Warrior Princess Exchange!

[frayadjacent]

chaila and I recently did a Warrior Princess Exchange: she gave me some Wonder Woman comics to read and I suggested some Xena episodes for her to watch! My Xena suggestions were "One Against an Army" -- an obvious choice, IMO, for the the competence porn and the Xena and Gab being awesome and having an amazing relationship -- and "When Fates Collide". The second one seemed a little counter-intuitive but I still think it was a good choice for chaila, and for showcasing how awesome the characters can be. Also I re-watched the episode for Research and OMG so much fanservice. It was delightful

Chaila gave me The Hiketeia, which I devoured pretty quickly (well, after I figured out how to get Simple Comic to work right). It was a great story with some awesome Wonder Woman action and two great women characters.

I was surprised a little by how Diana claimed she didn't care what Danielle had done, to the point of kinda cutting off the conversation. It was an interesting ethical dilemma where I didn't really agree with anyone. I mean, I am fine with what Danielle did, but only because of the reason why she did it, which Diana claimed to not care about. (Though it seemed like she did care about it, since she was contemplating how she'd have felt if it were her sisters.) But honoring the Hiketeia was the major motivator for her, which I obviously don't identify with but it was pretty interesting nonetheless.

It definitely made me want to read more, and I imagine that if/when I do read more WW, I'll go back to the story and read it with a new level of emotional/intellectual engagement with the characters and stories.

I also thought the art was quite pretty, though I do predictably dislike the way women are drawn. It's not as bad as many comics but the contorted-torso-butt-and-boob poses were definitely there. But I liked how it conveyed the action.

The only thing I really wished was different was that it had spent more time on Diana and Danielle's relationship. I wish I had gotten to see them spending time together, to see how Danielle got good at her job instead of just having Diana tell me. But I wouldn't have wanted that at the expense of anything else, so I'd have wanted the book to be longer. :)

Comments

[sanguinity]

Yes, there are Amazons in Xena. There are a lot of Amazons in Xena. There are... a half-dozen tribes in the Amazon nation? With a fairly wide geographic spread. And Xena has extensive backstory with them, there are several major plot arcs that feature them, and Gabrielle becomes a (non-resident) Amazon queen fairly early on. Yeah: lots of Amazons.

So, begging our host's indulgence to continue this convo about a natural history museum having an exhibit on the WW Amazons, and what that means in terms of how the Amazons are coded... (frayadjacent, it's a convo about the first few panels of a short, stand-alone Wonder Woman promotional comic for Wendy's restaurants, linked at the link. Which means no spoilers in this comment for anything to speak of. Chaila summarizes a bit about how the Amazons look in Gail Simone's WW run, however, so if you're especially spoiler-sensitive...)

So, what I had thought about saying in that convo, but didn't, because I'm not sure how much it would have added:

In Xena, the Amazons are coded as straight-up indigenous. (Which I have got some major problems with, actually: the "main" tribe in the show is coded as Australian Aboriginal, the northern tribe has got some vaguely Arctic indigineity going on, and there's another tribe that's so blatantly coded as Native American that Gabrielle all but does redface in that episode.) (She wears fringed buckskin. She shoots a deer with a bow and arrow, and then does warpaint on her face with its blood. If I ever make that redface in SFF vid, that scene is absolutely going to be included.)

But I digress: in Xena, the Amazons are not Greek, but culturally distinct from the Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese, and are absolutely coded as indigenous. It would not surprise me one tiny bit to see a natural history museum exhibit about them. (And while Xena and Wonder Woman are different fandoms, with different directions and choices, they do share source material, and that means I sometimes see strong echoes between them.)

Combine that with some of the observations Mercedes Lackey made in her introduction to the first Gail Simone WW trade, The Circle, about the Greek stories about the Amazons, and how the Greeks were very much building a loved/hated Other when they were making up those stories...

...um, and this moment right here is why I didn't make the comment! I'm not sure how to sum up! Yeah, I see what you mean about the WW Amazons being seen as primitive by in-story Americans? That despite how Greek they were under Rucka's pen, they're portrayed much more clearly as other-than-Greek in at least some other presentations? And that makes it easier for me to see it in WW? *handwaves vaguely*

[frayadjacent]

This is super interesting. In addition to in-story Americans, it also makes sense to me why Out-of-story Americans, i.e., many WW readers, might see the Amazons as "primitive" indigenous people, if they've seen them coded as such in other sources such as Xena. (I totally agree with you on that, though I hadn't noticed the ways that different tribes are coded differently. [Well, I did notice that the Northern Amazons were coded differently from the Greek Amazons, but I hadn't noticed the third group being different {and now I can't remember what story that was with the redface, or rather what tribe that was}.])

