my girl had agency, complexity, and three-dimensionality for days.
In her essay Xena: Warrior Princess Through the Lenses of Feminism, Melissa Meister states that, “Women on television have always been defined through their interactions with men. There has never before been a woman on television that was a signified woman without a male signifier. However the creators of Xena: Warrior Princess have managed to break through this cultural paradigm.”
There were no regular romantic interests on Xena. She didn’t have a more feminine alternate identity. She got sweaty and dirty and angry and arrogant and vulnerable and, on an average day, didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought about her.
In her 1994 book entitled Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media, Susan Douglas states, “It’s a bias of the TV industry, [this belief] that women will watch shows about men, but men won’t watch shows about women, and therefore half the audience will be lost.”
And a handful of years later, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly - when Xena had already been out for two years - director Sam Raimi would be quoted as saying, “The audience is not afraid of watching some women break out of the conventional mold. Unfortunately, the Hollywood establishment may not be aware that the audience really wants that.”
According to ratings Xena was a cult hit, the most popular syndicated drama series on American television by its second season, conventions were selling out, and half of Xena’s adult audience was male.
….It was not just because of the eye candy. It was also because of the ass-kicking.
In the context of the show, she’s not a fighting fuck toy, she’s not a sexy lamp, she’s not a McGuffin, she’s not a physically strong but emotionally blank slate, she’s not the only woman around for miles. She is a deeply flawed person who has joyously laid waste to entire armies, who has delighted in destruction and who is intensely caring for those she loves. She has her own identity, she has her own motivations, and just about every single episode passes the Bechdel Test with ease.
Women in Action: Like the Harpies in a Bad Mood
It’s probably time to discuss the fact that the show also handled some of the wildest action scenes American television had ever seen.
So, a little-known fact: Xena’s legacy as an action hero is actually pretty ironic, because actress Lucy Lawless notoriously hated filming the action scenes. She wasn’t a martial arts buff, she didn’t really play sports, and she wasn’t even one to visit the gym of her own free will. Lawless also told Starlog Yearbook in 1996 that her school nickname had been "Unco" for “uncoordinated.”
Renee O’Connor, on the other hand, loved learning the fight choreography, found ways to fit extra physical activity into her 12-hour workday whenever she could, and got joyously competent at handling her character’s various weapons in her own free time.
Yet Xena is still the one who walks on screen and just really looks like she could fucking kill you.
And don’t get me wrong - when I say that Lucy Lawless hated learning to fight, I do not mean that she didn’t put in the work. According to instructor Douglas Wong, she took to the training like a fish to water. She breathed real fire, she dealt with multiple injuries on set, and in interviews she always, always gave props first and foremost to the stunt team.
Under the supervision of stunt coordinator Peter Bell, the crew was constantly innovating and bringing things to western television that had never been done before, all of which would prep the New Zealand industry for the upcoming Lord of the Rings films.
The stunt crews constructed their own makeshift rigs to imitate the style of Hong Kong wuxia films, which were at the time influencing Hollywood more than they ever had before; their trial-and-error process combined with the tight budget even developed into something occasionally called "Kiwi-style wire-fu," with stunt action scenes usually filmed under the eye of the second unit.
The pilot episode of Xena even featured direct homage to 1993’s The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk, starring Jet Li, which was one of director Doug Lefler’s favorite films.
Stunt workers got used to strapping themselves into their own harnesses and working through injuries, including the most legendary stunt performer to come out of Xena; Zoe Bell.
But if action scenes are half stunt crew, sometimes that camera does need to be on your lead actor, and this means your fight scene is also only as good as your lead is convincing.
That’s not always an easy thing when, instead of looking hard as nails, half the action heroines on screen look like they stepped out of Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood video.
Don’t get me wrong - many, many actresses have put in long hours at the gym in preparation for action roles. They did the hard work and got fit and toned and fight-scene-ready - some even regularly practice multiple martial arts in their private lives - and should be lauded for it.
But with all genuine respect to the many talents of Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson - all of whom have topped Forbes’s list of the most highly-paid actresses in the world for multiple years, and all of whom were helped in their rise to fame by action-heavy roles -
- the world's highest-paid action heroes look like this.
And I’m not here claiming that it’s easy for women to build muscle, or suggesting that physique should be prioritized over acting ability, or advocating for soul-destroying fitness regimes, but why don’t more of our heroines look as though they can actually lift the weapons they use to defend themselves?
Look at Serena Williams. Look at these powerlifters and boxers and crossfit athletes and hammer throwers and bodybuilders.
Scarlett Johansson can obviously play any person, tree, or animal that she desires, but I personally have friends who could bench press her. I have friends of friends who could bench press her. I have friends of friends of friends who could -
And hey, I’m aware that this is a topic around which we need to tread delicately. The last thing I want to do is add to unrealistic body image expectations, or shame someone for being small and having no muscles. I am also small and have no muscles. I also love that smaller actors, skinny actors, actors playing characters that are conventionally feminine, have a place in the action genre too, and I respect the choreography and the acting talent that makes those fight scenes believable and enjoyable.
I also recognize the unfair fucking irony of looking at an industry that essentially forces its actresses to be incredibly thin and expecting it to produce stocky action stars from that same pool of A-listers.
But there’s a reason that excitement blooms among audiences, however briefly, over the potential acting careers of ex-MMA fighters. One couldn’t accuse them of being particularly good at acting or necessarily the brightest bulbs, but damn if it didn’t look convincing when they were punching people, and again, there is a damn short list of heroines who look like they could actually bench press you without breaking a sweat.
When you do see them, they are usually background characters played by stuntwomen who are experts in fitness, martial arts, and sports in their private lives.
And as I’ve mentioned, Xena was not played by an actor with expertise in fitness, sport, or combat in her private life. So why does she still stand out in a field of her peers?
In the 2011 film Colombiana starring Zoe Saldana, the lead character, Cataleya, is depicted in childhood as reading a Xena book and dreaming of growing up to be the warrior princess herself. The movie goes on to follow a grown Cataleya’s path of revenge against the drug lord that killed her family.
Reviews of the film were mixed, but most of the praise was reserved for Saldana, who is a talented actress and, at this point, a certified action star. Most of the fight scenes in Colombiana are no more unrealistic than your average campy battle in Xena - okay, to be entirely honest, it’s hard to be less realistic than the gravity-defying battles that were apparently taking place in ancient Greece - but they simultaneously drew a lot of criticism in one specific area: reviewers and commentators felt that Saldana was too skinny to make a realistic action hero.
In fact, one derisive Vulture article entitled Female Action Stars Have Gotten Too Skinny to Throw a Believable Punch went so far as to say, quote, “If there’s one major difference between the action heroine [Cataleya] idolized and the one she has become, it’s that Xena’s Lucy Lawless had some believable heft to her, while Saldana resembles a supermodel who could be toppled not just by a gang of thugs but a stiff breeze.”
I find the article generally condescending in tone and you can decide for yourself whether this is a genuine or unfair criticism, but the words “believable heft” actually ring pretty true. Over two decades since Xena went off the air and we still remember the warrior princess for the way she fought.
I even remember my marine corps vet grandfather - who, along with my grandmother, watched the show with general good-natured bemusement - making a general sort of comment about how surprisingly believable she looked.
To quote a fellow fan, “Lucy Lawless was not a particularly burly woman, but somehow she made Xena seem like a fucking tank and I don’t understand how.”
Because when she fights, Xena has power. Her hits have visible weight. Her shoulders are broad and she’s tall as hell and more than anything, even today, there’s something revolutionary about how absolutely bug-eyed, howler-monkey crazy Xena’s face sometimes gets when she fights.
There are obvious exceptions to this, examples where our heroes are allowed to let their faces be as wild as they want them to be - you have the always-classic Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Charlize Theron as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, Dafne Keene in Logan, numerous warriors from Okoye to Nakia from Black Panther, and whatever the fuck was going on in the ‘Ronny vs. Lily’ episode of Barry.
Also, if you’re looking for the exciting new places that the next generation of action stars could lead us, do yourself a favor and watch Prey starring Amber Midthunder.
But in the years since Xena went off the air we’ve also had superheroes like Jessica Alba as Sue Storm in 2007’s Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer, who has explicitly said in interview that she was directed to mute her expressions in emotional scenes in order to look more attractive on camera. And in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Elizabeth Olson discussed Joss Whedon - at the time, a man with the reputation as one of Hollywood’s feminist darlings - and his directives to keep her face largely calm and serene even in grief and rage, in sharp contrast to her wilder facial journey in WandaVision. The expressionless, always-sexy female action hero - whether a result of studio directive, character choice, or acting ability - continues to dominate the screen.
Xena is not that. Actually, my best friend and I have a drinking game where you take a shot whenever Xena goes wild-eyed in a fight, and by the conclusion of an average episode you end up pretty drunk.
Just a Girl in Search of a Really Good Sword
So, who is Xena?
There’s a lot more to her than the one-dimensional seductress we first meet in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, whose main goal is killing Greece’s biggest hero so that her own army will be unstoppable.
Under the care of the writers for her own self-titled show, the evil Xena of the past became more wild-eyed, vicious, and cruel, determined to conquer the world – partly for the power, and partly just because she loved a good kill. Her favorite pastimes included burning villages and kidnapping children and choking men to death for the sheer fun of it, hitting rock bottom as something almost more animal than human.
Just to hammer the point home, yeah, this is the kind of backstory and character development that is usually only given to dudes.
In the approximately ten years between her early warlord days and the start of her own show, she has come a long damn way. By the time we meet her, she still has moments of slipping, doubting, and of wavering back into her darker tendencies. She still seems to revel in a good fight, and that part of her that used to cackle while slitting throats will probably never be entirely gone.
Yet the Xena we see on an average day is monotone and serious, Olympics-grade unimpressed with your bullshit, and maintaining a veneer of calm over all of her inner batshittery - which is very much still there, hovering just beneath the surface.
Subordinate to no one, more likely to focus on brute force than feminine wiles, she can also be butch as hell? At times she’s just downright masculine, gruffly uncomfortable with praise, impatient with her own tears, angry at herself for moments of weakness, and reluctant to be sentimental.
The season one episode The Path Not Taken has genuinely one of my favorite scenes in the series, where we see her walk into a tavern and, being beset by unwelcome figures groping and leering in her direction, casually punches her way through the crowd before sprawling herself down in a chair and propping one leg on the table like a dude.
So, who is she? She’s intimidating. She’s not really good at girly stuff, and the instinct to bedeck herself in plundered finery has mostly passed. She’s nigh impossible to embarrass. She loves her horse. She uses sex like a weapon. She uses weapons like a weapon. She has many skills. She never really screams, but has a hell of a battle cry, and she occasionally uses her best friend’s scrolls for toilet paper.
Like with many iconic characters, elements of her look and style and personality also came down to actor input.
The original plan had been to bleach Lucy Lawless’s ash-blonde hair to a lighter platinum in order to differentiate Xena from the other brunette characters she had previously played on prior episodes of Hercules. Lawless, though, suggested they go dark instead, taking inspiration from Argentinian tennis star Gabriela Sabitini.
They also wanted Xena to have a warrior cry - citing Tarzan as their inspiration, in fact - and Lawless was the one who came upon the zaghrouta, the traditional Middle Eastern ululation performed at weddings, celebrations, and funerals.
But one of my favorite things about Xena is that she is just genuinely, honestly kooky, with a sense of ridiculous adventure and dry wit hidden behind her monotone. And I think we can, again, thank the cast for this one - in her own words, there were some episodes where they were just having fun and “crazy Lucy” bled over onto the screen.
But fun moments aside, Xena also has a lot of pride, and that pride is one quality that hasn’t changed much from the olden days. She knows what she’s good at - almost everything - knows how she looks - awesome - and is still very, very used to being in command. She’s spent a lot of time giving orders and having them followed, and she’s not the type to play second fiddle, not to a general or a king or a god.
So Xena is a woman with red in her ledger. She still struggles with good and evil, having what you might call a “relapse” about once per season, and spends the rest of the time carrying that burden on her shoulders. She doesn’t believe she deserves or can ever earn forgiveness, but will spend the rest of her life trying. Not because the scales will ever wash clean of all the innocent blood she’s spilt, but because she’d rather pay for her mistakes with her life rather than with her death.
And it’s not like she never struggles with guilt again. In season one’s The Reckoning, she allows herself to be tried for a murder she didn’t commit before ultimately choosing to live. In season two’s Remember Nothing, she wishes that she had never picked up a sword, before being shown, in the classic style of It’s A Wonderful Life, what the world would be like without her. Later on, Forgiven, hardly one of the best episodes of Xena, ends with the characters being ritually cleansed of their sins, and Xena refuses to participate, clearly still believing she doesn’t deserve it.
Callisto, the best villain of the show and the childhood survivor of one of Xena’s many slaughters, is the embodiment of that guilt. She was created by Xena, the same way Xena was created by the warlord who attacked her hometown.
So Xena bears the burden of making her the way that she is, feels hypocritical for judging her, and feels responsible for every crime that she commits.
And yet in one of their later encounters, Xena announces that she is done paying for Callisto’s crimes as well as her own – the blame for Callisto’s actions moving forward goes to Callisto alone. She’ll take the blame for what she did to Callisto, but not what Callisto has done.
Angsty ex-assassin types have kind of always been my thing, and the way Xena deals with this has honestly always been my favorite. There is no real schism between who she is and who she was; it’s not a separate personality, she never changed her name. Xena is Xena is Xena, and she’ll take the consequences of her actions squarely on her own shoulders.
All Consequences Are Your Own Creation, and There's a Price You Must Pay
Redemption is a funny concept that gets thrown around a lot in meta character discussions. People talk about redemption for villainous or simply antagonistic characters like Darth Vader, or Kylo Ren, or Severus Snape.
And for me, the bar has always been set by Xena. And also by Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender, I guess, but we’re not here to talk about him.
At first glance, it may look as though Xena’s redemption arc takes place during the trilogy of Hercules episodes that were her introduction; she’s evil in the first, conflicted in the second, and has sworn to fight for good by the third.
What makes her such a good character is that this - her riding off into the sunset swearing to fight for justice from now on - isn’t the end of her redemption arc.
It’s the beginning.
Also I have a pet theory that the reason it actually stuck this time - as opposed to times previously when she’d had opportunities to start fighting for justice - is opportunity. She didn’t just have a role model and then a moral compass that she wanted to do right by; her army was physically taken away from her and she couldn’t so easily fall back into her old ways again, as she nearly does several times later in the series when that type of power is handed back to her.
In the pilot episode, we see her burying her armor and her weapons, and it’s viewer’s choice whether she’s planning to live a peaceful life, or if she’s planning to die.
And that makes sense, to me. She knows that temptation comes from opportunity, and she never really stops being a woman who loves to wield a sword.
As the series goes on and she fights evil on the side of justice, she still wears her infamy like a cloak. She didn’t choose a new name when she started killing innocent people - she was Xena, the same Xena as the well-intentioned farm girl she used to be. And after she turned Good, she was still Xena. It was all part of her legacy.
Throughout the series, some people hate her, spit on her, and try to exact their revenge for the things she’d done. She spends her time walking an interesting line as someone who knows she deserves whatever they want to dish out, but doesn’t intend to die. Someone who’s come close to letting herself be executed more than once, but has always realized that she wanted to live, and that her death wouldn’t actually benefit the world.
And she does spend the series living. Because she might as well. Because no one thing - not her trial and death, not her saving someone’s life, or a thousand people’s lives, could ever make up for what she had done. Saving one life doesn’t cancel out taking another - and even if it had, she’d have had to toil for decades to even come close to evening the score. What she has to do, the only thing she can do, is spend the rest of her time on this earth doing good. Helping people. Making things right.
Even while she has friends who would absolve her of her wrongdoings, the main narrative of the show supports her perspective, not theirs. It reminds us that the scales will never balance, and she never pretends that they will.
It’s one of the main reasons that the finale of the show never sat right with me, conceptually.
Because what Xena teaches is that “redemption” isn’t doing one good thing and then dying. Sacrificing yourself to save one or many, after being responsible for the murder of untold innocents, is meaningless on the grand redemptive scales of the cosmos unless it comes alongside a massive ideological shift. And even then, redemption isn’t a fixed end goal that can be worked toward and arrived at.
It’s a journey, and the journey literally never ends.
A Friend of Humanity
There were a lot of supporting and recurring characters on Xena, played by a lot of talented actors and actresses, but I’m just going to run down my favorites before we move on to bigger topics.
This list is non-exhaustive and I’m not including villains or love interests. We’ll get to those later.
So, in no particular order -
Cyrene
Xena’s relationship with her mother, Cyrene, kind of kills me. It's a dynamic I think you really rarely get to see on television, because she is afraid of her own daughter. They’re uncomfortable with one another, even when they’re working on forgiveness. There’s blame and guilt and half a lifetime of broken trust there, and it’s all wonderfully played in the pilot episode by Darien Takle.
It’s the same episode where we hear the warlord Draco warning Xena that people like them can never go home -
- and soon after, when Xena finally comes home after years of warlording, this is how Cyrene greets her.
Their relationship is messy and difficult and I honestly love it.
Lyceus
Xena’s younger brother Lyceus is only in one episode, but we first hear his name in the pilot where Xena, visiting home for the first time in about a decade, goes to visit his grave.
Lyceus was one of the many victims of the warlord Cortese’s attack on Amphipolis in Xena’s youth; Cyrene blames Xena for his death the same way the rest of the villagers blame her for the deaths of their sons. If only she’d done nothing, let them bow to the warlord’s commands and give up everything they owned to his raids, Lyceus and the others wouldn’t be dead.
Xena mourns him, she feels guilt over his death, but in the first season we never learn much about him as a person. He’s just a long-gone, once-beloved martyr.
And then in season two, in one of my all-time favorite episodes entitled Remember Nothing, we meet Lyceus.
It’s the It’s a Wonderful Life episode - Xena gets the chance to see what the world would have been like if she had never taken up the sword. A lot of things are actually worse, but one thing, at least, is better - her younger brother is alive.
And he’s kind of great? They look nothing alike and he’s not particularly war-like, but especially in comparison to her wet blanket of an older brother who we met briefly in season one, Xena and Lyceus clearly have a close and loving relationship. He gets her, and more importantly, he’s an idealist with convictions of his own.
He’s not some idiot victim that Xena dragged into a fight over a decade ago; they’re partners in crime, comrades in arms, and he’s clearly a person who decided that fighting was necessary of his own volition, and who was willing to give his life for the cause just like she was.
Autolycus
The thief Autolycus is portrayed by Bruce Campbell at his Bruce Campbell-est, and he’s honestly always a lot of fun.
I love how the two of them bounce off each other, and even though Autolycus isn’t the character with the most depth out of everyone on the show, he has charisma for days and it’s always fun to see him show up.
