Hopes and Dreams for a Xena: Warrior Princess Reboot

If you’re a Xena: Warrior Princess fan like myself, then you have probably heard that a reboot is in the works. Sadly, it is a reboot and not a continuation, which means Lucy Lawless and Renée O’Connor will not be reprising their roles as Xena and Gabrielle. That’s a little sad, but I guess I get the direction the Powers That Be are pursuing.

That being said, if this is going to be a reboot, I have a couple of suggestions and requests for how to make a Xena reboot successful today while still being true to the spirit of the show.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Zeus, Hera, Male Power Fantasies, & Female Demonization

Ah, Greek mythology, how I love you. Greek mythology has always been incredibly captivating to me, probably because the gods act so human. They have their strengths and flaws, they squabble among themselves, they fight for power, and they can even be tricked or deceived. It’s incredibly interesting. However, I can’t stand the watered down version of the Greek gods that we get in our pop culture. My biggest issues are with how our pop culture portrays Zeus and Hera. While the other gods may also occasionally be portrayed poorly, I feel like the portrayal of these two ends up being the most problematic.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape.

Throwback Thursdays: Help, It’s 2014 and I’ve Only Just Discovered Xena: Warrior Princess

To all of you who grew up getting a forty-five minute weekly dose of Lucy Lawless crushing men’s skulls with her perfectly sculpted thighs, you have no idea how lucky you are. You, in your starry-eyed youth, were exposed to Xena long before anyone really grasped how bad the sets or the production value were, allowing you to absorb the show’s badassery and high potential for lesbian relationships without distraction. I grew up with non-geek parents who hated television, so my first experience with Xena was just a few weeks ago, as a tangential but awesome adventure on my personal quest for Karl Urban’s fine Kiwi ass.

Carry me away with you, oh 90’s goddess.

For those of you who have forgotten (or have, by some great misfortune, never seen the show at all), Xena: Warrior Princess follows the loosely connected episodic adventures of the title character (played by Lucy Lawless) and her totally-not-girlfriend Gabrielle (played by Renee O’Connor) as they adventure around doing good and fighting evil against canvas scenery backdrops painted by interns. Apparently Xena killed a lot of people and destroyed a bunch of stuff at some point and is on a quest for atonement. Many episodes are based loosely on Greek mythology, but some other artistically interpreted cultural influences show up as well.

Top 5 Female Villains from Geek TV Shows

For your Halloween pleasure, I am providing my Top 5 most terrifying female villains in geek TV shows. These are the women who you would not want to meet in a dark alley or in a brightly lit park, because no matter what, they’ll probably fucking kill you and laugh while they do it. Why only five? Well, sadly there aren’t as many female villains as there are male ones, especially in TV shows, and more often than not, they are shown to be just vain and petty rather than pure terrifying evil. For this list I chose ladies who seem to legitimately enjoy being evil and show little to no remorse for their actions. This does not necessarily mean that they have less depth or are less interesting; they are just the female characters you love to hate. I am also only sticking to one villainess per TV show. So with that in mind, let’s begin!

Trigger warnings for mentions of rape, torture, and abuse after the jump.

Magical Mondays: Magical Beings and Their Relationships with Animals

Recently, I was reliving my childhood by watching Xena: Warrior Princess, and while I was watching Xena try to broker peace between the centaurs and the Amazons, I was struck by a curious thought: How do centaurs feel about horses? Do magical beings who are mostly human but have physical characteristics similar to certain animals feel differently about how those specific animals are treated?

Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom (10 Canon/10 Fanon): 2014 Edition

This Valentine’s Day, as all Valentine’s Days, will not succeed in bringing our city down. This Valentine’s Day, as all Valentine’s Days, will soon recede into painful memory, fading with time, until another foul Valentine’s Day is upon us again.

—Welcome to Night Vale, “Valentine”

It’s that time of year again, nerd friends. That awful time of year known as Valentine’s Day. Once a year, before Valentine’s Day, our authors nominate and then vote on ships for our Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom (10 Canon/10 Fanon) list. It is during this time that the LGG&F writers go from peaceful coexistence straight into full-blown anarchy as each writer battles for their favorite ships to make the list.

