Oh My Heart

[frayadjacent]

I changed my mind and watched the Xena finale. 

It turned out fine, actually.  Everything I didn't like I was already spoiled for, and there were a few things that I *loved* that I wasn't spoiled for.  The thing I was dreading because SQUICK wasn't so bad.  Partly because I am less squicky about said squick that I used to be, and partly because it just wasn't as squicky as I expected.

If anyone wants to discuss/gush about/sob over a campy, operatic television show from 15 years ago, you know where to find me.

Comments

[bobbiewickham]

So I watched the first ep of Xena a very long time ago on Netflix (was too young for it as it aired, I think), and I liked it a lot but somehow never got around to watching more of it. Would you recommend it, for someone who likes BtVS and action heroines generally?

[frayadjacent]

I'd say that if you like BtVS and action heriones and you enjoyed the first episode, you'd probably like the whole show.

It's probably the most female-driven television show I've ever seen. With a small handful of exceptions, all of the characters whose choices and actions propel the stories, especially the stories that span multiple episodes, are women, including quite a few memorable recurring characters. And no one in the show seems to find it all that remarkable that so many of the very strongest and best fighters, most ambitious leaders, most ruthless warlords, or most influential religious personalities are women. (There are lots of one-off male warlords and kings, though.)

It has great fight scenes and action, in my opinion. Now, I'm no connoisseur of battle choreography, but from the very start I was consistently impressed by the physicality of the action sequences and stuntwork. I find it really fun to watch, especially with Lucy Lawless's expressive face conveying the joy or anger she feels when she's fighting. The stunts aren't realistic -- you can tell they're doing wire work, they regularly break Newton's law of inertia and conservation of angular momentum (sorry, I notice these things!), and some characters even fly, but it totally works. For me anyway!

The two main characters, Xena and Gabrielle, crept into my heart like only characters on a few other shows (such as BtVS, Firefly, or Friday Night Lights, all of which would generally be considered higher quality than Xena) have. The show just has a lot of heart. I completely understand now why they are icons.

Those are the main reasons I love it.

But, fair warning if you didn't know: the show is also extremely campy, the effects were probably a tad low budget even for the 90's, and there are definitely big holes in plenty of plots, story lines, and in some characters' writing (though far less for Xena and Gabrielle than other characters). The first season, Xena and/or Gabrielle falls in love with a new guy every other episode.

The show also has major problems with race throughout. There is a LOT of exoticisation of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures and characters, there is an arc that uses Indian characters as the Oriental backdrop to white characters' development, and they seem to disproportionately cast Maoiri actors as primitive and bloodthirsty characters -- if "character" is even the right word, as sometimes they are undifferentiated masses of "primitives". On the other hand, they do also often cast black, east Asian, and Maoiri actors as Greeks. I appreciate that because the show doesn't aim for historical realism, so it would be ridiculous to only cast white people as Greeks on those grounds. (It also is realistic to have black people in Ancient Greece and Rome, I think?)

BTW: oblique but significant spoilers for the series finale are in the discussion downthread.

[thirdblindmouse]

What were the things you loved?

As long as you don't say the bare belly armor, we can still be friends.

[frayadjacent]

Ha! I did sort of rationalize it away as, "She wants to get shot full of arrows".Bbut yeah. That was a bit much. Even Gabby wore sensible clothes for that battle!

Mainly it was the "if I had 30 seconds to live" scene. I'd seen clips from it in vids but I had no idea what they actually said to each other. I also loved when the two of them put out the fire using Gabrielle's method. And it's a small thing, but I loved the sweet way that Xena laid down next to Gabrielle and watched while she was getting her tattoos. Also Gabrielle was made of awesome pretty much the whole way through. I sort of knew that just from vids though.

Gah, speaking of, I am struggling to find good Xena vids! I've watched everything still up on the LJ vidding comm's Xena tag at least twice, and I've been watching youtube vids but they are mostly kinda bad. I feel bad saying that but even the better ones often have aspect ratio problems and so forth. There are some that do extreme literal interpretation of lyrics which kinda works for Xena? Because camp. But I want more! I've been watching Devotion and Boom Boom Ba every day. I'm sure there are plenty of good Xena vids on YouTube, the problem is that popularity really doesn't indicate quality.

[blueswan]

Hi dropping by to say hello and subscribe to your journal. I couldn't not mention a couple of vids you might enjoy.

My favourite Xena vids are These Two Arms and Salome by killa (now killabeez. I can't find them on line but she does have a journal here at DW if you wanted to email her to see if they are still available.

[frayadjacent]

Hello -- and thank you! I dug up Salome and am gonna email killa about the other one now. :D

[thirdblindmouse]

I did love Gabrielle in that episode a lot.

I have not had much success finding good Xena vids online. Maybe the show peaked too early, and too many vids were never digitized. I know tons that were once online have been taken down, because I remember encountering a lot of broken links to personal vidding pages back when I first started looking.

Aside from Boom Boom Ba and Devotion, my other favorite is By My Yoko Ono, of the campy and literal school of Xena vidding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrmT0O61wzA (I'm not sure if there's a downloadable version online anymore, though I got a wmv from somewhere. Sadly, it's no higher quality than the YouTube version.)

Maybe there are other good Xena vids somewhere on YouTube, and every now and then I get the urge to go looking, but all I've ever found there are not very good shipper vids of various stripes, presumably because ship feels are what gets people to hit the "like" button.

If the criterion for Festivids inclusion was "less than 100 vids that thirdblindmouse can find and enjoy", Xena would be a shoe-in. Maybe I should start a vid fest for not-technically-festivids fandom, where people name a fandom in which they can't name 10 vids they like, and people either make them vids or vid recs.

[frayadjacent]

OMG I love that idea!!! I WILL PLAY.

Speaking of campy and literal. I saw a vid to this sexy Shawn Colvin song that has a line that's something along the lines of, "the Amazon's running down my thighs". So GUESS WHAT THEY PUT THERE. That's right: a bunch of Amazons charging forward (from "To Helicon and Back", I think) overlaid with a clip of the camera panning over Xena's leg while she's laying down. GET IT?

It was actually sort of awesome. My friend and I were having a Xena vid party and that was definitely the most exclaiming we did all evening.

[thirdblindmouse]

Hahaha, that does sound kind of amazing. Like the sort of vid I refrain myself from making mostly.