As an aside, the actors also got to reunite in 2015 on Ash vs Evil Dead, to generally rave reviews.
Joxer
This might be a controversial one - a lot of fans hate Joxer because he’s obnoxious, because he likes Gabrielle, because he gets between her and Xena. It’s all true, but he’s so stupid that he activates all of my protective instincts and I kind of adore him. He was also played with great comedic skill by Ted Raimi, which I applaud.
Lao Ma
We’ll talk more about Lao Ma later, and she could also arguably go on a list of Xena’s love interests as opposed to friends and allies, but she deserves a place here as well.
She was one of the standout characters of the entire show, due to a wonderful performance by Jacqueline Kim; striking, gentle, incredibly powerful, but cunning and quietly manipulative in her own way, Lao Ma was a fantastic mentor to Xena at a time in her life when no one else was gentle or kind to her.
She brought Xena back from the edge, and nearly, nearly, got her to turn away from evil a decade before Hercules was ever in the picture.
Ephiny
Ephiny was by far my favorite Amazon, and I’m going to be real here, it’s just because Danielle Cormack is a really good actress. She’s won multiple television awards in Australia, and she always lent some wonderful grit and groundedness to any episode she was in.
Minya
Alison Wall straight-up won a New Zealand Television Award for her turn as Minya, a fairly beloved character who partially exists to poke fun at the show’s fanbase, but rather than feel insulted, that fanbase largely just embraced her.
She is also a thespian.
Salmoneus
Salmoneus was originally a character on Hercules, and he first meets Xena there, in The Gauntlet.
I really love the fact that he’s seen and known her - not precisely at her worst, but way before she was at her best, and then continued to be an occasional if rare companion thereafter. Robert Trebor’s comedic timing is genuinely brilliant, and not unlike Autolycus and Joxer, I love that Xena’s often grumpy but secretly a bit soft on him and his antics.
Hercules
I’ve mentioned Hercules a fair few times already, so we don’t need to go too much in depth here, other than to say how unfortunate it is that Kevin Sorbo turned out to be a genuine bigot, because I liked Hercules’s relationship with Xena. I liked that he was just a good guy - not too exciting, but that’s fine.
I’m a massive sucker for Outsider POVs, and the idea that he and Iolaus had fought against Xena and now were her friends was just kind of fascinating to me. I’d genuinely love to read a story from Hercules’s perspective as they part ways after Unchained Heart and he begins to hear rumors of her heroic and selfless exploits.
And yeah, he could technically also go on the romance list.
Don’t Be Shy, Your Mother Wasn’t
While on that topic, let’s talk about how much Xena got around!
I would argue that after a lifetime of being screwed over by men she trusted, she eventually realized that screwing was a damn good entrapment technique and has been using it to great effect ever since. More than that, though, I’m pretty sure she’s just an allosexual woman who loves a good tumble, and doesn’t see things like modesty or bodily shame as worthwhile or as applicable to her.
Try groping her without consent, though, and she will literally breathe fire in your face.
Anyway, I think over the course of her three-episode introduction and the six seasons of her own show, she had:
1) People she was taking advantage of, like Hercules’ best friend Iolaus.
2) Bad boys she liked to tumble with while they partnered up, spending some time being mutually awful to each other but whom she later grew to respect, like Borias.
3) Bad boys she had UST with but didn’t really respect at all and strung along more than anything, like Draco. You could also potentially put Ares in this category, if you’re going by the sizzling chemistry and ignore the episodes that implied he might be her dad.
4) Evil or unscrupulous men who had screwed her over by taking advantage of her young trust and naiveté, like Julius Caesar - yes, that Julius Caesar. And yes, if you hadn’t realized already, that is Karl Urban.
5) Random one-episode dudes that were maybe powerful fighters or good at heart, but beyond that her interest made little to no sense, except for uneven scripting, like Ulysses.
6) Good people she genuinely admired and maybe also felt thankful toward, like Hercules and arguably Lao Ma.
7) Bad boys she actually liked, like Marcus.
8) And Gabrielle.
I’ve seen Xena’s canonical romantic entanglements tackled through a number of different lenses in the past - is it progressive that she’s so unashamedly sex-positive with men and Gabrielle, is it regressive objectification to portray her in so many sexual situations, is her ownership of her sexuality refreshing, is it conceptually outdated for so much of her character growth to be pinned to the influence of various men and Gabrielle... and I’ll be honest, I’m not very interested in analyzing that, but we can break it down a little.
Xena says some interesting things about men and romance in general, even putting aside her insistence to Gabrielle that the “strongest tree in the forest stands alone.” That’s the voice of experience talking. That’s a woman who’s been waiting a decade to stab Julius Caesar in his stupid face.
Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated by something she says in the first episode to Gabrielle about Gabrielle’s boring fiance - don’t worry, he dies pretty quickly - when trying to convince Gabrielle to stay with him. “He looks like a gentle soul. That’s rare in a man.” I’ve always loved how it sounds as though she’s speaking from her own experiences, with some bitterness, some world-weariness… but then, Xena also underneath it all wants Gabrielle to stay with her, and Xena knows that she herself isn’t always gentle at all.
Even more telling is her conversation with the warlord Draco. “[You look good] except for that ugly scar…. You picked the wrong woman to get rough with.”
“It never would have happened if you’d been more cooperative.”
In a world where sword fights, warlord antics, and inter-army politics featured in nearly every episode, Xena as a series was largely free of explicit rape threats or references. Maybe it was because the show, for all its ability to delve into dark themes, was angling for campy empowerment rather than gritty realism, or maybe it was because Xena herself was capable of beating the living tar out of almost anyone alive. Game of Thrones the show was not, and whatever might be said about the importance of accuracy in on-screen protrayals of human depravity, Xena’s general refusal to use explicit sexual violence as a plot point is extremely refreshing in retrospect.
Anyway, Draco follows up their previous discussion with this line:
“I dreamt of being with you in love or against you in battle. You won’t give me the satisfaction of either, will you?”
Xena seems to get into a lot of love-hate relationships, or maybe a lot of ‘I’m sexually attracted to you but one of us is going to end up killing the other” type relationships.
She was happy to seduce her targets while she was evil, and seems equally untroubled in using her sexuality for her own ends once she turns good, as well. Some of this might have been the show selling sex to the audience, but a lot of it just outlined the fact that Xena was far from a shrinking violet. She had sex with Borias on a horse, for God’s sake.
If we temporarily take the issue of inconsistent characterization in early seasons, back when they still thought the audience wanted one-off romantic entanglements, and toss this aside, gurl had a pretty bad track record, and she definitely had a thing for bad boys.
I hesitate to phrase it this way, because “bad boy” is usually used in the context of a Bonnie and Clyde, ‘sweet innocent girl meets a rebellious dude and gets corrupted’ sort of way. Xena had a thing for bad boys in the sense that she used to also be a bad person, and still had a significant wild side that just genuinely enjoyed beating the shit out of people.
She was mostly on an even footing with her partners, except for a couple of, uh, highly unusual cases. As the series goes on, we see in flashbacks how Xena lost both her naiveté and any remaining willingness to be subservient in a partnership.
Some of these you can also hand-wave as the writers not yet having found their footing. In season one’s A Fistful of Dinars we learn that many, many years ago Xena was engaged to be married to some motherfucker - I forget his name, we’ll call him The Fiancé - who then sort of lost interest once he’d ‘conquered’ her and they both fucked off to do their own thing. She never trusted him again until he died saving Gabrielle and turned out not to be such a schmuck after all.
I don’t know what to do with that shit, other than point out that the themes of that episode - Xena’s youthful naivete, her willingness to join up with a powerful and untrustworthy man for the sake of her own personal gain, and her blindness to his eventual betrayal - would come roaring back with a vengeance only a season later.
In season two, the episode Destiny grants us a flashback to early on in her warlord years, where Caesar, probably her longest and most consistent human enemy outside of Callisto, tricked her, betrayed her, and took away the last of her innocence as well as her sanity for a while.
It’s something that the ‘grown-up’ Xena of the eponymous series would never have fallen for, or even been interested in, but chronologically she’s not even twenty years old when it happens, and boy, does it mess her up.
As was written so skillfully in the 2009 essay Xena: Warrior Princess – Role Model for the Ages, “Xena’s biggest mistake with Caesar was believing that he saw her as she saw herself, the self reliant, independent woman worthy of him because she was his equal.”
The betrayal, the injuries, the death of her only remaining ally, all of these things broke Xena in a way that few things would before or after; she went from a power-hungry local warlord on a slippery slope to an absolutely bloodthirsty maniac, and, hot take here, she never entirely, 100% went back.
I admittedly kind of love how, even several seasons down the line, Xena loses some of her usual stone-cold rationality when dealing with Caesar, as if every time she sees him, she can’t help but be re-enveloped in the fury and anguish and humiliation of being left for dead on that beach. There’s something very compelling about a character who’s usually cool as beans just losing a little of her self-control around this one asshole who taught her an awful lesson about trust more than a decade ago.
The only other man in her life to consistently bring out such complicated emotions is Ares, the God of War, who depending on the episode might have been her lover or maybe her dad? It was ancient Greece, just try not to think about it. Ares had been instrumental in shaping Xena’s life from the shadowy sidelines, and reveled from afar in the destruction she wrought. He gave her guidance, strength, blessing, favor – she gave him war and death, and it probably turned both of them on more than a little bit. He felt personally scorned and infuriated by her eventual turn away from evil, and he spends the rest of the series trying to trick and cheat her back into her old ways.
I honestly am not crazy about the idea that all her resistance to Ares’ wiles and general imperviousness to the flirtation of powerful men was a result of bitterness from youthful experience, rather than just, you know, logic, but there it is.
And then at the end of all things there is, of course, Gabrielle. Who she loves, teaches, protects, lies to, is lied to by, and is occasionally betrayed by – and isn’t that a thing I like to think about sometimes - but this time, you know, their destiny is written in the stars or some such, they make peace, and they journey on together.
Xena also had a magic baby. I don’t know where else to talk about that, so we’ll put it here.
To be clear, I absolutely adore the backstory involving Xena and her first child, Solon. We meet him for the first time in season two, when we learn she’d fallen pregnant by her warlording partner Borias who was slowly learning the error of his ways and would soon die for it. She had given birth to Solon back when she was still pretty evil, and had given him away to be raised in secret by someone else. Even back then, she’d known that the best thing she could do for him would be to get him away from her, and that fascinates me.
Then there was this whole thing where Gabrielle was impregnated by the devil and gave birth to a clone of herself who murdered Xena’s son and lead them into a violent cycle of mutual blame that culminated in a musical episode, but that’s not important right now.
Xena’s Magic Baby came around in season five, mostly because Lucy Lawless was pregnant in real life. On the upside, there was something kind of groundbreaking about a pregnant warrior having sword fights on primetime television, but on the downside, it became one of those Magical Impregnation Destiny Alien Baby tropes.
Shows – good shows, shows I like – seem to unfortunately do this all the time. Amy in Doctor Who, Sharon in Battlestar Galactica, Scully in X-Files, Gwen in Torchwood, etcetera. A leading woman gets pregnant, and it has to be a magical impregnation that aliens put there or that secretly spells the doom of all mankind.
Wombs being used as a plot device annoys me, and I genuinely wish Xena had just gotten randomly knocked up by accident instead, or that the ever-friendly Aphrodite had decided to give the happy probably-bisexual couple a gift in the form of a bun in the oven.
Instead, because it was season five and the writing for the show had taken what you might call a turn, Xena’s second child, a daughter named Eve who was destined to bring death to all the Gods of Mount Olympus, was the result of immaculate conception via a reformed divine Callisto, thus enabling cracked out parallels to be drawn between Xena and the Virgin Mary.
Which… no, thank you.
Anyway, all of this relationship talk may lead you to wonder -
"Does Xena ever think about settling down and getting married?" "No, she likes what I do." – Hower and Gabrielle, on Xena
So let’s talk about Gabrielle.
The earlier incarnations of Gabrielle remain my favorite. Renee O’Connor is a talented, funny actor, with abs for days and who could undeniably whoop my ass if she tried, but I somehow never bought Gabrielle as a full-fledged warrior. As the seasons went on her outfits got tinier and her weapons got pointier, and I wasn’t always convinced the dual-knife thing was the most natural progression for her character.
Her growth from being a naive, wide-eyed girl with dreams of being a bard in season one, to being a competent and independent woman with complex moral struggles of her own in later seasons, was absolutely a satisfying one.
But simultaneously, she had a tendency to be gullible or short-sighted. She had already betrayed Xena once or twice by the mid-point of the show, and I was slower to forgive than our eponymous hero was. I was a spiteful nine-year-old.
What you can’t really deny, though, is that for better or for worse, she is Xena’s best friend. She’s loving, she’s kind. She works as Xena’s moral compass, sort of in the same way, if you’ll forgive the comparison, that the Doctor on Doctor Who needs a companion sometimes to curb his wilder impulses. Xena is gentle with Gabrielle, in a way she is with almost no one else.
The show straight-up admits that they’re soulmates.
There’s also an absolutely heart-pounding scene at the end of season four where Callisto finally takes Xena out of commission and Gabrielle, having recently sworn off weapons altogether in a quest for peace and pacifism, just absolutely starts murdering people left and right in order to save Xena’s life. I remember watching this moment on television when it first aired, and O’Connor sells the absolute hell out of it.
As an aside, the birth of Hope and everything that unfolds from it is also makes for such an interesting lesson on character perspective. Gabrielle is traumatized from her experience, desperately clinging to the idea that she can pull something bright from the darkness, potentially being influenced by the evil wiles of the creature that was in her womb, and convinced that she can nature-vs-nurture raise her half-human, half-demonic child to be an ethical person. Xena, who has all the experience of a brutal killer but is a mother herself whose moral line has always been drawn at murdering babies and who would usually do anything to protect a child of Gabrielle’s, sees Hope as something more like a demonic tumor; a thing in the shape of an infant who has more real kinship with the chest-bursters from Alien. Xena turns out to be right, of course, but you can see why, in the moment, Gabrielle’s actions may have seemed not only more compassionate but more logical.
And, well.
Harold, They’re Lesbians
In retrospect, one thing is particularly obvious to me now, in a way it totally wasn’t as a pre-pubescent watching the show when it first aired, and it is that by the finale, Xena and Gabrielle are in a really blatant non-platonic relationship.
The year was 1995.
The very first on-air kiss between two women in American television history had only been featured in the legal drama L.A. Law about four years prior, in 1991. Then in 1994 a parental advisory warning was posted before the scene where Roseanne Barr kissed another woman on her self-titled show.
At the time that Xena aired its pilot episode, the first lesbian marriage on American network TV wouldn’t happen for another year. Ellen Degeneres would not come out and face the subsequent cancellation of her show for another two years. Will and Grace wouldn’t air for another three years, and The L Word wouldn’t for another nine.
These were the times, literal decades away from shows like Modern Family, from Pose, from Heartstopper, from Orange is the New Black, and from Our Flag Means Death.
And it was in this social atmosphere that Xena became famous - or, depending on who you spoke to, infamous - for its “subtext.”
To hear it told today, the evolution of Xena and Gabrielle’s half-spoken relationship was half the result of coy winks and playful nudges by the writing and production teams, half the result of audience interpretation, and the actors were more or less the last to know.
Lesbian writer and producer Liz Friedman, who was with the show from the first through fourth seasons, said in a 1996 interview with The Advocate that, quote, "We never wrote Xena to be a lesbian, but it's not our show, it's the audience's show. If the fans want to read Xena that way, great." She also went on to say, "They're such a perfect little butch-femme couple. What they do between episodes, I don't know." It was probably the most ambiguous interview she would give on the topic.
And as an aside, if you try to call this show “queerbaiting” today, please remember the era of television we are discussing. This was not Sherlock, this was not Supernatural or Once Upon A Time, this was a show literally being made twenty years ago under the veil of censorship, closer today to something like The Untamed than an endless tease like Supergirl.
They tread carefully, though, within the guidelines of network television. According to executive producer Rob Tapert, showrunner RJ Stewart was careful, not wanting to take advantage of the audience or reduce the relationship to pandering. On the flip side, the studio was so worried that Xena would be perceived as a lesbian show that from the start, Xena and Gabrielle were not allowed to appear together anywhere in the same shot of the opening titles.
Watching at home as a child, I wasn’t completely ignorant to the rumblings of Xena being a lesbian show, but was mostly aware of it via mildly distasteful teasing from amused family members, which was itself a lot to unpack when I finally returned to the show as a more self-assured adult and fell in love with it all over again.
Meanwhile, Xena's status as an LGBT icon was quickly becoming the stuff of legend. There were essays, there were magazine features, there were theses. An article featured in the Village Voice by writer Michael Musto is what Lucy Lawless credits with cluing herself and their wider audiences into the show’s subtext, and from that moment, the cast were in on it too.
No one among the show’s production went on to acknowledge the subtext more than producer Liz Friedman. In 1996 on One in Ten, a Boston-based LGBT radio program, she said, "That's one of the best parts of the job, getting to throw in references that I know the fans who are interested in that will pick up on, but don't necessarily flash any irrevocable red lights. We opened up a show with the two of them fishing naked, and we're about to have a Halloween episode that will certainly have some nice moments for our queer fans, a little lesbian vampire show."
In season two, Xena and Gabrielle shared a sort-of on-screen kiss, and the follow-up was the most highly watched episode of the entire series to date. We don’t have empirical data on this, but it’s largely thought to be because about a bajillion queer women tuned in to see if it would happen again.
By season three, the characters’ flings and romps with male characters were steadily dwindling, and Lucy Lawless, in a 1997 interview with Playboy Magazine, was playfully joking that Xena’s dream vacation would be “a biennial sailing trip to Lesbos.”
As early as 1998, there were rumors of a prospective episode featuring the poet Sappho, played either by Lucy Lawless herself or by out lesbian actress KD Lang, falling in love with Gabrielle. An anonymous and unconfirmed source later said the episode had been shelved because it would be impossible for subtext to not become, well, main text. In the same year, SNL poked gentle fun at the show’s lesbian fanbase, and an all-lesbian marching team comprised of a hundred and twenty-two marchers attended the thirtieth-annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras festival dressed as Xena. ‘The Marching Xenas’ would continue appearing in Pride parades far and wide.
In 1999, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor attended the same festival themselves, dressed in costumes from the show, and Subaru winked at Xena fans in a lesbian-focused car ad.
By the year 2000, a small fan committee had raised the funds for a Xena-themed parade float on an eight-ton flatbed truck, complete with a banner reading, "Temple of Xena: Warrior Dykon." I have been tragically unable to find pictures from that year.
Then in 2001, the same year that known dickhead Kevin Sorbo whined publicly that Xena was different from Hercules due to it being, and I quote, “heavily into lesbianism,” episode nineteen of season six featured Xena buying Gabrielle tickets to see a performance by Sappho.