[sanguinity]

5x05 "Them Bones, Them Bones," preparing Gabrielle to travel to the spirit world to fight Alti (who was dead at the time). *reviews episode* Yep, that scene is every bit as bad as I remembered it being.

Huh, they say it's the "Northern" tribe, but it's all tipis and arrows and fringed buckskin (as it is in the rest of the season, cf 5x16 Lifeblood and 5x17 Kindred Spirit), which is not what I remember the styling from 4x01 and 4x02 Sin Trade to be like?

*quickly reviews 4x01 and 4x02 Sin Trade* Yeah, I guess there was fringed buckskin then, too? But the stylistic details were a bit different: the buckskin was buried under lots and lots of animal pelts and shells and things. And wigwams instead of tipis? *shrug* I dunno. But in S4 I did not feel hit over the head with "pseudo Native Americans," while in S5 I did.

But concerning the variety of tribal stylings, when you get into S6 and all the Amazon tribes are banding together under a single queen, the camera pans around the queen's council and there's the suggestion that there is more cultural diversity within the Amazon nation than just the "Greek" and "Northern" tribes.

[frayadjacent]

Ah, thanks for pointing these details out to me. And yes, I do dimly remember the diversity in the council in S6.

I wonder how much thought the design people put into those differences between the Sin Trade episodes and Them Bones? I mean, I imagine the set designers at least thought about them, but then again maybe the writers described the scenery and the set designers just went with that. It might not even have been the same people.

But it does definitely sound like there were deliberate attempts to code different tribes as different real-life indigenous groups, which is all sorts of messed up. Thanks for pointing that out.

[sanguinity]

And then once they've done that coding, they run some of the classic icky indigenous tropes. I really hate that Gabrielle is an Amazon queen: I've had more than my fill of What These People Need is a Honky.

And yeah, I know that nearly everyone on-screen is white, but that's still so clearly the trope playing out... Ugh.

[chaila]

Oh I definitely didn't mean that the Amazons are generally *not* coded as indigenous in Wonder Woman? Because I think in a lot of ways they could be seen that way? Like even when they're Greek they're *not actually Greek*. They're like, Greek-adjacent? They worship the Greek gods and the Greek myths are part of their past, but they also have their own language (sometimes a comic will say Amazons are speaking Greek and I want to punch it because it is very established that Amazons speak Themysciran, and while this is related to Greek, it is not Greek!) and culture. It's never really clear what their ancient status was, I don't think, and comics obvs make up their own history? (though idk that the comics have ever gone the route of explicitly or implicitly coding them with cultural markers of real life indigenous peoples, though that's probably down to comics keeping Amazon things vague in general rather than the result of any respectful decision) But I've always thought it probably was akin to what you say about the Xena Amazons, sans the racial coding.

And with some very slight spoilers for Perez--which is what Rucka is calling back to all the time--IIRC, their origin there is basically that they escaped imprisonment by Heracles (the comics kind of remove the political bite by making the oppressors the gods, always, and PS Perez's stuff is really problematic in some ways and there is a lot of rape in the backstory) and are basically given Themyscira and immortality by some of the female gods in recompense. And then they live apart for centuries, and re-create and/or newly develop all that advanced technology and culture (and keep their old language, religion, etc., unchanged by the outside world). And even in Simone's run, at the beginning the whole situation is that yet more people are trying to invade Themyscira *again*, because over the centuries, people are constantly trying to invade it because they want the land and all the stuff that it has. So some of these story elements are kind up calling up what happens to indigenous peoples?

It's more just that they turn the narrative and political trajectory of stories about indigenous people on its head? So like the museum exhibit isn't necessarily coding of primitiveness the way it otherwise might be, because by the time Diana is an ambassador for them, they're very able to maintain their cultural power and very able to define the terms of their own exchanges. So it's all kind of just a mess, coding-wise. Which is basically what you started out saying, which is it's hard to figure out what, if anything, Diana or the comics or anything means with regard to any of this?

