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girl4music · 20 days

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In celebration of XENA DAY I’m going to leave the link to this podcast episode that the She Nerds Out hosts did with Steven L. Sears right here and transcribe some of it for you that I find the most fascinating and validating in regards to how the TV show and TV ship inform and influence each other in that the story arc/plot/narrative always wraps around the characters of Xena and Gabrielle instead of the other way around.

The way Steven (yes, a straight white middle aged man) talks about Xena and Gabrielle is remarkable to me. He has such respect and reverence and just absolute sincerity when he talks about them both as individual characters and as a relationship dynamic that is primarily and predominantly romantic in his eyes. He confirms exactly why I will always highly praise the creators/cast/crew for what they did with this TV show and this TV ship and the timelessly magical experience it has on me and I know always will have on me. I can't believe that I actually had a personal conversation with this man for over an hour because I feel like he is a kindred spirit of sorts to me. At least as far as my interest and passion for TV art/entertainment goes. The way I know and understand the characters on a much deeper level than the show itself could ever really represent them to and for me.

You’ve just got to love how Steven automatically and intentionally wrote Gabrielle as a comphet lesbian. And I resonate so strongly with his words about her story arc and her journey in terms of how it applies to Gabrielle’s love for and initial fear of loving Xena the way she thinks - at the time - she’s only supposed to love men. Of course she’s constantly “running home to mama” because that’s where she knows herself best even if she’s always felt too queer to be mama’s little girl. And there is that very quietly played theme with her where she’s constantly struggling with that internally which is so brilliantly communicated in both Steven’s writing and Renee’s nuanced portrayal of Gabrielle’s character. And that is exactly what a “comphet lesbian” is. It’s someone that habitually runs home even when they know they don’t belong there because it’s safer or more familiar for them than stepping into the dangerous unknown even when it feels so much more welcoming than home ever did.

‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ is a queer story from the get go. Episode 1 is very queer storytelling actually in the way that these 2 protagonist female characters meet each other and become family to one another. It’s “I feel like a stranger in my own home but I just met you and you seem to feel the same way as me - let’s just stop being strangers and be a home to each other.”

I would really recommend listening to the whole podcast episode because the whole thing is just amazingly in-depth and insightful but if you can’t do that please enjoy these transcriptions of what I think are the best parts of it that explain so much about where the creators/cast/crew’s minds were at VS where the network/studio/executive’s mind’s were at because it’s important to be aware that they were not queerbaiting or pandering or exploiting LGBTQ fans which many show’s creative teams and their network/streaming service platforms still do with their lead same-sex characters instead of take them seriously.

As I said - most of the creators/cast/crew agreed with the fans and even viewed the TV show as a love story between the 2 lead characters themselves. Especially the big names. Steven is a great example of that fact. And if they were just “fan-servicing”, then they were serving themselves just as much because they wanted canon Xena and Gabrielle just as much as the fans did. They may never have initially saw them that way but they clearly knew that it was the natural progression for them so they didn’t dispute it. They embraced it.

STEVEN: “One of the things we discussed at the beginning was a flaw that you find in a lot of TV shows that have 2 leads. Generally, 1 is the lead who has the name on the banner and the other one is the ‘sidekick’. And I remember saying - not as an ultimatum, I just casually mentioned it in the meeting - I said ‘I don’t believe in sidekicks. Sidekicks are the props that you kill off at the end of the first season so that people will tune in the next season. They’re kind of useless and they just exist.’ And everybody agreed with that and we did not want to get to the point where Gabrielle was just standing in the background going ‘Get him Xena! Get him Xena! Get him Xena!’ And I remember we angst during the baby tossing episode ‘cause that’s all she did. She participated by grabbing the baby but she literally was acting ‘Get him Xena! Get him Xena!’ And so we decided that Gabrielle had to have a solid progression that was not just a convenience for us. In other words we didn’t want to do this just because ‘well, we don’t want her to be a sidekick so we’re going to pretend like she’s important.’ We felt she had to be. And so obviously the relationship between the 2 characters folded in with that perfectly. So this was one of the episodes (‘The Greater Good’) where I said - I kind of posed the question in my mind - I thought ‘what if Gabrielle was the Xena of this episode?’ Which, obviously, is what came out of it.”

HOST: “Speaking of that episode though,… that’s one of the most iconic episodes of the show. Definitely of that first season if not of the show generally. So when you say that building up [Gabrielle’s] character and making her more important to the story and finding that through the relationship - was their relationship sort of just natural or was that something that you guys were like ‘yeah, no, this has to be a huge part of what the show is now.’”