They later kissed on the mouth and proclaimed their love for each other. You know, like gal pals do.
The same year, Lucy Lawless pretty officially outed Xena in an interview with Conan O’Brien, and a couple of years later, in a 2003 interview with Lori Medigovich of Lesbian News, Lawless said, “Gay, gay, definitely. There was always a 'well, she might be or she might not be' but when there was that drip of water passing between their lips in the very final scene, that cemented it for me. Now it wasn't just that Xena was bisexual and kinda like her gal pal and they kind of fooled around sometimes, it was, ‘Nope, they're married, man.’”
Then, speaking with Michael Musto for Out Magazine, she said again, “Where there's smoke, there's got to be fire. It was clear from the writing that it was a love relationship.”
The interviewer also asked her whether, post-finale, Gabrielle was now having sex with Xena's ghost, to which Lawless obviously replied, "I hope so,” because she is a legend.
Notably, she was also named the Star 100 Ally of the Year at the Australian LGBTI Awards in 2017, after once again attending Sydney Mardi Gras.
And while we’re on the subject of Xena’s record with the LGBT+ community, I guess this is also as good a place as any to talk about actor Karen Dior and the season two episode Here She Comes… Miss Amphipolis.
It was the beauty pageant episode of Xena - you heard me - and it featured our heroes taking on secret identities within the competition in order to solve a mystery, prevent a murder, and potentially stop a war.
For those not in the know, Lucy Lawless was the former ‘Mrs New Zealand’ of 1989.
Anyway, one of the other contestants was Miss Artiphys, played by bisexual former adult film star and HIV/AIDS activist Karen Dior.
There are a few places where the script pokes fun at Miss Artiphys, but the episode largely handles her with grace, dignity, and sympathy, and there is a very good reason for that. The character was created by Chris Manheim, the writer for this episode, in honor of her brother, a drag performer who had passed away due to complications with AIDS in 1992. In fact, the episode is dedicated to him; “In loving memory of Keith K Walsh.”
Karen Dior - whose legal name was Geoff Gann, and who used male pronouns for the duration of his life, so that’s what we’ll use here as well - had also been diagnosed with AIDS in 1995. He ultimately passed away in 2004 from AIDS-related complications, and like many others of his generation and the one gone before, deserved so, so much better.
In 1997, when his episode of Xena aired, the Reagan administration was well over, but stigma against those who suffered from HIV/AIDS was still rife and misinformation about how the disease could be passed - for example, through a kiss - absolutely abounded in the mainstream.
It caused a stir, then, when the episode ended with Miss Artiphys kissing Xena full on the mouth. And it was apparently Lucy Lawless’s idea, specifically with the purpose of challenging that stigma.
In an interview with New Zealand Women’s Day in 1997, Gann was quoted as saying, “Lucy and I just bonded instantly. [...] She gave me so much support. [...] It was just supposed to be one of those beauty-pageant kisses on the cheek, but Lucy suggested I should grab her, dip her and give her a really passionate kiss instead.”
And yeah, Miss Artiphys is wearing Xena’s clothes in that scene. It’s complicated, don’t worry about it. We’re going to talk about the outfit next.
Leather Unmentionables
The outfits in Xena largely took shape under the watchful eye of Ngila Dickson, legendary costume designer who brought home a New Zealand Film and TV Award for her work on the third season, and who would later go on to win an Academy Award for The Lord of the Rings.
Xena’s original costume, though, as well as the others in the Hercules three-parter, was designed by costume expert Barbara Darragh, who was inspired by art nouveau and, some have suggested, traditional Maori designs, such as the koru, which is based on the native silver fern. And also bats, apparently? Yeah, I don’t know.
As the three-off became a spin-off, Xena’s iconic leather and bronze went through a few design alterations for comfort and practicality under Ngila Dickson’s guidance, appearing both as a two-piece and as a single unit.
Lucy Lawless donated her own version of the costume to the Smithsonian Museum in 2006, cementing its legendary status.
Action heroines in sexy outfits are not precisely a new concept. Feminine versions of traditional warrior garb, except with more corseting and a lower cut, are still pretty much the norm. While one end of the action spectrum does boast practical outfits like those worn by Ellen Ripley or Kara Thrace, the other side of the costuming scale has historically teetered toward Boris Vallejo; pin-up girls with swords and goddamn high heels.
And inarguably, Xena: Warrior Princess had some ridiculous, bikini-inspired, midriff-baring outfits. Gabrielle’s shirts and skirts just got consistently smaller as the seasons went on. Don’t get me wrong, I think this outfit is gorgeous, I’m just a little annoyed they had Renee wearing it during fight scenes, but as we’ve covered, Xena and realism were not precisely friends.
I’d also love to see a proper breakdown of the costuming changes between Ngila Dickson’s departure and Jane Holland taking over in season five.
Still, up through season four especially, they also put their characters in shaman-inspired Siberian furs and some decidedly unsexy evil warlord garb, all of which I hated as a child for being “too weird” but all of which I now begrudgingly respect as an adult.
Xena’s usual outfit, of course, was a little skimpier.
So that’s not great, obviously. If your lead is portraying a wayfaring warrior, you’d think the emotional and physical comfort of the outfit would be a higher priority.
And I am always for better armor, both for the sake of historical accuracy and for believability, as well as the sake of providing actresses and stuntwomen with proper protection.
But I would like to point out a double standard in the way certain detractors try to automatically dismiss Xena’s iconic costume as impractical, or even claim that it detracts from the show’s standing as a feminist tentpole.
To be clear, I’m not here to write an essay comparing the bare chests and leather speedos of 300 to the cleavage-flashing, stomach-bearing corsetry of Xena. Objectification, unrealistic standards and fetishized bodies can exist on all sides of the spectrum, but we all know there is an inherent difference between a property created by men with the intent of portraying their male characters as a hyper-masculine, pride-driven wish-fulfillment ideal, and a property created by men with the intent of portraying an actress sexually for the sake of the - usually male - audience’s enjoyment.
But still, for all of this, I’m fairly defensive of Xena’s costume. You can say that she’s showing too much skin, or needs more armor, or call the breastplate fetish wear, but.
She is genuinely not showing much more skin than your average hoplite warrior in ancient Greece. I mean, yes, her chest is obviously more visible and she’s not wearing a helmet, because heroes in modern film and television almost never wear helmets, and she’s not carrying a shield, for much the same reason. And also because she can canonically catch arrows. But her costume is essentially just the busty version of this.
You know, bare arms, lace-up sandals, carved abs, exposed calves.
I mean, Xena partially comes from “sword-and-sandal” type films, which featured Steve Reeves dressed like this for 1958’s Hercules, and the episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys that Xena was introduced in literally opens like this.
Besides, things like plate armor were rare for ancient foot soldiers - gladiatorial armor was showy and sparse covering at best; artwork shows ancient Egyptian infantry as sporting no armor at all; and according to Greek historian Polybius, some Celts, according to legend, ran into battle naked.
Xena has shoulder guards and arm guards and the outfit hits her knees, which is more than you can say of 2017’s Wonder Woman.
And above all else, she is still, tragically, a standout among female action heroes - aside from your Ellen Ripleys and your Sarah Connors in their pseudo-military gear, your Brides and your Furiosas and your Dora Milaje - for wearing flat. fucking. shoes.
Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman wears wedges. Natasha Romanoff wore wedges. Trinity wore chunky heels. The characters in Into the Badlands and Underworld and Rush Hour and Charlie’s Angels and Batman and Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy and the goddamn lady in Jurassic World all wore high heels during major action scenes.
Dayna Grant, longtime horseback stuntwoman for Xena who also went on to work on Wonder Woman, spoke in detail in multiple interviews about how the worst stunt injury of her life was caused by a pair of flimsy high heels that caused her to slip, become impaled by a dagger to the face, and go into cardiac arrest.
Flat soles aren’t just a stylistic choice. They’re important for safety. And the idea of putting your lead actor in comfortable sneakers and literally building the boot around them, as they did on Xena, should not still be revolutionary, but here, as in so many other ways, she was ahead of her time.
The Producers Sincerely Hope You Were A-MUSE-D By This Episode
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the soundtrack, which is almost a trademark of its own within the world of Xena, alongside the iconic outfit and the sweeping New Zealand landscape.
Composer Joseph LoDuca was a long-time collaborator of Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi, the three having first met in 1980, and his first-ever film score was for Evil Dead. He then worked on, among other things, Hercules, Xena, He-Man, Leverage, Spartacus, Ash vs Evil Dead, and Chucky.
The most well-known parts of the Xena soundtrack are its various non-English anthems, namely the Main Title and a battle track entitled Warrior Princess, which accompanied Xena from her first appearance on Hercules. Apparently LoDuca had written an Eastern European-style chant for an earlier episode that producer Rob Tapert loved, and from there came up with the idea of Bulgarian singing.
Xena hailed from Amphipolis, which was in the ancient region of Thrace; while the city was firmly within modern-day Greece, what was once known as northern Thrace is now within the official boundaries of Bulgaria. The name “Xena” means “guest” or “stranger” in Greek, and the production and the actors have both implied that the character’s heritage lies here in the north, perhaps amid the Balkans.
This is partially reflected in the soundtrack, where they brought together a Bulgarian women’s chorus with eastern European rhythms and heavy drums, the Bulgarian kaval flute, the gaida bagpipes, cymbals and conches and didgeridoos. It was dark, it was exotic, it was warlike and fantastical, and it resulted in seven Emmy nominations for LoDuca before the show was over.
It also helps when your main star has a Broadway-ready set of pipes and can contribute to some of the most haunting and memorable tracks on the show.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Xena’s first and best stab at a musical, season three’s The Bitter Suite, which predates the famous Buffy episode by three whole years and is an absolutely wild trip of a story, with several of the main cast singing their own songs, while others were matched with startling accuracy by professional singers, like the late Michelle Nicastro for Callisto.
With lyrics contributed by multiple guest writers and dances choreographed by Broadway veteran and multi Tony Award nominee Jeff Calhoun, the music of The Bitter Suite resulted in two Emmy Award nominations.
It is also one of the best showcases of the late great Kevin Todd Smith.
And speaking of him, the script for this video essay is already at fifteen thousand words, but let’s talk villains for a hot second.
Sleazy Warlords Who Deem It Necessary to Drink Magic Elixirs That Turn Them Into Scaly Centaurs
This is going to be a highly abridged rundown of the greatest hits, as opposed to a comprehensive list of every antagonist ever to grace the show, and if you’ve watched Xena, you probably already know who I’m planning to talk about.
Callisto
Callisto, played spectacularly by Hudson Leick, is probably still the biggest fan favorite out of every villain on the show.
And to anyone uninitiated, I understand how this outfit and her slight build might recall something like Sucker Punch or a generic metal bikini villain from a video game, and call to question how convincing she could possibly be as a warlord or a villain, but ignore that. Trust me. Callisto was anything but generic, and half the reason it works is because the way Leick plays her is absolutely wild.
We’ve talked a little bit about her already - how Xena’s army burned her village, somewhat on accident, when Callisto was a child. That Callisto saw her family die, swore vengeance, and is somehow both more evil and more pitiable than Xena was at her worst. She’s the embodiment of Xena’s guilt, her existence and her many murders a constant reminder of the evil deeds that Xena will never outrun, and she’s fun.
Just. So much fun. She was also genuinely dangerous, genuinely tragic, and never used a single expression, emotion, or gesture when five would do.
Also there was a series of episodes where Xena and Callisto swapped bodies, during the period where Lucy Lawless had a broken pelvis after a horse stunt gone wrong for a Jay Leno skit, and both actors did a genuinely spectacular job adapting one another’s body language and speech style.
Ares
This brings us to Ares, as portrayed by Kevin Smith.
Maybe he was an evil bootycall, maybe he was her dad, it was ancient Greece and the scripts aren’t consistent on it anyway, don’t worry about it.
He was probably the longest-running villain on the show, the invisible force that mentored Xena through her evil years, brought her to her chakram, and reveled in every war she started and atrocious deed she committed. She was, in his eyes, his greatest accomplishment, and when she turned away from his path, he took it pretty personally.
Like, it’s actually hilarious how mad and scorned he is about it. He spends a lot of the show trying to convince her to return to him, to greater or lesser success, and trying to get her killed when she refuses. Their dynamic is fun, Kevin Smith was overwhelmingly charismatic on screen, and he also got more opportunities to stretch his skills as the show went on.
There’s a whole episode in season six where he’s lost his godhood and Xena somewhat sadistically tries to teach him to live on a farm while nostalgically reliving her own childhood, and it’s one of my favorite fluff episodes.
Also, yeah, Smith and Lawless had pretty insane chemistry.
Caesar
The last member of what you might call the Big Three was Julius Caesar, portrayed with perfect smug condescension by a young Karl Urban.
There are no words for how much I hated this man as a child. He had betrayed Xena, he had humiliated her and broken her, he didn’t respect her, and I hated him more than I had ever hated anyone in my life -
- Except for this one guy from the 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth. He’d killed a pet duck named Gertrude, I was eight years old and I wanted him dead, it was a whole thing.
Anyway, as a massive, massive Lord of the Rings fan, I cannot describe my shock on realizing this absolute bastard bane-of-my-existence was also Eomer of Rohan.
As I mentioned earlier in the essay, Caesar met Xena when she was young and naive - there is no continuity to the Xena timeline, but at a guess she was still in her late teens. She captured him, seduced him, and ransomed him back to Rome, parting on what seemed to be good terms.
Thinking that he was now an ally, they planned to meet again - but instead he brought an army with him, killed all of her people, broke her legs, and left her to die.
Whenever they meet again in the series, there’s an incredible sense of tension due to their long, messy history - lots of mutual disdain and that weird energy of two people who used to have sex a lot and now despise each other.
Their story mostly concludes in the Ides of March episode in season four, and it is a powerful, heavy one, not least because the implication that Caesar may have won - that he, despite all Xena did to fight against him, may soon become the all-powerful emperor of Rome - makes it one of Xena’s worst defeats in the series.
Alti
My last favorite villain came later on the show, and while she isn’t quite on par with the other three, I think she’s definitely worth mentioning here; and that’s Alti, portrayed by Claire Stansfield.
I don’t include her on the list because I think the writing necessarily utilized her in the best way possible, or because the flashbacks to her time with Xena make a huge amount of sense within the timeline, but because Stansfield portrayed her with convincing power and menace.
She always felt a little not-human - a little too mysterious, a little too all-seeing, and too mystic for Xena to just beat hand-to-hand. The actress had this fantastic throaty voice, and a lot of presence, and you need that if you’re going to be a convincing and worthy antagonist against Lucy Lawless. You need to be able to stand toe-to-toe with her and either look or act just as impressive, which is why, I think, so many of the other antagonists and warriors on the show fell slightly short.
And it’s not just because Xena is tall and dark-haired and pale-eyed and those things make for a powerful visual. They were constantly hiring gorgeous model types in an attempt to hit this combination again - like with Velasca, with Livia, with Varia. They tried to make Livia a whole lot of something by giving her the nickname “The Bitch of Rome,” but we all know who that really is. And look, respect where it’s due, Velasca was a lot of fun and Varia had a lot of fans, but lightning never quite struck twice.
Even Athena was a well-acted antagonist on season five, but it’s an issue when your day-to-day protagonist is just straight-up more intimidating than the literal Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare.
Just before we close this section, a quick shout-out to a few honorable mentions; first and foremost Najara, one of the only warriors to ever actually straight-up beat Xena in a fight.
Xena is such a sore loser that it’s genuinely hilarious - she’s good at so many things that she’s always on the backfoot for a second when she finds someone of her own skill level, and because she never really had to learn how to lose graciously, she’s just so bad at it.
I know their personalities are worlds apart, but sometimes I feel like she and Thor would get along really well.
Moving on, there’s also Dahak and Hope, who didn’t have much personality but whose arc was tied into some of the most emotional and tumultuous times in the show; and Draco, who was always a good fun time.
We also got a lovely fun performance from Renee O’Connor here - any of the show’s doppelganger episodes were a great opportunity to watch the actors show off their range.
Also this thing. I thought this thing was cool.
….Anyway, the main villain of the show was plot consistency, so.
#MaoriActressForXena
A few years ago I started a casual discussion on social media regarding my opinion that - given how a Xena reboot was at the time supposedly in the works, the filming location of New Zealand, the Maori designs that apparently influenced the style of Xena’s armor, my recent bingewatching of traditional haka performances, and the original series’ unfortunate propensity for casting Maori actors more frequently as villains than as heroes - the reboot was an opportunity to feature a Maori actress as the new Xena.
Of course, every actor deserves the opportunity to play an original character and make him or her iconic in their own right rather than simply re-treading the past, but there is no reason for these options to be framed as an either/or. Yes, the industry should focus on original properties and on casting the best actor for those properties without bias; but simultaneously, in rebooting a popular franchise, why confine the search for a new lead to actors who happen to resemble the original, unless context calls for it?
Anyway, I didn’t expect or get many responses to my post, but the ones I did receive were… enthusiastic in informing me that a Maori actress in the show’s ancient Greek setting would be “unrealistic.”
Unrealistic. In Xena.
The series that traveled from Zhou Dynasty China to Roman-occupied Britain in about a year and covered events from the Trojan War to Arthurian legend to the Bible.
The series where Kevin Smith, who played Ares, was of mixed European and Tongan descent; where Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, was played by black actress Galyn Gorg; where Cleopatra was Gina Torres; Manu Bennett took a turn as Marc Antony; Tony Todd played Cecrops the Lost Mariner; Tamati Rice was both a pseudo-Vercingetorix of Gaul and the literal Archangel Raphael; and the man introduced in the first season as Xena’s former one true love - you know, before Gabrielle was properly a thing - was played by African-American actor Bobby Hosea.
Greek or Mediterranean descent has never been a requisite for actors on the show. Why would it be? Historical accuracy is not friends with Xena: Warrior Princess and never has been.
If it were, a New Zealander of Irish ancestry wouldn’t have been cast as a Bulgarian warrior in Greece to begin with. For reference, the distance from Ireland to Greece is about equal to that between Greece and Sudan.
Listen to me. There is one hard and fast casting rule for a series of Xena, and it is that Karl Urban needs to play at least four different characters.
Somewhat vindicatingly, a couple of years later, Lucy Lawless was asked at Palermo Comic Con what her thoughts were on the potential reboot, and yeah, her answer was that she would like Xena to be played by a Black actress, so.
Anyway. Let’s spend a second talking about the way Xena portrayed culture and race.
The answer is that it was a pretty mixed bag. It was the 1990’s, the show took place mostly in ancient Europe, almost all of the showrunners, producers, writers and directors of the show were white, and I’ll be honest, I say ‘almost all’ just in case I missed something while scrolling IMDB.
