What we owe Xena

News Media Commentary
Title:	What we owe Xena
Commentator:	Cathy Young
Date(s):	September 15, 2005
Venue:	online (www.salon.com)
Fandom:	Xena Warrior Princess
External Links:	WwoX at salon.com WwoX at cathyyoung.net
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What we owe Xena is a 2005 article by Cathy Young for Salon.com.

"Ten years ago the Warrior Princess stormed the small screen, leading the way for the "girl power" that followed."

Some Topics Discussed

• the groundbreaking characters of Xena, and others
• feminism and Xena
• the subtext of the show
• fans' influence on the show: for better or worse

From the Article

There was something different about this show and its hero. Eventually, after watching a sixth-season episode that made me curious about story lines I had missed, I went on the Internet to catch up, and fell in love.

"Xena" is credited by many, including "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon, with blazing the trail for a wave of female action heroes: Buffy, Max of "Dark Angel," Sydney Bristow of "Alias," Starbuck in SciFi's new "Battlestar Galactica" (in which Lawless guest-starred last week) and the Bride in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill." (Tarantino is an enthusiastic "Xena" fan: He talks about his love for this "really cool show" in an interview on the DVD of "Double Dare," a recent documentary about Hollywood stuntwomen featuring "Xena" and "Kill Bill" double Zoė Bell.) Nonetheless, the series could have adopted as its own the Rodney Dangerfield mantra "No respect." "Buffy" largely eclipsed "Xena" on the cultural landscape as the "girl power" show, garnering the critical analysis, the accolades for creative innovations that "Xena" did first (such as a musical episode) and, when it wrapped up, the grand farewell in the media. Too often, "Xena" got written off as campy swords-and-sorcery fare, a kids adventure show or a chicks-in-leather lesbian romp. Yes, of course it was campy, and it was a fantasy action show with gods and monsters that appealed to many children. And it did play unabashedly with lesbian themes. But it was so much more than the sum of all those parts. It had great characters and smart writing; riveting stories that often drew not only on ancient history and mythology but on sources as varied as medieval legends, Shakespeare, Richard Wagner and "The Producers"; and a cool, bracing feminism that was practiced, not preached.

How was Xena a female pioneer? Let me count the ways. She had no male support or regular romantic interest. She didn't, unlike Wonder Woman or the Bionic Woman, have a conventionally feminine day-to-day alternate identity, though on a mission she could pose as a Roman matron, a virgin priestess or an exotic dancer. Xena was not "strong but feminine"; she was unapologetically strong and unapologetically female, sexy and powerful, unafraid to get sweaty and dirty on the job, and all the more beautiful for it. Nor did she care about pleasing anyone: In one memorable exchange, a slick opportunist seeking to enlist Xena as an ally says, "I like you," and she shoots back, "Don't. I'm not a likable person." (As Lawless once said, Xena is "a good person who doesn't think she is.")

Talk to a few "Xena" fans, and you will hear a lot of theories about when, if ever, the series jumped the proverbial shark. Most agree that it reached its pinnacle in the brilliant third season and had its peaks and valleys after that: There were some wobbly story lines, some recycled plots and other signs of creative fatigue, and in the final season a tendency to amp up the sexual titillation and overly graphic violence (with an overdose of both in an episode that had the heroines infiltrate a harem to rescue Gabrielle's kidnapped niece). But at its most uneven, it was still a terrific show.

One offshoot of the show's evolution was the much-talked-about lesbian subtext. Early on, some viewers -- mostly though not exclusively gay women -- discerned a romantic attraction in Xena and Gabrielle's developing bond. Despite an early crop of male love interests, the idea that there was something going on between the Warrior Princess and her young companion made the rounds of Internet chat rooms and quickly got back to the show's producers. After the initial surprise, they began to play to this perception with deliberate sexual innuendo, from double entendres (when a love-struck villager asked Gabrielle if Xena had considered settling down, Gabrielle replied, "No, she likes what I do," then quickly corrected herself, "She likes what she's doing") to scenes of the duo sharing a hot tub.

The subtext took on a life of its own, and eventually the possibility that Xena and Gabrielle were "more than friends" was treated as a plausible reading of their relationship -- preferred in some episodes, downplayed or contradicted in others. (There was no question that, however defined, it was the most important relationship in the two women's lives.) In the last two seasons, another kind of subtext -- between Xena and Ares, whose dynamic had been rife with sexual tension from the start -- was also brought to the fore and developed into a complex love-hate relationship. Late in the series, both of these ambiguous romantic "texts" were explicitly acknowledged in "You Are There," the off-the-wall comedy with the TV reporter: The nosy Nigel accosted Xena and Gabrielle with questions about their special relationship and demanded to know if Xena was in love with Ares. Both questions, of course, went unanswered.