Which kind of just leaves me also without a sum up. I tend to think it's cool that all this is part of the power fantasy that is superhero comics, that the Amazons are part of the power fantasy that is Diana, that they do have some of this coding as a minority or indigenous culture, and they have achieved the cultural power and self-sufficiency and power/ability to tell the dominant culture/nations to fuck off that they have. So like when their stuff shows up in an American museum, it's because Diana or they agreed that it would. And Diana deals a decent amount with being a representative of her different culture, and living basically in exile and trying to balance both worlds. But most of the real issues the stories are often trying to piggyback on are not really dealt with? Like we don't see indigenous people who can't do what the Amazons do in terms of power, or really even discussions of why it's important to the Amazons that they preserve their language, religion, etc. And idk what crosses the line into appropriation or that anyone involved in thoughtfully engaging in any of that.

On one hand, I am not sure what I will think of the Xena Amazons. On the other, bad interpretations of the Amazons and the idea of the Amazons who are stuck in the old world and the old ways is pretty often a theme in Wonder Woman also. Comics are just so confusing because they're so cyclical and everything gets retold over and over. So I feel like "Perez Amazons" and "Rucka Amazons" and "Simone Amazons" are all coded slightly differently, and that doesn't even get into the six other ways six other writers did it differently (and worse).

And of course the Amazons are always getting screwed over, narratively, even in Diana comics...I throw a lot of comics at walls over the Amazons.

(ALSO I DID THE THING, I went to Wendy's and got an invisible plane of my own. It is a silly little paper plane with a Diana sticker and I don't care I love it!)

[sanguinity]

YOU GOT A PLANE.

(I had all sorts of thinky thoughts, and then that was completely derailed by CHAILA HAS AN INVISIBLE PLANE.)

What indicates its invisibility? Does it fly??

*wrenches myself back to the topic*

:: Oh I definitely didn't mean that the Amazons are generally *not* coded as indigenous in Wonder Woman? ::

...and I think I mean to say that in WW, they don't code indigenous for me at all. (Which is why I was so flabbergast about the natural history museum exhibit.) If I squint I can kind of see it, especially if I bring in other places where they are coded as indigenous, but...

They have an embassy. They're not considered to be childlike not-really-nations under the "protective" guardianship of "real" nations. They have an embassy. That's pretty much the place that I keep getting stuck. Well, that and all the marble and statuary and Greek gods and other symbolic cultural shorthands for "civilization."

But then, I know that's more in Rucka than Simone, and I haven't read Perez yet. (I blew through Simon's run last weekend. Sat in the backyard in the sun with the collected trades. It was a nice way to spend the weekend.) So maybe after I read Perez, I'll see it better.

I find the Xena Amazons as problematic as all hell, because of the way the show misappropriates actual ethnic identities for them, and then goes on to use a lot of the icky narrative tropes about indigenous peoples. There are some storylines involving them that I'm fond of, but as a group of characters... Well, I mostly want to go in there and rewrite them from the ground up. :-/

Except for maybe their thing with the Centaurs. That I just find gloriously weird.

[chaila]

I HAVE AN INVISIBLE PLANE! It is very silly. It is literally cardboard colored opaque blue, and if you did not know it was supposed to be an invisible plane, you probably wouldn't guess? BUT I KNOW. It sort of flies? But kind of sadly. It looks fun on its little runway on my bookshelf though? Here is a picture someone else took. Invisible plane! I have never been difficult to please. :)

...and I think I mean to say that in WW, they don't code indigenous for me at all. (Which is why I was so flabbergast about the natural history museum exhibit.) If I squint I can kind of see it, especially if I bring in other places where they are coded as indigenous, but...

Lulz reading comprehension and words, why can't I do them?! I don't think anything in the other runs (that I've read so far) will change your view in any significant way, but you might have to squint less to see it? But always a lot of the things that I've been talking about that call up some indigenous coding to me are backstory, and not the focus of the actual stories in the comics. But Rucka's is the only one that has Diana as an official ambassador with an embassy and all those trappings. Like "ambassador of Themyscira and its people and culture" is always part of what Diana is and does, and occasionally in other comics there will be a throwaway line about her having a role at the UN or something, but nobody else gives her an ongoing formal ambassadorship the way Rucka does (much to my ongoing disappointment).