As I mentioned, there were numerous people of color employed as actors and stunt workers on the show. As the show filmed in New Zealand it featured a number of Maori actors, including Jay Laga'aia - who would become known for his role in Star Wars: Episodes II and III - in a recurring feature as Draco, who was given more three-dimensionality than the usual warlord of the week. Also present was Lawrence Makoare, who rose to international renown playing numerous villains in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
But especially in earlier seasons, the majority of the people of color on the show were playing one-off villains, doomed warlords, former slaves, and background henchmen as opposed to any of the main - oh my God, that’s Game of Thrones, I’ve just described Game of Thrones.
I think they did actively try to be progressive sometimes?
According to producer Rob Tapert, the thought they were doing ground-breaking work by putting Xena into an interracial relationship in the first season. He later even said that they received protest letters over this depiction.
I thought this sounded fake, and decided to do some research.
It sounds absurd today, more than 50 years out from Loving v Virginia, but until 1997, Gallup polls were still showing a less than 50% approval rating of black-and-white interracial marriage in America.
Which, as the child of a multi-ethnic family myself, was interesting to learn.
It supposedly hovers at around 94% today, which, what the fuck is up with that last 6%, America?
Anyway, this was less than a decade after a 1991 article from the New York Times reported that Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, found one in five white people surveyed to still believe that interracial marriage should be illegal.
So, I mean, going back to Xena’s love interest, Marcus, this may have been unusual at the time and the actor did a great job with this character, but also he was in like three episodes and ended up dead, so hashtag #theytried, I guess?
On top of this, conversations on cultural appropriation and whitewashing hadn’t entirely hit the mainstream yet, so there were a few - let’s say costume and makeup choices - that don’t entirely hold up today. Like the Horde. I mean, what is this? What’s going on here, guys?
One of the hallmarks of the show is also in the characters’ travels to far-away places - Britain, Scandinavia, China, India. Some of these depictions created mass controversy at the time, and we will definitely talk about that.
But one major, fan-favorite is the character of Lao Ma, who appears in season three’s two-episode flashback arc The Debt I & II, both of which are set in China and the Mongolain steppe during Xena’s reign of terror. Portrayed with strength, complexity and grace by Korean-American actress Jacqueline Kim, Lao Ma was not only instrumental to the plotline of two of the best Xena episodes ever made, she was a major figure in the younger Xena’s life. A scholar and a leader and a warrior and a teacher, she was one of the only people to actively treat the young warlord with kindness and compassion and mercy, and probably the person who came closest to turning Xena away from evil before she met Hercules.
These episodes aired in late 1997, and at the time a lot of people took her character to be incredibly positive representation for Asian women on screen. In retrospect, things were a little more complicated. For one thing, Jacqueline Kim, who portrayed her, is, as mentioned, not Chinese. For another, from a modern perspective, her status as mentor of mystic arts wasn’t exactly breaking stereotypes; for a third, she didn’t survive the series.
In a 2019 interview with Sarah Kuhn, Jacqueline Kim discusses how the filming process was, quote, “Just super fun and awesome. And working with Lucy was so liberating, because she is game for everything and super professional and funny and smart.” She also, quote, “loved that they weren't trying to hide that [Lao Ma] was Asian or say it's uncool to be Asian. She's Xena's mentor, she's the coolest person there!”
At the same time, she revealed that the producers had wanted her to do an exotic accent - not specific to a region or time period in China, but just generally, stereotypically Asian. Other actors on set were even putting on those accents, but she stood her ground, and her version is what went on-screen. In a later interview with Michelle Erica Green, she would say, “I love all the license that Xena takes, I love the campy aspects and the huge margin of disbelief. But one of my points in this exotic accent thing was, Xena's not speaking in a Greek accent. It's usually asked of somebody who has a 'different-looking' face that they sound foreign or different, and I've got a problem with that.”
She was also intent on making sure that the character had complexity. She wrote her own backstory for the Lao Ma, and would later say, “I liked that she was human above everything. I think sometimes people can dehumanize Asian women and make them sort of perfect or they can make them emotionless.”
She also tells a fun story about this scene, where Lao Ma is hiding Xena from men intent on hunting her down, and transfers air to her mouth-to-mouth.
The abridged version of how she tells it is like this: “We had only ten minutes left in the full day. Everyone was stressing out because we were going into overtime. Lucy had been in this disgusting water all day. She hadn't complained.
I remember all these men standing around and saying things like "We don't have time", "It's too important, it's too hard, there's no way". They didn't think we'd be able to find each other underwater.
Lucy looked at me and I looked at her. We were both very businesslike about it. And we did it! We just did it! We were just like two tomboy-ish girls diving underwater.
I remember it was just fun. The directors are always changing, and the tone on the set is up to the lead person. And she sets a fun, hard-working tone.”
And then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have the episode The Way, which caused such an outcry that it was literally censored from television. I haven’t rewatched these episodes in a very long time and we don’t have time to unpack the full mess, so I’m just going to lay out the abridged facts.
In season four, the show had a series of episodes set in India. The final episode of this arc, entitled The Way, also featured several Hindu gods; Krishna, Hanuman, Kali, and Indrajit. There’s also a white hippie Jesus-type named Eli, who preaches peace and non-violence.
Amidst the conflict of the episode, Indrajit captures Gabrielle and Eli, defeats Xena, Xena turns into the goddess Kali and teams up with Krishna to defeat Inrajit, and saves Gabrielle. The god Hanuman is also there.
Yeah.
They allegedly did consult with Dr. Ravi Palat of Auckland University, but there were to my knowledge no writers, directors, or producers of South Asian descent involved in the production of the episode, which opened on a smorgasbord of Indian cliches and featured the characters wearing these costumes. It was… a choice.
Anyway, word got out about the themes of the episode and really riled up one particular white New Zealander who some have later suggested had a literal brain tumor at the time - he repeatedly wrote to the studio in protest and also contacted a number of Hindu organizations in the United States, leading to wider outcry by the World Vaishnava Organization and the American Hindus Against Defamation.
On February 23, 1999, production staff received a letter from Tustas Krishnadas, Press Secretary of the World Vaishnava Association, in protest of the episode, which still had not yet screened.
It is a very long letter, but I’ll pick out a few statements:
“To treat Krishna as a fictional character who can be manipulated by script writers for the sole purpose of creating an interesting plot is not pleasing to sincere devotees of Krishna. Even if Krishna is portrayed in a "good" or "favorable" role, it is still of great concern because it gives the distinct impression that He is fictional.”
The letter protests reports that Xena attacks Hanuman, that Hanuman doesn’t counterattack, that Xena doesn’t apologize, that Hanuman is respectful but receives no respect in return, that Hanuman is not properly respectful to Krishna, that Xena speaks condescendingly to Krishna, and that’s a sentence I don’t often say. That Hanuman offers false instruction on how devotees are able to call on Krishna’s attention, etc.
Quote, “If we consider this scene carefully, we see that through the eyes of the Xena staff, the Vedic scriptures are not only fictional but they are also untruthful or contain lies. [...] It is shown by Xena that Krishna is at the beck and call of the proud and the faithless.”
He also protests that the show has replaced real religious icons with fictional characters, and states that Xena turning into Kali is deeply offensive to the demigods. He then says that Americans clearly think Kali is like The Hulk, which. Is pretty funny, like, that’s actually kind of a read on how Americans treat other cultures sometimes.
Also, this: Quote, “We also get the subtle message that the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krishna, and great devotees of the Lord such as Hanuman give their blessing to lesbian relationships. [...] In this show we have Krishna and Hanuman helping unite Xena with Gabrielle, her lesbian girlfriend, which may be misinterpreted as an endorsement by Sri Hanuman and Lord Krishna of the lesbian lifestyle when in fact it is condemned in the Vedic literature.”
Lol.
In April the producers, who said that they “produced this episode to illustrate the beauty and power of the Hindu religion,” met with Sunil Aghi, founder of the Indo-Americans Political Foundation and a Democratic activist in the United States.
“We should not be seen like the people who protested against Salman Rushdie," Aghi said at the time, and counseled them to remove certain specific scenes from the broadcast.
Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor also taped a 30-second public service announcement with Aghi to air alongside the episode The Way.
Afterward, an article from June 1999 on Hinduism Today stated that, “Hanuman is not harmed by Xena. In fact, they strike up a close friendship. Lord Krishna is depicted in a loving, Godly manner.”
The same online paper’s staff allegedly enjoyed the episode, and their New York correspondent, Lavina Melwani, former editor of India Worldwide, cofounder of the Children's Hope charity and prominent member of the Sindhi community, even said, “My husband and I enjoyed the show. It conveyed the philosophy of nonviolence and love very well. It brought Hindu ideas into the mainstream, reaching an audience that would not be exposed otherwise.”
Hinduism Today concluded that, “The producers have obviously worked hard researching Hinduism.”
But still, the furor in the US and India grew; some said that the show should have consulted with religious people instead of with Aghi, who represented a more secular organization.
There was ongoing outcry from the American Hindus Against Defamation, the World Vaishnava Association, the Hindu Students Council, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. There were petitions with thousands of signatures. There were floods of hate mail. There were pickets outside of Universal.
The episode was pulled from the re-release schedule and there were official apologies from the studio.
Some Xena fans started a counter-campaign called Xenites Against Censorship, and their petition had more than ten thousand signatures from over ten countries, decrying the censorship and pointing to the show’s usual disrespectful treatment of the Greek gods - which was generally to have Xena beat the shit out of them at every opportunity - which obviously ignores the fact that worship of the ancient Greek pantheon was not a living religion, unlike Hinduism.
The episode was eventually re-released several months later with one specific clip of Xena headbutting Hanuman removed, but it still drew continued protest on the basis that these figures should not be depicted on television for entertainment regardless.
Meanwhile, the show’s initial consultant, Dr. Ravi Palat, was expressing confusion at the outcry, stating that in Bollywood, quote, “There are hundreds of movies which portray Hindu deities as fictional characters.”
Also, in a 2021 YouTube comment on a video by That Movie Chick entitled That Time Xena Went to India and Almost Got Canceled, Rajneel Singh, the actor who played Indrajit, wrote an open letter on behalf of himself and fellow actor Rajiv Varma, who played Krishna. Both of them, he says, were practicing Hindus at the time.
The comment outlines how he’d heard no complaints from New Zealand's Indian community during the filming process; that it being 1990’s New Zealand, most of the actors were thrilled to have featured roles in Xena as the show rarely portrayed Asian or Indian characters; that as practicing Hindus they thought, quote, “the production was pretty fantastic and largely accurate;” that it was surprisingly on-target and not offensive; and that, quote, “the complaints were started by a very strange white hippie dude and the nearly all of the organizations who opposed the show and protested it were considered to be ultra-conservative and right-to-far-right Hindu organizations.”
He concludes that, as a person of color in the film industry, quote, “I have nothing but thanks for Rob Tapert and Lucy for pushing hard to find ways to make their show diverse and get diverse stories into it, in the 1990's when there was ZERO precedent for it.”
So. That’s… a lot. Like, I don’t know how to conclude all of this, other than to say be careful when portraying world cultures and living religions when you have zero producers, writers, or regular cast members of that culture or religion.
I do think that if these episodes aired today, the global discussion would instead surround the question of whether The Way was a fair, respectful, three-dimensional and nuanced portrayal of a culture and its people.
And if a reboot of Xena does ever go ahead, this is one of the ways in which they now have a chance to do better.
Xena Was Permanently Harmed in the Making of This Motion Picture
As with any long-running series, there is a lot of fan debate about what constitutes the best years of the show.
For a while, both the actors and the writers flourished more and more with each year, as did the budget. Season three is often considered to be something of a golden age. Producer Liz Friedman, writer Steven Sears, and writer/producer RJ Stewart all left the team for a time after season four, and their presence and influence was inarguably missed.
It was the time of a lot of turmoil behind the scenes; scores of crew members left to work on Lord of the Rings, which was fully monopolizing New Zealand’s filmmaking industry at the time. Executives were focusing their energy on other projects, Lucy Lawless was pregnant with her second child, and new writers were brought in who seemed, at least from the outside, to be somewhat in over their heads. A time skip left behind some fan-favorite supporting characters. The subtext was diminished, for a time, replaced by a sudden focus on random male love interests, and the ratings - coincidentally I’m sure - plummeted.
Season six was considered something of a return to form, and it continued to have excellent one-off episodes, but by this time the writing was on the wall, leading to a massive-two part series finale entitled A Friend in Need.
So, we don’t talk about A Friend in Need. It was certainly crafted with a lot of careful effort and attention by the cast and crew, and some of the creators and some fans hold it near and dear to their hearts, but to many of us, we have collectively decided to view it as non-canonical.
Xena broke a thousand barriers and buried a dozen stereotypes; no one likes to think of it betraying its legacy of feminine power and queer love by also falling into the trope of permanently burying its bisexual lead.
The finale aired in 2001, when discussions of that trope were only just beginning to hit the mainstream, and undoubtedly the cast and crew thought they were crafting a fitting end for a Greek warrior always searching for redemption.
Lucy Lawless has since changed her view on the show’s ending, discussing it in multiple interviews and telling Entertainment Weekly that it was a, quote, "huge regret," saying, "We didn't realize really what it meant to people. We thought, 'Oh, that's a really strong ending.' Now I just say to fans, 'Let's pretend that never happened'."
Epilogue
So where is Xena today, more than twenty years down the line since the series finale?
The legacy of the show is still hard to overstate. Our modern slate of sci-fi, fantasy, and action projects would simply not be what it is today without the ground-breaking work of the cast and crew in 1995.
Without Xena’s success, without the efforts of its creatives, there may not have been a Buffy or Dark Angel. There certainly wouldn’t have been a Cleopatra 2525 or perhaps and Alias, or a La Femme Nikita, all of which were stepping stones for Gina Torres before she landed Firefly. We might not have Kill Bill as we know it. And just as there is no warrior princess without Terminator and no Terminator without Alien, literally every action heroine we’ve seen since has found her path just a little smoother because of Xena.
And let’s be honest, it’s half-responsible for a lot of design elements that are now ingrained into the public consciousness.
It changed New Zealand’s film industry, partially through the Xena to LOTR Pipeline - you can even see some of Richard Taylor and WETA Workshop’s fledgeling work in early episodes.
But arguably, nowhere was the impact stronger than on Xena’s audience. While it was on air, fans claimed that the show was empowering them to leave abusive relationships. For others, even for personal friends of mine, it was part of their first wake-up call that they were not heterosexual. Some fans wrote their Masters thesis about Xena.
For me, it spawned a life-long fascination with ancient history and travel to foreign places. If you flip through family photo albums, there are half a dozen photos from the late 90’s of tiny me wearing Xena memorabilia, like, yes, this is a costume that my mother made when I was nine years old, which I revamped a decade later for Comic Con and then again a decade after that for the Renaissance Faire.
So, what else has happened in the years since Xena went off the air?
Kevin Todd Smith passed away following an accident on a film set in China in 2002. He is still very much missed.
Um, Condoleezza Rice was unfortunately nicknamed the “warrior princess” by members of her staff, which mostly makes sense if you’re talking about the war crimes.
In 2005, the scientific team that discovered the dwarf planet 2003 UB313 nicknamed it "Xena." Later the same year, the team found that 2003 UB313 had a moon, which they of course nicknamed "Gabrielle."
In ‘06, Lucy Lawless was actually present at the deathbed of a longtime Xena fan, was there as her family, friends, and her partner remembered the revolutionary life that the woman had lived.
Lawless was also arrested at an oil-drilling protest in 2012 and continues to be an advocate for climate consciousness. She remains outspoken online and occasionally just absolutely bodies Kevin Sorbo when he’s being an asshole on Twitter.
In 2013 Jennifer Sky, actor for Amarice, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times to discuss how liberating Xena had been for her. After an abusive teenage modeling career that resulted in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, her time on the show learning “horseback riding, archery, and numerous fighting techniques” had been, quote, “shout-it-to-the-heavens inspiring.”
The last Xena Convention was held in 2015 - rumors of a revival several years later having been derailed by Covid-19 - but over the years, Xena fans have raised tens of millions of dollars for charity in total.
The first Wonder Woman movie finally came out in 2017 and Lucy Lawless wasn’t in it, which is fine, I definitely feel fine and normal about that.
Rumors of attempted reboots of the show have since come and gone.
I would love to see the original cast back - following in Linda Hamilton’s footsteps for Terminator: Dark Fate - and watch them walk into the sunset happily ever after, passing the baton down to a new generation. Whatever path they take, I hope they move for more diversity not only on-screen but also behind the camera and in the writer’s room.
It’s not Xena if it’s not pushing boundaries, it’s not Xena if it’s not progressive, and they now have the opportunity to do so much better than they could in the 90’s.
Moving down the list, in 2021, tennis legend Serena Williams released the ‘Xena’ line of her personal sportswear brand. The website states that the clothing is “made for your inner warrior princess.”
The same year, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor finally reunited on screen in Lawless’s show My Life Is Murder.
And in 2022, a literal statue of Xena would have a cheeky blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange and the Multivers of Madness.
To quote producer Richie Palmer on the commentary track, “The great Lucy Lawless. This scene pays tribute to female heroes and villains. She's the embodiment of both, so it's really appropriate for this moment.”
Nature is healing.
Post-Credits
Also.
In the 1950’s and 60’s in Italy, the industry was briefly dominated by what came to be known as ‘sword-and-sandal’ or ‘peplum’ films, which were low-budget historical or mythological epics in the vein of Hollywood blockbusters like Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, and Spartacus, and included Steve Reeves in what is still one of the most iconic portrayals of Hercules in 1958 - the same year in which American author Daniel P Mannix coincidentally published Those About to Die, an in-depth historical fiction account of the lives of Roman gladiators - before enthusiasm for this genre ultimately faded away. In 1972 future Hollywood scriptwriter David Franzoni dropped out of grad school to motorbike across Europe, and was inspired by the many ruins of ancient arenas that he saw on his tour, a journey that stayed with him for over twenty years. Meanwhile, fantasy and historical epics were persona-non-grata at the box office, aside from the brief sword-and-sandal revival of the 1980’s which included Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian, a character Schwarzenegger was later uninterested in returning to, so the script for the follow-up Conan the Conqueror was changed to Kull the Conqueror in 1997 and the part was given to Kevin Sorbo, who was at that time starring in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, the parent show of Xena: Warrior Princess, where the titular character could often be seen battling Rome both in the arena and outside of it. At this same period in the late 90’s, the previous Eurotripper David Franzoni approached Hollywood producer Douglas Wick and suggested a film set in a Roman coliseum, for which he then worked up a draft based upon Mannix’s 1958 book Those About to Die and the idea was sold to DreamWorks with Ridley Scott coming on to direct as principal photography began in January 1999. That film, released in the year 2000, was obviously Gladiator, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and alongside the New Zealand-produced Lord of the Rings trilogy, ushered in a new Hollywood era of historical epics that include Troy, 300, Kingdom of Heaven, Alexander, and of course King Arthur, scripted by David Franzoni himself. The screenwriter for Troy would later go on to work on a new series that was greenlit for HBO in 2008 entitled Game of Thrones, which would become one of the biggest television shows of the decade after its premier in 2010, the same year as the television series Spartacus premiered, which was created by Sam Raimi and executive produced by Rob Tapert and appeared on Starz co-starring Lucy Lawless.
