"Who wouldn’t want a badass woman with a sword?" by Sadee Bee
Who wouldn’t want a badass woman with a sword?
On missing powerful women in media while
rewatching Xena: Warrior Princess
There is just something about watching retro media as an adult. I enjoy doing it from time to time, even when it makes me feel old. Truthfully, the nostalgia overrides this feeling more often than not, or even catching tiny details that I wouldn’t have when I was younger.
Lately, my rewatch campaign has been all the fantasy I enjoyed as a teen/young adult. On the docket right now is Xena: Warrior Princess, every bisexual teen girl's gay awakening, every lesbian's wet dream. Well, maybe not every, but definitely mine, though I am getting off topic.
I can’t recall the first time I caught an episode of the show, but I know it was later in my life, given the year the show started and the year I was born (mind your business), so having the opportunity to watch it from start to finish has been a real treat.
In case some don’t know about Xena, here is a brief description from Wikipedia:
Xena: Warrior Princess is an American sword-and-sorcery television series filmed in New Zealand, which aired in first-run syndication from September 4, 1995, to June 18, 2001.[1] Critics have praised the series for its strong female protagonist, and it has acquired a strong cult following, attention in fandom, parody, and academia, and has influenced the direction of other television series.[2]
Sword-and-sorcery is a banger genre in TV and movies, and Xena is no exception. A pivotal show during its run, considering its predecessor, Hercules:The Legendary Journeys. In fact, it was a spin-off, one that some, I’m sure, did not believe would be the least bit successful. Sure, people loved the character of Xena, but were people truly ready for a female protagonist in this realm?
Oddly enough, it ended up outperforming Hercules altogether. Which, in a way, brings me to the point of why I’m writing about it. What happened to how we embrace powerful women in media?
Xena: Warrior Princess kicked down so many walls and opened up so many women and femme-presenting folks to the idea that power and beauty don’t have to be polar opposites. If anything, the power makes you hotter. It showed us that female-led stories can be gripping, compelling, and, quite frankly, not all about a man in a genre so dominated by them. Xena made me want swords and my very own Chakram. It has made me explore the fantasy genre more deeply, and, to be more relevant, it is making me very aware of the glaring lack of strong female characters in the genre now.
I rarely partake in video games, shows, movies, or books that don’t feature a female lead. Hence, the rewatch of Xena because, truthfully, I am finding representation of this sort lacking in our era. What representation we do have: House of the Dragon, Wheel of Time, Penny Dreadful, I am Not Okay With This, and even Witches of East End seem to fall to the wayside in terms of viewership, season renewals, and just a general fervor for them in a way I wish they had.
To be honest, these days it seems like every female-led thing is met with a contempt I rarely ever saw in the era of Xena. This is not to say that it did not exist, but I do think it has grown in popularity to be misogynistic for the sake of it.
The most recent uptick I have seen in this is for the God of War video game series, in which the studio recently announced the new game: God of War Laufey. It has been so bad that some men have even taken to making AI edits of the game and calling it God of War Laundry, as if Laufey herself isn’t a literal frost giant and the original wielder of the Leviathan Axe, who could take on Kratos any day of the week. To be honest, I was never super interested in the God of War franchise, but I am now. Why not tell the story that a lot of us, like half the population, have been begging to hear?
I think, unfortunately, a lot of the appeal of Xena back in the day was the underlying sex appeal of the show. Warriors in skimpy, impractical outfits, Xena’s obviously lesbian relationship with Gabriel, and maybe even a larger ability at the time to suspend disbelief. We didn’t have the internet to fly to with brain-dead opinions. If we hated something, we hated in silence. And sadly, catering to the masses wasn’t so imperative then as it is now, with internet critics being able to review bomb everything before it even exists. There is also our current administration putting terrible men on a pedestal (one’s Xena would destroy), the overall persistent notion that women and femmes simply deserve nothing but fear and violence. Sadly, it feels like there is a stunning lack of desire from the patriarchy at large to change any of this.
All this to say that I wish we could go back to when embracing strong female leads didn’t feel like a death sentence. Xena: Warrior Princess is proof enough that we can give something of this nature a deep and long-running success. Women and femmes can be more in a story than a plot point in some guy's life. We are capable of quite literally being the heroes of our own lives, and I think it is time that popular media reflected that again. As Xena herself once said, "My body doesn't make me who I am, my deeds do."
We could all aspire to be much more like her today. At the very least, give me a TV show that has a woman with a sword, kicking ass in the name of good, or simply because she fucking can.
Comments