YAY you read Simone! You should tell me what you thought sometime. :)

Before you read Perez, I feel I ought to alert you that, well, everyone has A LOT of love for Perez, but this is heavily, heavily colored by nostalgia. His run was the beginning of a lot of elements in Diana's stories that recur and that are great (the mythology elements in particular, and removing Steve Trevor as a love interest earns him my undying gratitude), so he does deserve a lot of the credit for establishing her in a new way. But even apart from its general dated-ness, it has A LOT of stuff that made me side-eye really, really hard, particularly around the Amazons and Diana's origin. I can be spoilery in email if you want, but let's just say, other stories have kept the good parts of his run and built on them, but there's plenty that I'm happy to leave in the 80s where it belongs. It's worth it for Julia Kapatelis alone, but it'd probably be good not to go in expecting Rucka-level greatness!

I find the Xena Amazons as problematic as all hell, because of the way the show misappropriates actual ethnic identities for them, and then goes on to use a lot of the icky narrative tropes about indigenous peoples. There are some storylines involving them that I'm fond of, but as a group of characters... Well, I mostly want to go in there and rewrite them from the ground up.

This makes me sad but not surprised. :( And is part of the reason why I'm perpetually glad that the established characteristic of the WW Amazons is that they are more advanced than pretty much the whole rest of the world. So at least sometimes they get to subvert all these myths and stuff. But now I do sort of want to see what this thing with the Centaurs is!

[sanguinity]

I should probably get frayadjacent to explain what the story with the Amazons and the Centaurs is supposed to be, because there's lots of backstory that gets revealed in bits and drabs over nearly six seasons, and I mostly throw my hands up about all of it. (I suspect the Centaurs might be primarily Hercules characters? Characters who spend a lot of time on the other show are sometimes hard to sort out.)

But! All Centaurs are male, and they live across the river from the Amazons (this was established before the show decided there was more than one Amazon tribe). And early on in the show, the Centaurs were pretty squarely positioned as the answer to any "but what about the menz??" (How do you procreate? What do you do with male babies?) question one might have about the Amazons.

That, and the Centaur-suits are hilariously bad. Around the time the barn episode that you watched, the show's budget expanded enormously, and they actually started using special effects and depicting "armies" as more than six people. (One of my clearest memories of the barn episode was goggling that they must have hired every stunt actor in New Zealand for that ep.) But somehow, the hilariously-bad Centaur-suits never got updated when the show's budget expanded.

Basically, I look at the Amazons, I look at the Centaur suits, I listen to characters seriously intoning another installment of the epic Amazon/Centaur backstory of war and alliance and betrayal, and I collapse into a fit of giggles. Because I DON'T EVEN.

[chaila]

Oh dear. I have never seen any story try to deal with the question of "BUT NO MENZ, HOW? WHY?" and have it result in anything that wasn't completely awful or hilarious, lulz. Although heh, much of this--Centaur suits paired with serious descriptions of epic mythological backstory that I'm supposed to take seriously--is kiiiind of my Xena issue in general. But I'm trying to embrace the camp! Two eps weren't enough to determine whether I can or not, but it sounds like the Centaurs may help me figure this out. :)

[sanguinity]

I trust you to frayadjacent's loving hands for Centaur episode selection.

But I think embracing the camp might be easier via an episode whose strength is camp? One is perhaps less likely to view camp as a nuisance in the serious eps, if one has an independent love for some of the campy eps?

...but maybe we should just keep the camp as far as way from you as possible, for as long as possible, until you are capable of shrugging "because Xena" about bewildering-wtf-was-that things, the same way you've learned to shrug and say "because comics."

[chaila]

That is a really appropriate comparison! Maybe this last strategy could work. :) Because I'm not sure I *get* camp? And I still don't get comics a lot of the time, but DIANA. I had tried to deal with comics before and it didn't work, because comics, but once I fell hard for Diana I could handwave comics!

[sanguinity]

Doesn't get camp?? *gasps in shock* Well. Then you may never see the 100% INNOCENT WITH ZERO SUBTEXT AT ALL episode wherein Xena fists a fish. It is a sad thing, so I will just tell you: Xena fists a fish, and there is ZERO SUBTEXT WHATSOEVER.