I’m obviously not saying that Xena is the reason we have Gladiator. I’m just saying that it was a part of cultural zeitgeist at the time, and it’s important for us to pay respect to every complex thread that has led us to where we are in pop culture and art today.
A Rambling Account of the Badassery of Xena: Warrior Princess
A video essay about Xena: Warrior Princess and her place in the history of action women and queer women on screen.
youtube
0:00 - Intro
8:23 - Disclaimer
8:44 - Toss a Coin to Your Warrior (Princess)
10:48 - Women in Action: By the Numbers
37:59 - Women in Action: Like the Harpies in a Bad Mood
49:57 - Just a Girl in Search of a Really Good Sword
56:29 - All Consequences Are Your Own Creation
59:47 - A Friend of Humanity
1:06:51 - Don’t Be Shy, Your Mother Wasn’t
1:22:55 - Harold, They’re Lesbians
1:36:13 - Leather Unmentionables
1:47:06 - The Producers Sincerely Hope You Were A-MUSE-D
1:50:32 - Sleazy Warlords Who Drink Magic Elixirs
1:59:13 - Blonde-Haired, Blue-Eyed Horde Girls
2:15:31 - Xena Was Permanently Harmed in the Making of This Motion Picture
2:18:02 - Epilogue
2:27:21 - Credits
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How come whenever something bad happens to someone in power it's never fucking mitch mcconnell.
#the thing about kings dying is they are immediately replaced#there are many kings. there is only one of that motherfucker.#and he is never going to retire#do you see what im saying
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Four days of hell.
Duncan Visla x Swedish!reader
Summary: Duncan curses Blut for involving his neighbor in the man's schemes.
Warnings: torture, blood, inappropriate comments, cursing, name-calling, shooting, idk just Duncan Visla things.
Author's note: I thought it was spelled Vizla, but the closed captions said Visla. Idk. Either way, I guess.
Masterlist
...........................................................
Duncan was enraged.
Here he was, held up by chains like an animal, awaiting his fate at the hands of Mr. Blut.
And they had taken her in the process.
Y/N.
Mr. Blut walked through the doors, the light revealing little but the bright red of his suit. And behind him was Y/N.
She had a collar wrapped around her neck, the leash being held by the man.
Duncan was ready do make him regret the day he was born.
Mr. Blut handed the leash off to one of the guards who ties it to a nearby pole.
"You hurt me, Mr. Visla. And that cannot be repaid with a swift, impersonal death."
He slowly takes off his jacket as he speaks, replacing it with a transparent apron.
"When the English caught the traitor William Wallace, they dragged him naked through the street for six miles so that peasants could smear their warm, fresh piss and shit on him…"
Duncan didn't even bother paying attention to the man, his eyes resting solely on the girl, as if his gaze would be enough to unlock the chains on the two of them.
The old man remembers the day she came into his life. He has been out splitting logs when he heard a noise coming from around the house next door.
Y/N had fallen outside in the snow, and now sat in it, half embarrassed, half amused.
Although Duncan hadn't noticed the fall, he saw the girl immediately and found himself walking in her direction.
The girl, as it had turned out, had just moved from Sweden, and was trying her luck at a life in America.
Duncan thought her foolish for picking Montana of all places, but he would never say that to her.
In the fall, she had scratched her leg, and hadn't noticed the red seeping into the snow. So, Duncan helped the poor girl into the house.
And that was eight months ago.
He had grown too fond of the girl since then and he now was cursing himself for it.
"…because the traitor had hurt the king."
Duncan snapped away from his thoughts and back to the situation in front of him. He was dripping sweat as his eyes glared at the man.
"…I guess Wallace hurt England pretty bad," Mr. Blut leaned in towards Duncan, "YOU hurt ME pretty bad, Mr. Visla. I have four days before I have to kill you. Four days of HELL! And on your birthday….
…you die."
Y/N had sat against the pole she was tied to, her eyes focused on Duncan's face. She had never seen the older man like this: focused, angry, and unforgiving. It was a scary sight for her.
But beyond that, she focused on the man in the red suit's words. She was struggling learning all of the English words, and lots of them she had missed just then. But the ones she did catch were the most important ones.
Something about his birthday and hell and dying.
She continued to watch her neighbor closely. So much so, that she didn't notice the other man shift his gaze to her.
Mr. Blut gave a sick smile as he turned back to Duncan, "I'm going to have a little fun with your lady. And you're gonna watch."
She didn't quite understand what he meant, but she saw Duncan's eyes narrow just slightly.
He held a picture up to Duncan of the girl that was taken earlier, her body in a kneeling position and the man's hand gripped her jaw, his thumb in her mouth. She looked scared and confused in it, and Duncan was ready to murder.
Mr. Blut held up a knife, stabbing the picture into Duncan's chest.
Duncan let out a groan.
Y/N pushed herself forward slightly, her eyes wide in shock. A small shriek left her lips but she covered it with her mouth.
Mr. Blut moved to his instruments of torture, "So I've given it some thought, and I've decided that we're gonna start…" he held up a small snipping tool, "…with these. Music please."
The man proceeded to cut Duncan's skin to the sound of the bagpipes.
The sounds of Duncan's wails and cries becoming too much for the girl. She backed herself up against the pole, covering her ears and shutting her eyes tightly.
After what felt like hours, he finally stopped his torture. He pulled the knife from Duncan's body, taking the picture with him.
"The fun continues tomorrow, Mr. Visla."
He untied Y/N, dragging her out of the room with him.
The door closed, the lights shut off, and Duncan's chains were given slack, making the exhausted man fall to the ground in a slump.
…
The pattern continued for the next three days. The endless torturing, the pained cries, the blood, and the crying girl in the corner.
By the third day, Duncan was entirely disoriented, his eyes not moving as fast as he wanted them to. His body wasn't listening to his brain and he was dying of blood loss.
Mid-torture, Blut's knife broke in Duncan's torso. He cursed at the man, and held up the remaining part of the blade. "You broke my favorite knife."
But Duncan wasn't responding. He could barely keep his eyes open.
Blut got in his face, "I said, you've broken my favorite— hello?"
He cut at Duncan's cheek to try to get a reaction, but none came.
"I'm obviously not getting through to you, am I?"
And with that, he stabbed the broken blade into Duncan's eye.
Duncan screamed, the deep vibrato echoing in the room.
Y/N let out a shriek, her voice finally coming through. "Sluta! Sluta såra honom!"
Blut looked over his shoulder, taking the blade from Duncan's eye. He looks back, pulling Duncan's face up by his hair. "The fun continues tomorrow, Mr. Visla."
As he walked back towards the door, he stopped by the girl. He leaned close.
The girl was panting now, her voice now turning soft compared to the shriek she had given earlier, "p…please."
The man kicked at her legs in anger. "You'll learn to shut your fucking mouth, you little whore."
She retreated slightly, her eyes wide.
Blut turned back towards Duncan. "And for your birthday present, Mr. Visla… you get to keep your whore tonight."
And then he left.
…
The silence continued in the space for longer than she would have liked.
Duncan could barely keep his eyes open.
"D…Duncan?"
He let out a groan of recognition at the sound of her voice.
"What did… what were the words he said… about me? I tried to follow but I… it was too fast."
A light hum from the man and a strained, "…No."
She nodded, understanding to keep to herself.
"Sleep…"
She turned her head to Duncan. "W…what?"
"…sleep."
A nod, and she leaned back against the pillar, letting herself fall asleep.
…
The next day, Y/N awoke to the sound of gunshots. She jumped, her head swiveling to Duncan.
She watched as Duncan fought off the guards. She was unfamiliar with the sound of bones snapping until that day.
She hid as much as she could to avoid the bullets that flew across the room. Duncan stood straight when it was done, his mind now focused, and his body responsive like never before.
He took heavy steps to the girl who now was looking up at him with an unreadable expression.
When he neared her, he took the piece of broken blade in his hand, and stared at the collar, as if asking for permission to touch.
When she nodded, he stood in front of her now, her head tilted up from her place of the ground to look at the ex-assassin.
His fingers lightly ghosted over the scratch on his cheek, his eyes studying it closely.
She let him, unsure of what it was he was doing.
Finally when he deemed her alright physically, he knelt down face-to-face with her, his hand fidgeting with the collar's lock until it opened.
He threw it from her frame, his eyes now ghosting over the bruises that laid under the collar.
He took deep breaths.
"Did he touch you?"
She tilted her head slightly in confusion.
He sighed, "Did he… hurt you in other ways?"
She slowly shook her head.
He left out the biggest sigh of relief. "You're gonna follow me. And you're going to do everything I say without hesitation."
He grabbed her arm, pulling her up with him.
When he hurt more guards climbing the stairs, he pushed up under a table. "Stay there."
He then shot the light box, making the building lose power.
The guards came in slowly and on edge, their flashlights being their only source of light.
Duncan managed to take them out one by one.
When they had been cleared from the room and the outer room, he whistled lowly and the girl slowly emerged, following him down the stairs.
He checked around each corner carefully before leading her through. Once they entered the underground tunnel, he took the fire extinguisher off the wall. "Cover your ears and stay right there."
He threw the extinguisher around the corner and shot it, making the guards both with ringing ears and blind eyes.
After a lot of shooting, she heard his whistle again and moved to follow.
She stepped close to him then felt a hand wrap around her throat from behind, a gun now pointed at her temple.
"Don't move, Visla."
Duncan cursed under his breath and turned around slowly, his calculating eyes taking in the sight, "Give me the girl."
The guard pushed against the girl's already bruised windpipe. "I said don't move."
"Christ…"
The man was shot before Y/N even processed that Duncan had moved.
She felt his body crumple to the ground, his voice pleading.
Duncan stepped to them slowly, taking the man's shirt in his grip. He punched the man harshly.
And again.
And again.
And she let him.
After about six punches, Duncan fell to the ground in exhaustion.
She knelt down beside him with a gently hand on his upper back.
He finally stood up with her help, and they slowly walked out of their seemingly endless enclosure.
He pulled her to him, placing a gentle kiss at her temple.
Duncan held her close, and she let him. The blood seeping into her clothes didn't bother her at all.
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Part 2 would be cute :)))
#duncan vizla#duncan visla#polar 2019#duncan vizla x reader#duncan vizla imagine#Duncan vizla fanfiction#duncan visla x reader#duncan visla fanfiction#duncan visla imagine#madds mikkelsen#polar fanfiction
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It'd kind of weird how..Persephone has a closer relationship to Hera than her own mother like 🤨
Demeter literally gave you everything you could ever want, she just didn't want your dumbass running around with the Olympians FOR GOOD REASON?? (And low and behold as soon as she left the Mortal Realm everything went shitty and bad things immediately happened to her 😶)
Like..you wanted MALE god friends so bad?? Cuz ig Hermes wasn't enough?? All the nymphs, Athena, Hestia and Artemis weren't enough?? Fucking weird.
Like I'd get it if it was about hee wanting to go to school but she only did that for like one WEEK or less, before she pussied out and got distracted by Hades and all his riches.
Demeter should be disappointed that she put so much effort into Persephone only for her to become this ungrateful, spoiled, tantrum throwing, sugar baby. Like holy shit--
She was raised around nymphs but she takes every chance to terrorize them, but let a God actually insult her and she just grumbles and pouts and let's Hades deal with it. (Unless it's Zeus for some reason?? She has no issue getting bold with the literal king.)
Like her act of Wrath was because of her two nymph friends dying and yet..she clearly doesn't care about nymphs. Or anyone in the Mortal Realm for that matter.
(Also.. she doesn't seem to like Hermes or Artemis for that matter either, easily replacing them with Eros and Hades, despite Hermes being her first male friend and Artemis LETTING HER STAY IN HER HOUSE. Also..Eros got to ealk her down the isle.and not of her nymph friends were there except for Daphne?? What the hell.
#anti lore olympus#j.p speaks#i love hera but..Persephone seems to care more about her than her own damn mother.#lo critical#Persephone is a spoiled little child who cant take care of herself but acts like she can.#anti lo persephone#..I think i hate her actually 😶#demeter deserves a daughter that doesnt hate her so much
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Headcanons for Kokushibo because I I'm bored <3
TW. SH mentions, abuse, some of them might not make sense
Like I said before, he's aroace and gender apathetic
Daddy and abandoned issues
He has misophonia and injury phobia, because once he saw a man with both broken arms (open fracture) in abandoned mansion when he was a human
Him and Enjiūro Rengoku (first flame Hashira) They formed a special relationship with each other, which led Michikatsu to become slightly obsessed with him
To that point that he was with him when Enjiūro was dying from the demon slayer mark
He finds Kizuki as a social experiment that is filled with random people
He's an introvert
He had quite a long affair with Tamayo, like I mentioned before, in KokuTama headcanons
As a child, whenever he made a mistake in training with his father, he would be punished, for example, hitting, feeding or putting his hand in thin coals.
For first time when he saw how Yoriichi was blessed with skill, he felt proud but after a while of experiencing the immediate replacement (he was now that worst child and Yoriichi was better) he couldn't help but just be jealous of his brother.
Let's not forget the fact he hated and him and himself for some reason
He never wanted to be married, he never had any interest in romance or sexual affairs. He would rather run away than have family (which he did)
When he joined corps, he was 22
For a reason, Shin Kaminari (first thunder Hashira) was laughing at him and nagging him for being jealous of something that is not important.
It then turning into bulling ig..
Shin once burned his haori
And when Kokushibo became a demon, he found him, killed and make this murder look like suicide as a karma (he wrote his name on the back in one of the books)
Of course, he had sleep problems, which sometimes caused insomnia and then hallucinations, and trouble with remembering things
He suffered internally from it, seeing himself as a "not good enough" or "just an absolute failure in eyes of his father" that made him SH (it wasn't bad but it wasn't good either)
He sometimes wasn't sure if he's talking with real people or just imagination was tricking him
He hates winter. When it's snowing, he has trouble with brushing his hair, since the snow is sticking to his hair and making it harder to brush
You may guess what happened to other 3 hair brushes before
One time, his mother gave him card earrings, like Yoriichi have, but it was night/moon themed one's
His ego is high when it comes to the ability to defend yourself with a sword or simply being a samurai (idk)
He's VERY loyal to Muzan
"Such a strange thing... A demon king is treating me better than our own father, don't you think, Yoriichi?"
His kusugai crow was turned into a demon by himself and few years after it he found an owl on the edge of dying so he made him demon as well. From that day, he has two bird friends that sometimes travels with him on his shoulder
His last respected demon in 12 Kizuki is Enmu, he don't like his personality and he prefers former holders of lower 1 rank, like Ubume, but he finds her annoying as well
He's a person who doesn't laugh, but giggle with hand and hair covering his face
He had bad eyesight when he was a human, like give this man a pair of glasses
But as a demon, he has one lazy eye (lower pair, left eye) and 359° vision (-1° because of lazy eye, yk 🙃)
He doesn't like sweet things, he could eat it but won't enjoy it
He hates children really fucking much
He's two centimeters shorter than Yoriichi
He doesn't speak loudly or quickly, but when he whispers it's inaudible and quick and the best fact is that he isn't aware of it
He don't notice small tics he's doing sometimes, like when he listens to someone he often very gently swings back and forth with his head
He doesn't like to talk, because he's afraid that he might mess up some words which is true
He kept silent about half his life
He eats men, women, children and even randomly demons. He would just rip their arm apart and just eat it
He can use only 2 forms of sun breathing, 1st and 5th
Cptsd due to his abusive childhood
His favorite meal is Udon
Kissed by moon
Y'all remember that Akeno (mother of Yoriichi and Michikatsu) is very religious right? She would sacrifice her child is God would ask her, and if you ask which she'll probably say firstborn son (since Michikatsu was born first)
And Michi is 15 minutes older than Yoriichi
#demon slayer#anime#kny#kimetsu no yaiba#demon#kokushibo#michikatsu#Michikatsu Tsugikuni#upper moon 1#headcanons#headcanon
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After thranduil became king, was he still heavily involved in the army, like, going out himself to fight and stuff, or did he stay more often in their mountain to take care of other things? Thanksss <3
Immediately after he came back from the War of the Last Alliance and was crowned King, yes he did. They’d just lost ⅔ of their entire army and so it was an ‘All hands on deck’ situation. It wasn’t simply to make up for the lost numbers, Thranduil had been a MAJOR part of the leading Orophers army and so it took time to train others to replace him in all that he did.
The longer he was King the less he participated in any fighting, but always remained involved in the army's tactics and to a lesser extent their training. The process took longer than some would have liked, as Thranduil felt guilt about ‘abandoning’ others to do all the fighting and dying, but by the time Legolas was a few hundred years old he hardly ever appeared on or even near a battlefield unless some Serious Shit was about to go down. Thanks for the ask!! <33
#tolkien#thranduil#haleigh speaks#haleighs greenwood#greenwood#thranduil headcanon#tolkien headcanon
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An Okay Pretender I (Bowser X Reader)
A/N: This is my first post and I wanted to do something kind-of-chapter-y! Dunno. Wanted to take a stab at it. It is GN reader! Sorry if things are a little wonky. I'm used to the AO3 platform! Either way, thank you for stopping by!
Word Count:473
Never take this crown off.
It was the only rule Peach gave you when she placed a baby pink crown with gold linings atop your head. Straightening from your kneeled position with your eyes locked on the polished palace floors, you watched as your appearance morphed completely. Your (h/c) hair bleaching out and becoming a bright blonde, (e/c) eyes becoming blue with a single blink, and your usual palace attire being replaced with a matching pink outfit. You had seen this type of magic before. If you could call it that. Toadette had done it a few times over back when this power was first discovered and had even changed her name to Peachette when she entered this state. You gave yourself a quick twirl and watched as your newly dyed blonde hair swayed over your back in a hairdo you favoured. You were grateful you had control over at least one defining feature despite looking like Princess Toadstool. Peach nodded to herself in content as a smile slipped onto her pink lips.
“You’ve seen me run this place a million times over, I’m sure no one will know the difference.” With determination swirling in her eyes, she clamped her white gloved hands on your shoulders. “I’m trusting you to run the kingdom in my absence. Are you sure you’re up to it?”