So now, blood-stained and bruised, it is my job as Supreme Overlord of LGG&F to bring you this year’s Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom.

If There Are No Lesbians Then I Don’t Care

I have noticed an upsetting trend recently. No one seems to care about queer ladies being represented in the media. Seems that any time a show announces that they will be including gay characters, or any time someone critiques a show for not having gay characters, more often than not those characters tend to be male. Gay men, despite also not having much representation on television, seem to at least currently hold the market on representation. Why is that? According to GlAAD’s most recent Where Are We On TV Report, there are fifty LGBTQ+ characters on broadcast TV. 61% of those characters are gay men, while only 20% are lesbians, though there are more bisexual women (14%) than bisexual men (4%) on broadcast TV. And of course only one of those characters is a transgender woman. Thank you, Elementary! 

I think the lack of queer female characters largely has to do with with how society has sexualized queer women. When I was younger, I remember hearing that queer men are less accepted in society because straight men are uncomfortable with queer men, but queer women are more accepted because straight men find them attractive. Yep, that’s right, there is this misconception that because queer women have been heterosexualized and fetishized, they are somehow more empowered than queer men. If that’s empowerment, then sorry, I don’t want it.

So you know the stats, but how many queer female characters are there in our geek wheelhouse? This is including both cable and broadcast TV shows.

Oh, My Pop Culture Pantheon: Syncretism in Pop Culture

We have talked before about shows like Supernatural blending religions together in a way that usually ends up being incredibly offensive to any religion that isn’t Christianity. In Supernatural, the most notable episode depicting this poor blending of religions is “Hammer of the Gods.” In this episode, all the gods from every other religion are not only shown as being less powerful than the Christian God, but also less powerful than even the Christian angels. At the end of the episode, viewers are treated to Lucifer murdering all the other gods. This blending and combining of often dissimilar beliefs into one belief is called syncretism. When shows like Supernatural attempt to blend religions together, they are attempting syncretism, though the writers don’t often do it well.

Syncretism mainly happens in three different ways. In the case of religion, it can be used to recognize your own beliefs and hold them to be true while still recognizing another person’s beliefs to be true. In the ancient world, this was shown in the way that each city and/or country believed in and worshiped its own god(s), but another country could have their own god(s). The people of each country were devoted to their own gods, but they still believed that other countries’ gods existed. It was often believed that if two countries went to war, their gods would fight each other to prove which country was more powerful. In fact, followers of ancient Judaism did not believe their God was the only god until about five hundred years before Jesus was born. This use of syncretism allowed people to keep believing in their own gods while still accepting that others may be devoted to different, but no less real, gods—though ancient people also often believed their god was better than another person’s. So although different people were allowed to believe in different gods, this was not a harmonious system as the various gods and beliefs were often in conflict with each other for supremacy.

The second form of syncretism is the fusion of religions. This is best shown in the spread of Christianity throughout Europe. Christians combined their own beliefs with the beliefs of pagans in order to make Christianity and paganism more compatible and attractive to converts, but also to eventually erase paganism. Christians put holidays like Christmas and Easter during the same times as holidays like Yule and the Spring Equinox. All Saints Day notably almost replaced All Hallows Eve (Halloween) in Europe for a time. Catholic and Orthodox saints were used to replace many pagan pantheons as well. Obviously, Christians didn’t entirely erase paganism by doing this, but after years of syncretism in certain areas, pagan beliefs began to fade away and were replaced by Christianity.

And finally there is the syncretism that is employed by many Wiccans, Pagans, and Neo-Pagans. While some pagans are devoted to one particular pantheon, some believe that all gods and goddesses are different aspects of the God and Goddess. This is more harmonious than the first form of syncretism that I described, because it does not put all the gods in conflict with each other and allows for an easier blending of beliefs. There are also religious pluralists who believe that all religions have some element of the truth, but not the whole truth. In this way, they believe similarly that all gods reflect something of the true god(s).

So what does this have to do pop culture? Well, like in Supernatural, many TV shows, movies, books, and other forms of pop culture try to write about religion by using syncretism, but they don’t really do it right. But boy, do they try.