In the meanwhile, maybe Fray will drop the Caesar plotline on you or something.

[frayadjacent]

Is that also the episode where Xena says "If the gods didn't want us to eat fish, why'd they make it taste so good"?

(Actually I think that might be in "Many Happy Returns", which is coming up for you, sanguinity!)

[sanguinity]

Oh, god, I have no idea. There were SO MANY fishing eps!

[frayadjacent]

Centaur suits paired with serious descriptions of epic mythological backstory that I'm supposed to take seriously--is kiiiind of my Xena issue in general.

Well, the centaurs are only in a few episodes. Aaaaand I'm not a good candidate for nominating a centaur episode, as I don't really like them either, for the same reason!

(I don't think Centaurs are really the show's answer to WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ because when an Amazon and a Centaur hook up it's always super controversial. But I do think it's pretty weird that all the Centaurs are men, apparently. Still, in general I feel like the show doesn't make very much effort to explain how the Amazons reproduce. I think at one point they might mention shipping off their boy babies, but I could be confusing it with descriptions I've read of Amazons in other stories.)

[sanguinity]

I thought boy babies were raised by the Centaurs, yeah. I dunno, it is all very dimly recollected, and I am not hunting through a bunch of Centaur eps to see who said what when, and with what kind of winks or nudges.

I liked the front half of the Hope arc, and I'm pretty sure there were some Centaurs in there along the way. But I can't think of anything else with Centaurs in that I'd recommend.

[frayadjacent]

I thought boy babies were raised by the Centaurs, yeah.

They very well might have been. I'm with you RE: hunting, so we might never find out. :D

That's true, Centaurs are important in Maternal Instincts, which is a good episode. I also like that part of Xena's backstory is betraying Borias right when he was redeeming himself (by negotiating a truce with the Centaurs) because then she gets to have manpain. But the Centaurs are pretty incidental to what's good about both those stories.

[frayadjacent]

I find the Xena Amazons as problematic as all hell, because of the way the show misappropriates actual ethnic identities for them, and then goes on to use a lot of the icky narrative tropes about indigenous peoples. There are some storylines involving them that I'm fond of, but as a group of characters... Well, I mostly want to go in there and rewrite them from the ground up. :-/

Word. And I seem to have lost track of the comments, but somewhere in here you mentioned the These People Need a Honky trope with Gabrielle, and that's a really good point that I hadn't noticed before.

And then there is the Horde, and their casting choices for Maori actors*, and the Let's Genocide the Cannibals episode (and the fact that there are some gorgeous Xena/Gab scenes in that one just kills me).

*On one hand, the fact that the show doesn't try to be "realistic" by only casting white actors as Greeks/Romans/Gauls is a step above many fantasy-type movies and shows. But they still tend to cast Maori actors as dumb villains and give most of the interesting villains, as well as the heros, to white-looking actors.

[sanguinity]

I couldn't watch the cannibals episode, because cannibalism is a major no-go for me. (I fucking HATE that there's a cannibalism scene in the S6 credits. Hate, hate, hate.)

And yes, the Horde. I skipped those eps outright, because there's shit I don't need on my TV. When you hit that many OH NO YOU DIDN'TS in a row before you even get to the credits, I decide that I don't need to see wherever it is you think you're going with this.

Yeah, there's stuff that I DEF wish they had done better. Or, in some cases, not at all. :-/

[frayadjacent]

YES for sure to all this.

(Do you remember if you skipped the episode "Destiny", the one that shows Xena and Caesar's backstory? Because the pre-credits stuff is basically made of OH NO YOU DIDN'T, and then it is completely different for the rest of the episode.) Like, the teaser could be completely skipped on rewatch and the episode is only better for it.

[sanguinity]

I watched that one, yes. I should have specified: OH NO YOU DIDN'T on Native/Indigenous issues is my automatic bail-point, because self-preservation. Other kinds of racism or exotification don't tend to create the same kinds of physiological distress in me. (I disapprove of other kinds of racism and exotification strongly! It will directly affect my ability to enjoy and respect a work! But other kinds of racism/exotification don't set off fight-or-flight reactions, so I tend to hang on longer before deciding whether to bail or not.)

[frayadjacent]

Yeah, that totally makes sense.