Giddiness raced through your body. Of course you were ready! Well, about as ready as one could be. You suddenly weren’t sure if the giddiness was from excitement or nerves. What if something goes wrong? Something was meant to go wrong! Something always did at least once in the week and the culprit was usually the same person: the King from the neighbouring Darklands. It wasn't to say you feared him…at least, that was the story you made up for yourself and you were sticking to it. Don’t show fear. Realising you hadn’t answered, you quickly nodded. “Yes. I can do this!” You gave her the warmest smile you could muster before peaking over her shoulder at the primary colour wearing brothers behind her. “You all have fun. If anything, I’ll be sure to send word to you immediately.” Carefully, you took Peach’s hands into your own and gripped them tightly as you met her gaze once more. “I’ll be alright.” And with a final tight squeeze, you sealed your promise.
You watched as a sliver of worry you hadn’t noticed before vanished from Peach’s face as she hummed softly. Turning to her travel group, each grabbed a bag before making their way to the centre room wrap pipe with a few Toads padding after with piled high pink luggage. With a silent wave, you saw them off and hoped that their trip to Sarasaland wouldn’t be as long as predicted. A lot could happen within a month.
#Bowser#mario bros#bowser x reader#bowser x y/n#Romance#Play Princess#Bowser falling in love#super mario bros movie#super mario bros#Princess#Prince#King
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RITE OF PASSAGE
JONATHAN BYERS X READER
Summary - Your best friend, Jonathan, likes you. You like Steve.
Warnings - mentions of sex
JONATHAN HAD never been a fan of Steve Harrington. He had a lot of reasons for his distaste, given that the infamous King Steve was a royal dick. Steve had called Jonathan almost every name in the book, labeling him a pervert and a creep. On top of this, he was never shy about attacking the Byers name as a whole, regularly taking hits at Jonathan’s family.
Truthfully, his list of reasons to hate Steve was quite literally never-ending. There was only one reason, however, that had the power to make his blood boil; serving as both a reason to hate Steve and a reason to envy him.
You.
He wasn’t surprised by your fascination with Steve, especially given the fact that every girl in Hawkins would die for a chance to so much as touch his hair. He just didn’t find it to be very fair, though.
Steve Harrington already had everything he wanted; money, popularity, a swarm of girls all dying to get on their knees for him, and all Jonathan wanted was you. But, all you could seem to think about was Steve, and that little fact was almost enough to drive him insane.
“They say it’s like a rite of passage, ya know.”
Jonathan’s eyes flicked over to you, perched atop his bed while mindlessly tossing an old issue of Teen Beat to the floor. The two of you always spent your weekends like this, cooped up in his bedroom listening to whatever record held his attention at the moment, just passing time together.
“What is?” He asked, sitting cross-legged towards the end of the mattress. Your legs were laid across his lap as you leaned against the wall behind his bed, your gaze glued to the ceiling while his remained fixed on you, watching as you chewed at a piece of loose skin on your lip.
You hesitated, ceasing your assault on your chapped lips as they pulled into a coy grin. The sight made his heart flutter in his chest, unintentionally mimicking your expression. “Having sex with Steve.”
A strangled sort of sound escaped Jonathan’s throat as he threw his head back, the fluttering in his chest now replaced with a familiar sinking feeling. You mistook his frustration as teasing, never having considered that Jonathan thought of you as anything but.
“I’m being serious!” You squealed at him, cheeks now flushed as laughter spilled out alongside the words. “I heard Tammy talking to some other girls at lunch, and they all agreed that you just can’t go off to college without the King Steve experience.”
Jonathan straightened himself back out in time to see you playfully wiggling your eyebrows, clearly more into this conversation than he was.
He was used to hearing you talk about Steve, and most of the time he did his best to play along so you wouldn’t get suspicious of his feelings towards you. He always listened to you drone on and on about Steve’s car, Steve’s hair, Steve’s clothes, and, once, even Steve’s ass. But conversations like these were the ones he struggled with the most, the ones where he couldn’t quite force himself to play along anymore.
It made him sick to think about it, the idea of you being just another girl for Steve Harrington to stick his dick in.
You deserved better than that.
You deserved him.
When he didn’t reply, you continued. “And I was thinkinggg-” you drug the word out, scooting down the mattress to get closer to him, “that maybe you and I should go to his party tonight!”
Jonathan’s face dropped. “You’re kidding, right?”
“C’mon!” You immediately whined, placing your hand against his knee as you prepared to beg him, looking at him through your lashes. Jonathan was always a sucker for your puppy-dog eyes, but right now he couldn’t focus on anything other than the knot forming in his stomach. “I know it’s not really your thing, but I don’t wanna go alone. You know that going to one of his parties is my best chance to get his attention, plus Tammy already said she’d introduce us and everything! And you don’t even have to stay the whole time! You can leave as soon as Tammy brings Steve over—”
“No!”
You jumped a bit at the sudden shout, stunned as Jonathan shoved your legs from his lap before rising to his feet. Jonathan rarely ever yelled, especially not at you.
A frown settled on your lips. “Look, I get you don’t like parties, but you don’t have to freak out-”
“It’s not about the party, y/n!” Jonathan interjected again, his hands running through his hair as he began to pace across his room, his mind moving at a hundred miles a minute. “Like, seriously, do you even hear what you’re asking me?” He didn’t give you enough time to respond, already continuing his frantic rant. “You’re literally wanting me to drive you to Steve’s house just so I can keep you company until he decides he wants to fuck you!”
“Okay,” you raised your hands like a white flag, keeping your voice steady as you followed him with your eyes, still moving from one end of the room to another, “if it’s gonna piss you off this much then you don’t have to take me, alright? I think Nancy’s gonna go, so I can just see if I can hitch a ride with her or something-”
Jonathan’s fingers tightened around his sandy hair, pulling it roughly as another groan escaped him. “I’m not pissed cause you want me to take you!” Your brows furrowed together at his words. “I’m pissed because all you care about is getting with Steve!” He paused his movement, feet coming to a halt as he pointed an accusing finger in your direction, “You’re better than that! You’re better than a fucking easy lay for Steve Harrington!”
“You’re acting dramatic.” You told him plainly, arms moving to cross over your chest.
“And you’re acting stupid.” He quickly countered.
Your eyes only narrowed at him, still trying to keep your cool, not wanting the whole Byer’s household to hear the two of you fighting. “It’s not a big deal, Jonathan! Everyone has flings in high school. And if you had someone you were interested in I would happily help you get with them! So why are you acting like such an ass about this?”
Jonathan shook his head at your statement, huffing as he spoke. “It’s different.”
“No, it’s not!” You retorted. “You're just being a dick about this because you don’t like Steve!”
“It’s not about Steve! I mean, yeah, sure, I don’t fucking like him—but that’s not the point!” Warmth crept up his neck, frustration reaching a boiling point as he struggled with picking his words. “It’s different because you don’t like me!”
He spoke with such a harshness, his words carrying an unfamiliar edge. It took you by surprise, and left you sinking further into the mattress as you watched his hands fall from his hair to his face, covering his reddened cheeks. The atmosphere had changed now, anger having morphed into discomfort.
“What are you talking about?” Your voice was low, just a few notches above a whisper. “Of course I like you, Jonathan.”
His head shook again, rubbing his face as he let his hands fall back to his side. “No.” He told you as if it were a fact. “You don’t. Not the same way, at least. Not how I like you.” He hesitated, looking somewhere over your shoulder, too embarrassed to meet your gaze. “Not how you like Steve.”
Something cracked in your chest as he spoke, the words lingering in the air between the two of you. Instantly you found yourself filled with a sickening sense of guilt, thinking of all the times you had gushed over Steve to Jonathan, having been so oblivious to his feelings the whole time. Beneath that guilt, though, was something else; perhaps best described as a streak of curiosity as you considered the idea of being with your best friend.
It was uncharted territory in your mind, a forbidden topic that you had never dared to consider previously, and now that thoughts of it bloomed in your mind, you were a bit shocked to find that you weren’t put-off by it.
Jonathan, on the other hand, had gone into a full blown panic as he realized what he had admitted. He had bitten his tongue for years now, too afraid to ruin what he did have with you, and now in a single moment he had risked blowing all of it. He took a deep breath and readied himself to find some excuse to leave, maybe lie about needing to pick Will up from Mike’s house, but you spoke before he had a chance.
“I don’t not like you how I like Steve.” You clarified, sounding vaguely unsure of yourself and awkward. “I just—I don’t know—never knew that you were…” you paused, sighing as you tried to find a way to phrase your thought, “an option.”
Neither of you had ever done this before, never thought to cross the simple boundary of friendship and venture into something else. Because of this, Jonathan matched you in awkwardness as he replied, “I am.” He cleared his throat, still diligently avoiding eye contact with you. “I mean—if you want me to be, then I am.”
For a moment you both stayed quiet. You remained planted on the bed, Jonathan still standing across from you, nervously fidgeting with the fabric of his jeans.
“Okay.” You spoke, breaking through the fairly new silence, sliding yourself back up to the top of his bed. You reached for the floor, your fingers grabbing hold of the Teen Beat you had tossed aside earlier.
Jonathan finally looked at you, staring as you began to flip through the pages again. “Are you not gonna call Nancy?”
Your shoulders lifted into a lazy shrug, stopping you incessant flipping as you landed on an article about Molly Ringwald. “The album isn’t over.” You told him, referencing The Clash record he had put on before the two of you had gotten into it. “Besides,” you added on, glancing over the thin pages of the magazine with a playful glint in your eye, “I’m better than an easy lay, right?”
All he could manage to do was look at you, even after you shifted your attention back to the magazine. Without another word, you patted the comforter beside you with your palm, silently urging him to rejoin you on his bed.
Maybe he didn’t have to be jealous of Steve after all.
a/n - decided i wanted to start writing for stranger things, so ofc i had to start with my boy jonathan<3 obviously very new to writing for stranger things so bear with me i'll improve ok i promise
steve totally wouldve fallen in love w/ the reader if she went to the party but whatever we will let jonathan have this win ok
#jonathan byers imagine#jonathan byers#stranger things imagine#stranger things x reader#jonathan byers headcanons#jonathan byers fic#jonathan byers blurb#jonathan byers drabble#jonathan byers fluff#jonathan byers smut#stranger things imagines#stranger things blurb#stranger things headcanons#stranger things fic#stranger things fan fic#steve harrington imagine#charlie heaton#charlie heaton imagine#stranger things
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I am utterly baffled by the amount of conspiracy theories going around about the royal family at the moment. Maybe it's because I don't care about them in the first place so I couldn't give a monkey's if Kate has been replaced with a body double or whatever because it literally doesn't matter either way.
But what confuses me is how low-stakes the conspiracies are. Most of them fall short on at least one of the three tests I like to apply to conspiracy theories.
1) How many people would need to keep quiet for it to remain a secret?
If Kate is secretly dead and they've replaced her with a body double, then the staff, doctors, body double's family, and probably more people know about it and need to keep quiet. And they presumably need to keep quiet forever, because if they're going to announce she's dead later rather than immediately for some bizzare reason, the truth is going to come out eventually anyway.
2) Is there actually something in it for the conspirators?
The thing I find most laughable about flat earth is simply "if the earth is flat, why are the scientists and politicians lying to us that it's round?" because I have never heard an answer to this that doesn't reveal how even more disconnected from reality the believer is. In the case of the royal family, what do they gain from pretending that Kate or the King are fine when they might be dead or very sick. They're going to die one day anyway right? The best motivation I can gleam is that the monarchy is obsessed with its PR image and want us to think they're perfect, because if we don't they risk losing their legitimacy. Again, maybe because I don't think they have legitimacy in the first place, but surely they wouldn't risk a scandal of being caught out in a lie since that would damage their reputation more than one of them dying from cancer.
3) Is the thing they're allegedly doing actually worth talking about?
One sympathy I have with conspiracy theorists is that their emotions aren't wrong, just their facts. It would be bad if Bill Gates was secretly injecting us with microchips; it would be bad if they had assassinated Diana. But, if they're covering up a natural death or illness or extramarital affair, is that really that outrageous? If they're not doing anything beyond that which your average Joe might lie about I don't see the problem. It doesn't affect society at large what these people get up to between themselves. If they were channelling tax money in a certain way or had a torture dungeon then that would be something to care about.
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**Seeing old threads on a specific subreddit insinuating that Historia was a better moral person than Levi and I’m trying to see how people could even possibly see it this way?**
They say how fans want to ignore that he’s a bad person for strangling her when she was about to make all their sacrifices to replace the puppet king for naught. God forbid she’s treated like an equal and a soldier. I was never able to stand how she was so stuck on feeling sorry for herself as if everyone else around her isn’t living in the same horrifying universe. I doubt they’d get their panties in a bunch if he manhandled Mikasa instead or any other female character. Apparently to them, Historia is an angel and Levi is just a thug…
So many characters have been forced to sacrifice their lives and their comrades and any semblance of happiness. But Historia exercising her own free will by agreeing to inherit the beast titan is the most tragic thing ever and should be avoided, even if it stalls the rumbling. Fuck every body else I guess, in this harsh world only SHE’S exempt from making horrible sacrifices. s/ …. Her abandoning that promise and betraying the scouts so she can live her cottage core girl life at the price of millions of people being crushed, and she’s supposed to be an angel compared to the “thug Levi”?? But this discussion just got me so mad 😭 I was just trying to read some threads to get fan fiction idea juices flowing. sorry for ranting at you…
But as if Levi himself hasn’t had to sacrifice his own humanity or a normal life, just to keep moving the needle forward in the right direction. He’s had to kill humans, he’s had to watch everyone around him die and live with the bitter pain of being the last man standing just so nothing was in vain. He fully stepped up to the responsibility of his Ackerman powers for the betterment of humanity. He could have easily been like his uncle Kenny and abused that strength, but he didn’t. Just because he doesn’t outwardly try to make everyone think he’s the stereotype of a good person like Historia, doesn’t mean he isn’t.
Haha, I really can't add anything more to this, because you said it all perfectly.
Anyone claiming Historia is "morally superior" to Levi has their head so far up their ass, it's not even funny.
Historia was one of the most selfish characters in the entire series, and that is saying SOMETHING, because there isn't a lack of selfish people in this story.
I've said before just what you reiterate here, which is that Historia got manhandled by Levi because she was too busy feeling sorry for herself to consider the consequences of her kneejerk refusal to take the throne. She didn't think of all the lives that would be lost and ruined because she was more interested in maintaining this humble facade she liked to play at, including all the lives of every one of her comrades. Every single member of the SC would have been on the chopping block if the coup failed, and the coup succeeding entirely hitched on her taking the crown.
So, knowing the type of person Historia is, it really shouldn't come as any surprise that she would renege on her previous agreement to inherit the Beast Titan, and actively aid Eren in committing a global genocide, all so she could, as you hilariously put it, live her cottage core girl life, lol. Historia AGREED to take on the responsibility of inheriting the Beast Titan and to safeguard the island that way. Levi didn't, nor did anyone else, ever force her to make that agreement. And then, she turned around and intentionally sabotaged it all, by getting herself knocked up. All those scouts that died in the forest with Levi, every person that died as a result of Zeke's and the Yeagerist's and Eren's actions, Levi almost dying, Hange dying, etc, etc... all of that is on Historia's head for her breathtakingly selfish actions. Because by intentionally getting pregnant, she made it impossible for Zeke to be fed to her immediately, which is in turn what led to the Yeagerists being able to take over the island, which is what led to Eren being busted out of prison and making contact with Zeke, which is what led to the Rumbling. And she did all this knowing what Eren's plan was all along. The only one who knew. It's always Eren fanboys and people that think Eren and Historia should have been confirmed as a canon couple, and that Historia's baby should have been Eren's, that are the ones who claim Levi was somehow in the "wrong". That's such bullshit. Like you said, Levi did everything in his power to save everyone. He never hid from any responsibility, and as you said, fully stepped up to the responsibility he felt his strength put on him to help people. He could have been completely selfish like Kenny, like Kenny TAUGHT him to be, and it even would have been completely understandable why he was, given the hell his life had been, but he never was selfish. He never allowed any sort of bitterness or hatred to dictate his actions, despite having the hardest life of anyone, despite losing more and sacrificing more than anyone.
Levi is, in every way, shape and form, morally superior to Historia. Levi is a hero. Historia is bordering on a villain.
So, yeah, Historia isn't a good person. She isn't morally superior to anyone. She's "the worst girl in the world", as she calls herself. She's so selfish, that she was cool with the rest of the world being destroyed so she could live out her own life in peace.
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I keep seeing u post about ur kingsoul au, would u be willing to write a basic rundown of the plot!! BC I LOVE everything that I've seen but ik none of the context :///
ALRIGHT, joke about never revealing the lore over, time to release the brainrot
The basic premise is that PK and WL gave the Pure Vessel kingsoul charm to keep their soul levels stable, in case Radiance tried to physically damage them to get out.
Fastforward many years later, and the infection resurfaces. Pale King and White Lady are hit with the possibility that the vessel was alive all this time and they...do not take it well. Pale King immediately dives back into work to cope, just to keep his mind off this. Meanwhile White Lady completely bottles up her feelings and tries to pretend everything's okay, and instead distracts herself by trying to make sure her husband is alright.
Things keep getting worse and worse, and finally when he's completely out of ideas, Pale King decides to trap himself and his palace in the dream realm in hopes that Radiance will go for him instead. He discusses it at length with his queen, says his goodbyes in case he dies and leaves. The moment he's in the dream realm she can no longer feel him, so she has no idea if he's dead or not.
His plan does not work. He's alive but trapped in the dream realm, presumed dead by most people.
White Lady is now alone, watching her beloved's hard work crumble to dust, feeling powerless to stop it. Finally, she gets an idea, and in her desperation she tries to reach to the Hollow Knight through the kingsoul charm, much the same way she would with her Wyrm.
It works.
They're momentarily pulled from the Radiance's grasp, confused and disoriented. Then they see their mother and their confusion grows. For a moment they think it's another one of that damned moth's tricks, but they can't feel her presence at all. Realising that it's their actual mother, they just break down, relieved to be free of the torment at least for a little while.
This cements her suspicions that they were alive, when before they thought Pale King might have been just wrong about how the infection works, now she's sure they're alive.
She hugs them tightly and tells them it's going to be okay, but their kingdom is dying, their people are suffering, their father might be gone forever, and she just needs them to hold on a little longer. Can they please do that for her?
They nod.
She smiles. They're strong, she says, they've got this.
And it works.
With her help, getting frequent visits and breaks, her reassurance; they manage to fight off the infection once again. Hallownest can begin to heal and rebuild once again, under her rule. She will continue what her beloved started. For his sake.
She sees them again, tells them as much. The kingdom's doing better, the infection is disappearing, all thanks to them. Their father would be proud, she tells them. They smile so brightly at that.
She reassures them, tells them to keep fighting, and one day another vessel will show up and they can be relieved of their duty. They will be named a prince, they could be a family. She promises.
They trust her. Trust her that she's sure of it.
Years pass, Hallownest is thriving again, the Hollow Knight has new strength to keep fighting. They've got their mother's help. They look forward to her warm embrace and soft words everytime.