The subtext gave "Xena" an added edge; it also resonated with vast numbers of lesbians who saw the heroines as role models and felt empowered by seeing what was, to them, a same-sex couple at the center of a television show. Many say that the series helped them come to terms with their sexuality, such as a 24-year-old British nurse who says that she found strength and happiness in the fact that everyone involved with the show thought that "one woman being genuinely in love with another is fine and lovely and beautiful." For others, the subtext had a flip side. From the start, many straight female fans were concerned that it played into some vexing stereotypes: that a tough, independent woman in a traditionally male role must be a lesbian, that two women who have a close relationship and no boyfriends must be lesbians, or that a woman's story must be a romance. Even some fans who appreciated the subtext saw it as a mixed blessing. One woman, a 28-year-old bisexual New Yorker, told me that while she's "glad the characters became gay icons," the disadvantage is that this can overshadow everything else that made "Xena" so great: "I hate it when I tell someone I love 'Xena' and I get the response, 'Oh yeah, the show with the lesbians, right?'"

The fan-driven growth of the subtext illustrates another "Xena" phenomenon: the special relationship between the show and the fandom. Other than "The X-Files," "Xena" was the first cult hit of the Internet age: the face that launched a thousand Web sites. One of the producers and principal writers on "Xena," Steven Sears, participated in discussions on "Xena" message boards (and occasionally still does); other staff members and actors reportedly lurked there as well, and seemed well aware of fandom debates. In the last season, popular fan-fiction writer Melissa Good was hired to write several scripts for the series, two of which were made into episodes.

This involvement with the fandom turned out to be a double-edged sword. Almost from the start, the fandom was bitterly divided among various factions, particularly subtext fans pitted against those who saw Xena and Gabrielle as friends. Fandom wars over relationships are nothing new: "X-Files" fans clashed vehemently over whether Mulder and Scully should do the deed. In the "Xena" fandom, though, these wars had the added angle of sexual politics. Some of the anti-subtext sentiment was undoubtedly driven by bona fide bigotry. Some lesbian fans, on the other hand, approached the argument as a real-life gay rights struggle and labeled all dissent as homophobic: To them, denying a sexual relationship between Xena and Gabrielle was tantamount to denying the reality of their own lives, and the "Are they or aren't they" tease was an insulting way to keep the characters in the closet.

In a way, knowing that the staff paid attention to fan opinions may have made matters worse: There was an incentive for the rival groups to out-shout one another to make themselves heard. Many fans who had no appetite for these wars fled the online fandom. Story lines that were seen as betraying the subtext, particularly the Xena-Ares relationship in the fifth season, were met with intense hostility from a small but vocal group; at other times, non-subtext fans grumbled about what they saw as pandering to the pro-subtext fan base (such as several sixth-season episodes emphasizing Xena and Gabrielle's transcendent bond as soul mates). At the end of the series' run, the Internet fandom exploded in a hysterical backlash against the finale, in which Xena died to right yet another past wrong and Gabrielle was left to travel alone. The official Xena forum at the Studios USA Web site filled with cries of betrayal and profanity-laced rants against the producers -- who attempted appeasement by releasing a "director's cut" version, in which the poignant final shot of Gabrielle alone on a ship was replaced by a hokey image of Xena standing next to her as either ghost or imaginary friend.

... like "Xena" itself, the fan base, on and especially off the Internet, transcends the stereotype. Most of the fans, for instance -- including some devoted subtext fans -- are straight, and quite a few are men. They are lawyers and stay-at-home moms, high school kids and Ph.D. students, white-collar workers and artists, soldiers and college professors; East and West Coast urbanites and residents of Midwestern and Southern small towns (not to mention Australians, Europeans, Israelis and Russians); Wiccans and churchgoing Christians. They include a middle-aged psychology instructor who first started watching because she thought Xena looked cool and now regards the show as a philosophical guide to living, and an exploration geologist in his 30s who discovered "Xena" when he wanted to tape a baseball game and set the VCR to the wrong channel.

In spite of it all, "Xena" lives and thrives. Fans still flock to the annual convention. On the Internet, several "Xena" boards remain active; with no new battles to fight over the show's direction, what remains of the online fandom is a far more peaceful, live-and-let-live kind of place that continues to draw new members. And in the wider culture, the impact of "Xena" is definitely still felt. In fact, "Xena, Warrior Princess" has become a kind of generic term for "tough chick." (Condoleezza Rice, who does a pretty good Xena-style steely gaze herself, has been nicknamed "Warrior Princess" by her staff -- much to the dismay of many left-leaning "Xena" fans.) Recently, a Chicago Daily Herald review of a gender-bending, nearly-all-female production of "Henry IV" was titled "Shakespeare Meets Xena," and the reviewer noted that today's audiences can easily accept the feminization of the play's power struggles and battle scenes because of "familiarity with battling babes like Xena."