But the time keep stretching on and on, and no other vessel shows. They're getting impatient, nervous, they can't keep going on like this. She knows it, doesn't she?
She reassures them. She's sure another, truly pure vessel will show to replace them, and then they can reunite once more in the waking world. She's sure. She promises.
Ages pass. They're getting tired. They can't keep going, even with her help.
They're impatient, nervous- no, terrified. She promised.
The infection starts showing up again. She's angry. Don't they know what they're fighting for?
They can't keep going. So try harder, she tells them. Do not disappoint her. Do not disappoint their father.
They're at their breaking point, they can't keep going. She promised them. Did she lie? Was all of this just empty stories all along?
But how dare they accuse her of that. They're a warrior. They were trained for this. They should be stronger. They let their father's legacy crumble once more.
They're a failure. She tells them. The king would be disappointed.
They snap.
The kingsoul lays broken between the two of them. The vessel pants heavily, still reeling after their argument.
She looks at them in shock then shakes her head. She turns away.
She overestimated them. She shouldn't have expected any better of them. After all...
They're only human.
They've failed them.
...No. No.
They'll show her. They'll show her. She's wrong about them.
For the first time in ages, they raise their blade towards the sun shining in the distance.
So that entire thing came to me after listening to My Goodbye from EPIC: the musical on repeat for two days straight. A lot of plotpoints in this AU come from me rotating these characters in my head while listening to these songs.
Pure ascends as the Lord of Shades and brings The Radiance down. But they don't kill her.
She'll get to live out the rest of her life as a mortal. In the ancient fallen kingdom that she brought to ruin.
They break from their chains, take one last look at her from the entrance of the black egg, and leave. They rise to the surface, don't look back as they pass the howling cliffs. It's not their home anymore.
White Lady feels a shift in her kingdom. Dryya runs to her, the infection is dying.
Shocked, she uproots herself and goes to the temple. There, she finds the Radiance, and no sign of her child.
So after being informed of what went down by a very pissed off Radiance, her reaction pretty much boils down to "THEY DID WHAT?"
Along their travels, Pure finds their other siblings. Mainly, Ghost, Mellow (BV) and Greenie (GV). They find their way, after many years, into the ruins of yet another fallen kingdom.
This time though, they find their new home here. They help build a new kingdom and are crowned as its monarch. Life's good.
Except for the fact other Hugher Beings get the wind of a void being doing that to The Radiance and want to kill them out of paranoia but that's a story for another time.
Oh, and PK finds his way out of the dream realm. Somehow.
Also WL and PK can still talk to Pure through now voidheart, but they immediately cut contact and most of the time don't even let them sense them.
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okay, after approximately.... seventeen hours? something along those lines (did, you know, have to do the occasional work task and, like, eat and get water obviously), i’m putting down the game for the night - got to a point where i didn’t immediately have an interesting task in front of me and needed to make a stopping point for myself
i’m gonna put a cut here and do some freewheeling thoughts on tears of the kingdom thus far, but generally it suffices to say that i am having a good time
first of all, i’m really glad i played age of calamity somewhat recently, because it gave me little bits of character info that i honestly would’ve completely forgotten without it - namely that teba had a son who was one of the tiny birds in the last game
anyway it really feels like they took the notes/complaints about breath of the wild’s story to heart, cuz god damn is there a healthy amount of story here, especially with them bringing back sages and temples and such - for posterity’s sake, i have completed the wind temple, and am on my way to death mountain for what i assume will be the fire temple; should be interesting to see who the sage is, since we got a little curveball from the ritos not making it teba (so now i’m thinking yunobo or someone else? and the someone else is a little more likely)
okay also for posterity’s sake - i have gotten four glyph memories, which i assume they’re assigned to the glyph and not given in a particular order, so i got the intro one (zonai), the castle, the demon king, and the sword; i’ve also done precisely 1 (one) chasm visit and started my job at the lucky clover, as well as completing enough shrines to get up to eight hearts with enough orbs currently on my person to get something, and i uncovered the demon statue under hyrule, as well
sad they’re not letting me play as zelda, but also love that she is literally an actual part of the imprisoning war from ten thousand years ago, like yup nope the zelda in that mural was in fact the exact same zelda who was critiquing and comparing herself to that perfect image of, it turns out, herself
like fucking hell i just love the character beats there, and hopefully some amount of that gets discussed on screen, cuz damn
oh, right, by the way, if i had a nickel for every time a dead king guided me through a great ____ zone i’d have two nickels - i kid, i kid, i really liked king rauru (which!! king rauru what?!?!? aaaaaaa my zelda lore brain is firing off all the time) bamfing around and actually, like, guiding us? like he doesn’t really quite know more than we do, he’s just more familiar with how the land works and such
... now that i’m thinking about it, though, how the hell did we end up where we did? like i was jokingly complaining to myself about how we were literally just shoved in a random room (on the floor), as opposed to breath of the wild where we were intentionally brought to an advanced piece of restorative technology, but also, rauru didn’t have a corporeal form? how was he able to replace my arm? and how did i get in that room????
guess that’ll be one for the zelda youtubers - oh, wait, right! i was gonna make this joke like fourteen hours ago, but i loved the opening bit where zelda is just like the zelda lore youtubers i watch sometimes, where she’s just excitedly pointing at things and going ‘!!! this is cool! i don’t actually know what’s going on entirely but it’s cool!!!’ like yes, love that for you darling, i will like comment and subscribe every moment you’re on screen doing what you love
let’s see... oh, the gameplay is pretty excellent, even if i keep dying because i’m bad at fighting without all my special powers (and because i couldn’t find a shirt for so damn long, like i know that was just luck probably but still), and the new magic abilities are fascinating - it’s interesting how they’re both more and less expansive than the previous set (like with the attaching things power, you can pick up anything not just metal stuff like you could with magnesis, but without cryonis water is way more terrifying cuz none of the other powers can really do anything about water by themselves)
fav so far is the ‘swim upward through solid objects’ one because ya know i love to climb things, and it’s really fun to have an escape clause on, like, most caves and a lot of other places (i think i used it a fair amount in the wind temple just to get away from dudes)
i haven’t made very many vehicles, because when i make stuff for movement i feel bad about abandoning it out in the wilderness but also sometimes you just gotta cut that corner and jump off the cliff (which, gods, it took so long to get the paraglider and i was so happy when it finally dropped into my hands) - this is how i felt about horses in the first game, although i’ve actually ridden a couple horses around this time
you know what i have done what feels like fifty times? supported president hudson, that’s what - actually it’s a really fun and simple engineering puzzle that i’m glad shows up again and again, but by gods i wanna take addison’s hands and just go ‘why didn’t you guys just make the sign stable to start with??’
it’s been very cool seeing how the world has changed, both with recovery after breath of the wild and with the stuff falling from the sky at the start of this game, although i think what fascinates me the most is that no one’s actually said (or even implied) exactly how long it’s been either since botw ended OR since link and zelda disappeared on their archaeological survey - like i have no idea if link was out for days, weeks, or months honestly (my guess is like three weeks but who knows!)
negative things... not a fan of how often i died, and it took me way longer to figure out how to use the zonai wings than it should have, i wish there’d been a slightly better explanation at some point, and i wish i’d gotten the latest memory i found (the sword one) later in the quest line, cuz it feels very resolution-y and while it’s occasionally fun to get these things as an almost in media res conclusion, in this particular instance i’d rather have just seen it later
the whole geoglyphs concept is super awesome, though, that was a fantastic addition and really rewards the whole flying around the sky thing that this game is really about
can’t wait to get through the rest of the major story beats so i can spend the next few months just dicking around
but first sleep
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Alright, let's do this for one of my characters. Probably gonna keep coming back to this post to do so for all of them cause it's useful.
Adrian Castellan
1. Adrian lies as part of his job, but the major one he constantly has to tell Lyanni is that he spent the years 2618CE to 2622CE recovering from a near fatal injury.
2. In a quote, "My social life extends to you and no further. In a sense, you are my only friend,"
3. Very rarely. Only one person has that he deals with regularly even knows he can feel emotion
4. As a kid on Callisto, he and his sibling's competed in virtual arenas once a month, and he sorely wishes to get back into that but can't since he's stuck on the other side of the galaxy for the foreseeable future.
5. Due to physical injury from a battle, he had to get his eyes replaced with cybernetics as shrapnel had taken them out. This also urreperably damaged some other parts around his eyes, such as the muscles that would usually allow for their movement, his eyelids and his tear ducts. However, even if he was still physically capable of crying, he'd likely suppress it.
6. Stephen king's Dark Tower books. Adrian is a nerd for all things antique, including most literature and art from the 20th to 22nd centuries.
7. Considering that having a human name is unique on a non-human world, probably just his name, though Lyanni yelling 'Dumbass!' Tends to also get his attention because it's usually warranted and only she actually calls him one.
8. Strict. He uses it exactly once in the entire book when he's borderline proposing to someone.
9. He prefers giving gentle love but growing up on Callisto has taught him that the other has it's uses too.
10. "Did you know that our standard ammunition used to be considered mounted machine gun ammo? Yeah, that's why we need power armor"
11. "What year were you born?" Is a question only Lyanni and his siblings (Maternal figure is deceased) would also know the answer too, and if the impersonator replies with 2595 they will be shot immediately, as Adrian lied about his age on official documents in order to enlist early and get off Callisto.
12. There is an in-joke between him and Lyanni about her first time seeing a dog, and not understanding domestication since her species doesn't do that she tried starting a conversation with it about IUC operations on the planet. Whenever it gets mentioned he just starts dying of laughter.
13. Very often, to the extent that a legitimate one genuinely unnerves people at times.
14. Pinch it.
15. 'At work' for Adrian constitutes whenever some random person on the street can see him. During that time he needs to maintain the facade of a divine messengers to keep the influence he needs to do his job. With King Alahn, he's still rather serious but noticeably relaxes. With Lyanni we see the joking idiot he would've likely been at all times had certain trauma not happened. Alone, he broods on the past, and usually works himself until he passes out to avoid thinking about it.
16. Mostly religious zealots and nobles because those are the kinds of people he actually has to argue with daily.
17. Adrian's natural hair colour is snow-white hair, and although people with mutations aren't seen as freaks anymore, it still bothers him. Everybody else notices his cybernetics eyes, which he changes the colour of to match whatever he is wearing that day.
18. Two people. Zeltin Kasrik, who's managed to become almost like an adopted son to him (and legitimately becomes his adopted son later on), and although it takes a while to get there, Lyanni Sverik.
19. Have you ever seen a cyborg purposefully deactivate their eyes and ears to avoid dealing with someone? Cause that's him.
20. He likes Baron Jormahnd Sverik (Lyanni's father) as a person but feels like he wasted his talents when he could've accomplished much more as a praetor. He doesn't like premier Richard Cade as a person or his work, but he respects the efficiency that the man brought to Titan during the uprising.
21. The native species of Kradoma had a very different sense of modesty to what humans do. They don't feel shame at their own nudity but see it as a sign of ferality if done outside of a home and will change clothes basically anywhere that isn't a public space (Living with one of these natives has prompted him more than once flee a room utterly flustered, trailing the words 'Oh for throne's sake!'). To the contrary, this species sees dancing as scandalously inappropriate if the partners aren't married. Growing up in festivals were people just danced with any random person they could find and swapped partners multiple times during a single song, this seems silly to him.
22. Listen to breathing in his ear without getting PTSD flashbacks to the war. In space, there is no gunfire, but his mind came to associate his own breathing in his helmet with danger.
23. The original reason for rescuing Lyanni wasn't to use her as a way to propel the native species forward technologically, but rather his plan was to trade a 'witch' with the witchhunters in Szeraan so they would leave the kingdom be for a little while longer. He dealt with this silently before she could find out about it, but he feels guilt and horror at the fact that he was about a day off of actually doing it before his conscience stopped him.
24. Depends. Would stealing the cookie help him more or less in a week or two than leaving it in the jar? If the answer is 'the same', he wouldn't have wasted the effort.
25. Music and literature from about a century before the fall of Earth to about a century after (1970's to 2190's)
26. Silence. He'd probably just stop talking entirely until he's confident that he can open his mouth without going on a tirade about the event.
27. One of those old monkeys that you wind up and it starts clapping cymbals together. He put it on his shelf, and the in his teenaged years while making his guns, he took it apart to see what parts he could repurpose.
28. To him, his posting to Kradoma is a kind of voluntary atonement for some of the things he's done or feels he is guilty of. At the start of the book, he claims that all he wants is for the native population to become independant as an interstellar civilisation. By the middle, all he truly wants is to go back to Callisto and make amends. In the end.
29. Either the way religion has drilled it into him: "All saints and imperator as my witness, I speak true!" Or if he can he'll go find proof, either through a quick data net search or by stellalimg evidence.
30. There is no professional guilt for him. He acknowledges the mistake and fixes it as soon as he can. In his personal life he feels extremely guilty about things that those affected will probably forget before lunch.
31. Anything involving Lyanni, Zeltin, Alahn or Maia Williams, plus his siblings. He almost immediately tries to rectify it even if it cause more problems
32. Stealing a sandwich just to get a break from nutrient bars.
33. A very mechanical "Ave Imperator," whereas a warmer greeting is in store for people he likes
34. "Hey," "Howzit?" "Eya"
35. Allowing an "Illegal" (someone not sanctioned by the IUC as a worker, officer or Praetor or other) to continue operating planetside cause they got him information. This comes with the added risk of them not being regulated by law, which could've been disasterous
36. King Alahn. He needs a working relationship with the king to do his job, but there's no malice in it.
37. What he was actually doing from 2618 to 2623. It's to keep them safe.
38. He's a surprisingly good dancer, but he fumbles because of nerves in front of others
39. He'd rather just be left alone with people he cares about.
40. Handshakes aren't as much of a cultural thing in the 27th century, but he'd probably have some unsavoury things to say.
41. He speaks Latin with a Callistoan accent, pronouncing 'V' as 'W' and a 'K' as a gutteral. He's also picked up some of Lyanni's dialect with Axidemir, and will occasionally pull out words that are antiquated in the common speech.
42. Probably "the art of subtle Manipulation" since it's something he got incredibly good at as a Praetor
43. Being Callistoan, if someone draws a weapon it means that they wanted a fight. The Imperial etiquette of leaving weapons by the door when visiting someone still gives him anxiety cause he either thinks someone wants to shoot him or he's afraid someone will misinterpret what he's doing.
44. Probably Italian or French since he speaks a later iteration of Latin as a home language, and probably wouldn't have too much trouble pronouncing Arabic since most of those sounds are in Axidemir.
45. Skew paintings annoy him to no end.
46. Part of his job is talking entire empires into setting themselves on fire, but he prefers to listen.
47. Pavel DeSantos. Now the Governers of the Jupiter moons, but a former bf of Adrian's.
48. Yes, or if he noticed they didn't want to be there he'd find a way to get them out.
49. At this point he'd eat anything as long as it meant an end to 8 years of nutrient bars
50. He will not hesitate to sacrifice close friends if it benefits the greater good or furthers the upliftment process.
51. "By the throne..." Or "Tears of the Empress!"
52. He tends to wait, but there are exceptions to this rule.
53. That humanity's war with the council races is justified. Also that his Maternal figure died because of him.
54. He can go from laid back and relaxed to guns drawn and twelve people layed low in only a few seconds thanks to the utter hellhole that was the moon he grew up on.
55. Reading. He used to actually enjoy it but because of the amount of reports he needs to compile and read as part of his job it's kind of lost it's appeal to him.
56. Usually he just wants one of his guns in hand, but later in he'll also take being around Lyanni Sverik as a comfort.
57. His sleep schedule. He keeps overworking himself by about an hour without noticing.
58. Mostly creative hobbies such as drawing or painting, but he always falls back to tinkering. The exception to this was back when he still played for his habitation tower's arena-sim team.
WEIRDLY SPECIFIC BUT HELPFUL CHARACTER BUILDING QUESTIONS
What’s the lie your character says most often?
How loosely or strictly do they use the word ‘friend’?
How often do they show their genuine emotions to others versus just the audience knowing?
What’s a hobby they used to have that they miss?
Can they cry on command? If so, what do they think about to make it happen?
What’s their favorite [insert anything] that they’ve never recommended to anyone before?
What would you (mun) yell in the middle of a crowd to find them? What would their best friend and/or romantic partner yell?
How loose is their use of the phrase ‘I love you’?
Do they give tough love or gentle love most often? Which do they prefer to receive?
What fact do they excitedly tell everyone about at every opportunity?
If someone was impersonating them, what would friends / family ask or do to tell the difference?
What’s something that makes them laugh every single time? Be specific!
When do they fake a smile? How often?
How do they put out a candle?
What’s the most obvious difference between their behavior at home, at work, at school, with friends, and when they’re alone?
What kinds of people do they have arguments with in their head?
What do they notice first in the mirror versus what most people first notice looking at them?
Who do they love truly, 100% unconditionally (if anyone)?
What would they do if stuck in a room with the person they’ve been avoiding?
Who do they like as a person but hate their work? Vice versa, whose work do they like but don’t like the person?
What common etiquette do they disagree with? Do they still follow it?
What simple activity that most people do / can do scares your character?
What do they feel guilty for that the other person(s) doesn’t / don’t even remember?
Did they take a cookie from the cookie jar? What kind of cookie was it?
What subject / topic do they know a lot about that’s completely useless to the direct plot?
How would they respond to being fired by a good boss?
What’s the worst gift they ever received? How did they respond?
What do they tell people they want? What do they actually want?
How do they respond when someone doesn’t believe them?
When they make a mistake and feel bad, does the guilt differ when it’s personal versus when it’s professional?
When do they feel the most guilt? How do they respond to it?
If they committed one petty crime / misdemeanor, what would it be? Why?
How do they greet someone they dislike / hate?
How do they greet someone they like / love?
What is the smallest, morally questionable choice they’ve made?
Who do they keep in their life for professional gain? Is it for malicious intent?
What’s a secret they haven’t told serious romantic partners and don’t plan to tell?
What hobby are they good at in private, but bad at in front of others? Why?
Would they rather be invited to an event to feel included or be excluded from an event if they were not genuinely wanted there?
How do they respond to a loose handshake? What goes through their head?
What phrases, pronunciations, or mannerisms did they pick up from someone / somewhere else?
If invited to a TED Talk, what topic would they present on? What would the title of their presentation be?
What do they commonly misinterpret because of their own upbringing / environment / biases? How do they respond when realizing the misunderstanding?
What language would be easiest for them to learn? Why?
What’s something unimportant / frivolous that they hate passionately?
Are they a listener or a talker? If they’re a listener, what makes them talk? If they’re a talker, what makes them listen?
Who have they forgotten about that remembers them very well?
Who would they say ‘yes’ to if invited to do something they abhorred / strongly didn’t want to do?
Would they eat something they find gross to be polite?
What belief / moral / personality trait do they stand by that you (mun) personally don’t agree with?
What’s a phrase they say a lot?
Do they act on their immediate emotions, or do they wait for the facts before acting?
Who would / do they believe without question?
What’s their instinct in a fight / flight / freeze / fawn situation?
What’s something they’re expected to enjoy based on their hobbies / profession that they actually dislike / hate?
If they’re scared, who do they want comfort from? Does this answer change depending on the type of fear?
What’s a simple daily activity / motion that they mess up often?
How many hobbies have they attempted to have over their lifetime? Is there a common theme?
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Right, now that I’m more awake and not crying from the finale...
LET’S GO OVER MY FAAAAVVOORITE PARTS OF WATCHING AND DREAMING!! Beware of spoilers if ya haven’t watched it!
First, the little premiere/teaser thingy before watching and dreaming started. I tried not to cry during that, I wanted to save my tears for the actual finale. “...For one final flight home.” I had to clutch my heart, it hurt so much!! From happiness, don’t worry.
Unfortunately, that happiness immediately turned into “what the fuck” as soon as Watching and Dreaming started. I didn’t realize we were doing the whole “Luz gets Belos’s outift” so soon! But the line Amity said was beautifully executed. “What do you do when you wake up from a bad dream?” “You turn on the light.” GAAAAAHHH I LOVE THAT!!
COLLECTER!!!! THEY JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN!!! And oh my GOD, they don’t know what death is. aaaahhhhhhh, THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT DEATH IS!!! (also them giving dragon belos a hug and trying kindness and forgiveness, omg theyre so cute my god-)
Well, they learned what it was preeeettty quickly! Me and my friends who I watched it with made guesses on who was gonna die in the finale. One said I was gonna die as a joke, then stuck with it. (They were right, the finale killed me lol) My other friend said King. I said Luz because it’s such an MC thing to die in the last episode.
I’ll be honest. I believed more that King was gonna die. So Luz dying? To Dragon Belos’s corruption flame? Oh my god. And the way Luz just said “I think we’re gonna be separated again.” with such a broken and trembling voice... oh my god. I shed Tear 1 there. What really broke me was seeing King and Eda go feral and The Collector just snapping their fingers, trying to “fix” Luz.... oh my god.
KING’S TITAN DAD IS GENDERFLUID. EVERYONE. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. KING’S DAD. THE OG TITAN. IS GENDERFLUID. WE ARE WINNING!!!!
Uhm. Titan Luz. Slay. Slay. Slay. I know we are all still broken over the owl house ending, but can we cope by talking about TITAN LUZ!?!?!???!!! She’s so fluffy!! And and and she acts like Eda!!! and and she’s so badass??? and AMITY NEEDS TO SEE HER RIGHT NOW OH MY GOD-
I love that King, Eda, and Luz all went to just about outer space, looked down and said “Wow.” Like, you’re in the home stretch of the biggest battle of your lives and you’re enjoying the view. That’s such a found family thing to do, oh my gosh.
Belos really tried to gaslight Luz. He really thought. HE REAAAALLLLYY THOUGHT. BITCH STFU AND DIE. Thank you to Raine (MVP OF THE SERIES!!!! NO JOKE!!!!), Eda, and King for curb stomping him.
Everyone’s future designs looked so. fucking. incredible!!! I saw other pointing this out but I’ll also say it. LUZ AND HER FRIENDS GOT FLAPJACK TATOOS!!!! They’re so cute!! Also Luz is in her emo phase, she had black eyeliner under her eyes. Vee looks adorable aaahhhhhhhhh!! GUS WITH THE DREDS OKAYYYY!!! King is a teen now guys! Eda became headmaster of the wild magic academy and has a hook to replace her arm. Amity looks like a very very succesful young lady, very proud of her. Willow and Hunter are still stumbling around with each other it seems, but that’s okay!! We love them!!
And to top it all off. Everyone (well, just about everyone) turned the camera, waved, and said “BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!”
I missed several things here, but this was a summary of my favorite parts (all of it) of Watching and Dreaming, the FINAL EPISODE of The Owl House. It doesn’t feel like it’s over. It’s gonna hit me later today and I’m going to start crying. But it’s okay. I’ll have fanart and fanfics and other fanworks to remember this incredible show by.
So uh. In case it wasn’t clear in my “Thank you” post. THANK YOU, FANS!!! WE ARE ALL AMAZING AND DON’T YOU EVER FORGET IT!!!
#god im cheesy#but i love it#and i needed to say it#lol#toh#toh season 3#toh season 3 spoilers#toh finale#toh watching and dreaming#Lexi's rambles#Lexi's TOH finale ramble#<-- making it a tag so i can find it later haha
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I feel like designing OC Endbringers, and I might as well share them.
So. How do Endbringers get made? I believe Eidolon's shard mixes concepts on his mind at the time with religious imagery he's familiar with and a powerset provided by Eden shards. This means that the "backstory" requires a specific time and that we know David's thoughts from this time period. On a more Doyalist level, I would also like to keep each one unique, narratively useful, and thematically relevant to Worm.
What if Scion killed an Endbringer immediately after Kevin said to? So like. The Echidna fight happens on June 20th, with Scion burrowing into the Earth and lasering Behemoth on the same day. Then Eidolon attends the June 21st Cauldron meeting from his flashback, and while here somebody adds on "By the way, it turns out Scion just randomly killed an Endbringer yesterday. What the fuck, right? Why did he do that? Should we tell people it happened?" The things on his mind from the fight, from the revelations, and from the meeting would be the building blocks for Behemoth's replacements (I'm giving him two for the record, no idea if that's always the result of one dying but I'll operate as if it were for the purposes of this post).
His own powers are weakening (this seems to be on his mind constantly)
He isn't strong enough to fight Scion (ditto this)
His Echidna duplicate seemed to be at full strength (this appears to have been on his mind ever since it happened)
The scrutiny caused by his clone's revelations (immediate relevance)
Shame for the things he's done (immediate relevance) (assume all unspecified bullet points are also immediate relevance)
The case-53s probably made him think about his role in abducting people, giving them powers, locking them up and/or wiping their memories and releasing them
Echidna's powers
The powers he employed against Echidna: Dessication, gravity manipulation, weird homing electric things, some sort of thinker power speculated to include precognitive danger sense and also knowledge of where to attack without harming civilians, sepia timeslow bubble, unknown power that explodes Alexandria clones
Queen 18.8 featured two Texas Wards named Young Buck and either Strapping Lad or Intrepid dying in front of him. I assume watching children you knew die of a knife to the stomach and immolation (respectively) leaves an impact for at least a couple of days.
The portal to Gimel
Echidna trying to bargain for her targets. (Imagine an Endbringer that does that. Communicates what person or thing its targeting and allows the defending capes to hunt down and sacrifice them "for the greater good". An EB that can be stopped easily harms their collective air of implacability, but also many people would do really fucked up things if they thought it would save a whole city.)
Missile strikes
Therapists
Cauldron's silencing of heroes who would leak information related to them
Being replaced
A lot of pieces to work with there... I would invite you to stop for a second and try coming up with your own Endbringers using this list before reading mine. Reblog with your ideas, even! The world needs more Endbringers (I mean, it really doesn't. But this fandom does).
Endbringer 1 is based on Worm's running idea that giving people powers hastens societal collapse. It takes the 'forcibly giving people powers' idea from what Eidolon helped do to the case-53s and mixes in an offensive power that mixes scrutiny with the shard that Hero, Citrine, and probably Softball got powers from.
Imagine an Endbringer who gives an entire city Codex's power (She was the Ambassador who shot invisible rays that permanently lower their targets intelligence for a temporary boost to her own). Imagine an Endbringer who makes 7,000 Heartbreakers. Or Svetas. Or Kings or Scrubs or Nice Guys or Tritaniums or Burnscars. Distributing a teleportation power that lets somebody chestburster their way out of any person they've ever met sounds horrible, but how much worse is it if the attack its happening on is when this fucker is attacking The Birdcage? What about giving a physically altering power to everybody that shows up to fight it, ruining their secret identities? What about making all the mundanes merge into Case-70s the next time they touch a parahuman?
An Endbringer who causes more problems in the long run is straying a bit close to The Simurgh's schtick, which isn't helped by her on-page attack involving flooding a city with parahumans and providing people with powers. The big difference is how this one fights at the time. Remember Citrine's line in Imago 21.4: 'I can use my power to cancel out the filters that keep someone's powers in their control. I can also remove the filters that keep their power from affecting them.' This Endbringer takes that horror game trope where something has a roving or flashing light, and if you end up in it there's just a cutscene of you dying with no recourse. Batman: Arkham Asylum is the first that comes to my mind, but it shows up in everything from Dishonored to WarioWare. In this case, its roving spotlights that appear to be emitted by the Endbringer's eyes (because being scrutinized by hostiles was on Eidolon's mind). Of course, the Endbringer doesn't actually need its eyes any more than the others do, and is capable of creating these beams anywhere if it wanted to stop going easy.
Now we move on to its appearance, which is a bit tricky. See, the first three used Christian imagery and the latter three used ideas from other beliefs. This could just be a weird coincidence, or it could be suggesting that at some point between The Simurgh and Khonsu David broadened his understand of faiths outside his own. I'm inclined to go with the latter, but that leaves the question of whether its happened at the point my Endbringers are created. I'm going to say it did, just for the sake of giving myself more options. Also, I would like to take this moment to point out that there is no obvious (at least to me) connection between what imagery an Endbringer is given and what their powers or M.O. are.
This Endbringer needs to have some longevity, which means its thick. It needs to be able to use its offensive power effectively: That means lots of eyes, and either being mobile/flexible enough to turn its head anywhere easily or that its eyes are all over its body. Ideally (for the Endbringer) its body should have the ability to do a lot of damage, since its powers can only directly affect people. My idea is a giant tree stump with eyes opening and closing all along the creases in its "bark", and roots that function as both flailing tendrils and as spidery legs. Against all reason I easily found a webpage that lists bible verses with tree stumps in them: the only ones with any distinct imagery are Daniel 4:15 and 4:23, which talk about having 'a band of iron and bronze around it'. This seems to mean circles of it on the ground, but making it be more like stump-bracelets makes for a good visual and obfuscates the inspiration a bit. Sadly the only named tree stump is Jesse (I'm not kidding, Isaiah 11:1 calls one that), which is an abysmal name for an Endbringer, so I had to look further. 'Irminsul' sounds Endbringer-y and was the name of a type of sacred pillar in Germanic Paganism. According to wikipedia, the oldest known description of an Irminsul referred to it as a tree trunk erected in open air. That works.
Endbringer 2: This one is inspired by the mystery aspect of Worm/Ward. It harms anybody who tries to spread information on it, even when dormant, and was naturally the result of Contessa(?) talking about offing whistleblowers in the June 21st Cauldron meeting.
On the subject of how information-spreaders die, we have several options. They could spontaneously combust (like that one Ward), but that's getting in Behemoth's way. Same for being electrocuted. They could suddenly have a knife in the stomach, but that doesn't feel like a Worm power to me and is a bit too on the nose. Likewise for using the missile strike as inspiration. They could be crushed by gravity or dessicated by heat, either of those two would feel suitably different from existing Endbringers but still like an Endbringer power. Annoyingly, I don't believe we ever saw one of these effects provided by an Eden shard besides Eidolon's, which would have made for a good selection method. (I flipped a coin, this is a gravity Endbringer now)
So I suppose that's also how it fights capes directly. Gravity manipulation is somewhat versatile, allowing for Eidolon's crushing effect, Topsy's ability to launch people skyward, even temporary black hole generation to round things out.
This feels like a very fast-acting Endbringer to me, one that shows up, crushes/elevates/black holes the area, and then leaves again (As opposed to other Endbringers, which show up further away from their targets and approach). It operates using the guerrilla strike method that all Endbringers (except Tohu Bohu) canonically adopted after New Delhi. And anybody who tries to report what happened is suddenly squeezed into a quarter-sized ball. Authorities can't warn people its going to show up, nobody can turn on the sirens, even trying to mobilize the heroes who signed up to fight Endbringers without getting crushed is playing with fire. Only figuratively playing with fire though - the coin didn't land on tails.
Its not a tank, so a smaller, nimble form is fine. Its not attacking directly, so it won't need a body that allows it to do so effectively. Its power is not connected to any body part. With no real guidelines as to what form it should take, I'm going to fall back on which religious symbol is the most religious: That's right, this Endbringer is a giant cross. Not really, that would be too silly. Its instead based on the largest religious structure in the world, which the internet tells me is Angkor Wat (its a Cambodian temple/city built in tribute to a Hindu goddess). Apparently it has five central pillars and a moat, and is covered in devatas. That's pretty easy to eldrich-up: Five arms and legs evenly spaced around a torso (the five central pillars), and instead of a head give it the appearance of faces trying to escape from all over its body (the devatas). Have it be blue because moats are blue. (I know technically water is reflective rather than blue, but shards don't care. They'd know that humans associate water with blue and go "Okay, sure. Whatever.")
That leaves the name. I get nothing for five-armed, too much for blue, and looking for religious figures assosciated with secrets only turned up Raziel from Jewish mysticism. Sure, let's go with that. I have been working on this post for four hours now.
In conclusion, my Endbringers are:
Irminsul, a giant tree stump covered in eyes that project rays that are an insta-kill (or worse) on parahumans, and ruins the world by distributing harmful powers. This is a good Endbringer.
Raziel, a five-armed, five-legged, blue torso with faces poking out of it that hit-and-runs with gravity powers that cannot be talked about without dying. I am unsatisfied with this Endbringer.
#parahumans#worm#worm spoilers#parahumans spoilers#wormwebserial#worm web serial#tw: religion#original character#tw: death#tw: stabbing#tw: immolation#tw: fire#angkor wat#endbringer
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Hello!! Can I request Mikey fucking male reader? Or sugar daddy Akashi Takeomi fucking male reader coz like 😩
🤭 might do both cause sugar daddy akashi so this will be a mix of shorter smuts and yes I did roast takeomi and don't regret it. Also I made myself jealous cause damn I wish I was their sugar baby 😔
This talk/contains: smut, semi public sex, car sex, marking up, sugar baby reader, me roasting Takeomi, bratty reader with punishment, this is a mix of short pieces of smut and headcanons.
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Becoming a sugar baby was your first good idea, becoming the sugar baby to the leader of bonten that was your best decision. Not even for the pay, trips, or the clothes in all honesty. What really was the grand prize was manjiro sano, the king of darkness and back breaking sex.
Finding out that he was a sex demon and the kinkest man to ever exist, he's taken you from every angle on every surface. The fondest one was after you had asked for a new car, a Toyota camry with a red interior that had black high lights. Of course mikey had bought it but before you even drove it off the lot. Mikey had you testing how good the durability of the seats were, bruising your prostate while he made you count how many times the car moved.
And we couldn't forget about the day when he took you to Italy to watch the Carnival of Venice, it was heavenly to witness the costumes dancing around each other to show the audience every extraordinary detail of their masks to the tips of their gowns and coats. But what tipped the night off was listening to Teatro La Scala while mikey treated you with such tenderness and love that it left phantom touches even today. From the gentle kisses that were focused on only two things which were to leav hickeies and encasing your nipples in overwhelming heat with a slippery snake of a tongue glazing you them, and the attention that your balls got was sinful enough that it would turn a dungeon master to a virgin. You were sure that mikey had left hickes on them even if you didn't check.
Picking the leader of bonten as your sugar daddy was the best decision and you planned to capitalize off of it right now, with nothing on you expect for satin sheets that slid off you shoulders to pool over your dick that was at full attention once you heard the click of the pent house lock. Walking was over rated when you fucked with mikey.
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To be fair, when you first started fucking takeomi. You expected him to bust in the first 4 minutes and for him to not be that big. You left with a limp and refusing to touch yourself, takeomi was a suprise after all he looked one sip of McDonald's sprite from dying but he proved you wrong especially after you mouthed off to him.
You learned pretty quick that takeomi didn't take lip from you and would shut you down immediately even if in public, all he had to do was give you the look to shush and prepare for punishment. And his punishments were so cruel but creative all the same, if you insisted that you needed to spend more than allowed on something trivial such as cookies then the punishment would be to fuck your self again a dildo that was attached to whatever surface was closest to takeomi but he controlled how fast and hard you could go. While you were focused on gaining forgiveness and the ability to cum, he threw in degrading but praising comments then after you finally gained forgiveness from four organisms he would fuck you though at least three more if you were up to it though the treatment afterwards was heavenly with him calling in the maids to replace the sheets with you favorite ones and to draw a bath that was filled with kisses and promises of using all four of his black cards for being such a wonderful boy and taking him even if you were tired and spent.
Then the special treatment for the anniversary, well those shopping sprees in Paris and takeomi helping you choose sn outfit to match his; when yall went to your resume at Le Fouquet's. He practically kissed the path you walked on and the hungry look in his eyes only grew with each swipe of the card, you were a master piece that was reaching completion, he was ready to show you in every light with his hand marks peeking through when your clothes just couldn't follow you movements. Takeomi can't wait for you to try and explain to your friends, just why you let him mark you up so bad.
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Hm headcanons or smut thoughts idk honestly both
No, I'm not taking my roasts for takeomi back.
Takeomi picks out brats so he can enjoy taming them by first allowing them to do whatever they want and run their mouths.
Mikey picks the duel, he loves a brat but also someone who will follow directions with no question asked.
Takeomi dick curves a bit as it reaches the tip, call him captain hook cause he has you hooked on deep throating him.
Mikey is thicker at the base and narrows out, though he is leaning on the more normal side of length. Man's knows how to sling that dick.
Please mikey loves to take you with him to every meeting he is forced to go to and loves showing you off but in your own way, such as if you prefer jewelry to high light your facial features then expect jewelry to go with even your lazy wear. You prefer clothes then you have every style, from baggy to sleazy to priceless and he allows you to walls slightly infront if him to have everyone's eyes on your clothes.
And takeomi, there's a reason he allows his little sister to buy anything. It's because he wants to see you with everything you enjoy, spending all your allowance in the art supplies section/store well then expect your own work shop. You like love some sports and need some new shoes or a better bag well then you getting your own storage filled with everything you could ever need in any color. Oh you like mathematics and science (this includes cooking) well guess what you getting a lab/kitchen so you may get all those crazy 3 am thoughts out but please let him know what your doing before you blow something up.
They are willing to support you as long as you talk in some way even if it's nonverbal, if you don't then please these boys will be stressed trying to figure out what's wrong.
In case you don't know what they do then listen please mind you business, they like you and wanna keep you bit if they think you gonna snitch or veiw them differently if you knew what they do then you gotta go.
#asks🤩#tokyo revengers#tokyo revengers smut#bonten mikey#akashi takeomi smut#takeomi akashi smut#mikey smut#manjiro sano smut#x male reader
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