STEVEN: “There’s no yes and no for any of that so… the thing is that every TV show - unless it’s adapted from a novel or unless you actually chart out 5 seasons right at the beginning - which a lot of TV series now are doing because of the way that we stream. They’re basically novels - at a certain point as you begin to develop it, it takes on its own life. With everybody’s contributions the characters become real and just as all of you are real, I could write stories that you could do, but you will live those stories differently. Even if you do them together, you’re going to live them individually. So when we started out the series we were looking for having a successful series. We wanted to have fun - everybody in this business wants to have fun - and we wanted to get another season. But, in the way that I write - and fortunately in this particular group we all had the same mindset - we don’t believe in doing action for the sake of action. We don’t believe in doing comedy for the sake of comedy. We don’t believe in doing anything that’s not rooted in character first. So when we started the series I had made a comment about their relationship. I actually said ‘we’re going to have a very large gay/lesbian following’ and some of the people in the office were like ‘why would you think that?’ and I said ‘well,… my first show was 3 guys on a boat.’ And back then you didn’t have the internet for fanfiction but there were news magazines that went out that fans would put together. Fanzines. And - of course - I subscribed to 1 4 Riptide and almost all the fanzines dealt with their relationships with how they regarded each other. On every level. Romantic levels and just on brotherly levels or anything like that… but their relationships were a lot closer. So what I realized with all the subsequent series that I was doing - every time there were 2 leads of the same gender, this type of fanfiction was out there. Now as a backstory, I come out of theatre. I’ve been doing theatre since I was 12 years old. So being around the LGBTQ community was just… Tuesday, you know? So, for me, as I kind of explained this, I said ‘any time a dispossessed group of our society finds validation in any of our media - they grab it. Because they’re not given it, they have to grab it.’ And I said ‘so, you know, it’s going to happen.’ And thank god nobody went ‘oh, we have to avoid that’ or ‘we have to stay away from that’. Okay? Nobody in the room … So what we just figured was like we’re just going to let these characters evolve the way they evolve. And anybody looking at these characters and the way they came together and the adventures they were going on - I mean in retrospect,… was it really a surprise that they would have this incredibly close bond as they went forward? I mean however you ship it, it doesn’t matter. That bond had to happen or Gabrielle would have been totally unnecessary. We would have gotten rid of her. She would have been an annoyance. As opposed to us embracing the annoying aspect at the beginning and then allowing the audience to watch this incredible growth that she never would have had without meeting Xena and the incredible growth that Xena had that she would never have had if she hadn’t met Gabrielle. I’ve always said ‘Sins Of The Past’ was a suicide episode. Xena was trying to kill herself. She had nothing left. When she buried her weapons she was saying ‘I’m leaving myself open to the next warlord to kill me’ and then she hears the noise in the distance and she goes over there and she sees this young girl standing up against warlords and there’s a part of her that says ‘I was like that. That was me. What happened?’”

STEVEN: “I will say though that as the show became more popular the studio backed off on a lot of things with us because we were doing well and they trusted us. I want to look at it that way anyway. The President of Universal Television during that time was a guy named Dan Philly and I knew Dan since I started. He was actually one of the studio executives from NBC for Riptide. So I knew him from back then. Really cool guy. Awesome guy. And he was like ‘look, you know if this is working, people are happy, you seem to be walking that line…’ - which I always snickered at - it’s ‘cause ‘yeah, cause we’re NOT walking that line’ - he said ‘just go for it.’ And he was also one of the old style studio executives where if they wanted something they would trust you. They would turn to you and they would say ‘can you have a little more titillation? ‘Cause we like that. That helps. Give us more titillation.’ But they wouldn’t tell us to do it. They wouldn’t say ‘this is how you do it.’ They wouldn’t say ‘redesign their costumes so that their boobs pop out.’ They would just leave it to us. And so we would say ‘oh, this scene where they’re in the tavern talking about these really intense things that are going on in their life - we’ll put it in a hot tub!’ And that actually is how the hot tub tradition began because we thought ‘well, that makes it titillating’ and yet… we used it for the story and… it actually is kind of a bonding thing… ‘so put it in there.’ They’re watching the dailies and you hear [Lucy] say ‘where’s the soap?’ and we go ‘do we leave that in?’ ‘Yeah, we’ll leave that one in.’”

HOST: “As far as from the fan side of it, I don’t remember when the term ‘subtext’ started to become a word that the fans threw around and it obviously has become it’s own thing: the subtext of the show. But it sounds to me like it was just very organic for you guys. But when did you start to hear of the fans - LGBTQ+ specifically - latching on to what we would call ‘the subtext of the show.’ Was there like any kind of feedback you were getting? Were you then more inclined to kind of give us a little more like ‘wink wink, nudge nudge’ moments like the hot tub? Were you receptive to what the fans were asking for?”

STEVEN: “Yes and no. With the internet obviously we had direct access to the fans and we always made it a rule that we were not going to follow where the fans wanted us to go. We hoped that they would follow with us. But at the same time we kind of adapted things. I remember - because of my geeky nature - I was the one who was online first. I was really into that. I was the one who found the first AOL chatroom that Laura, a little 14 year old girl had set up for Xena. So I was listening in. And for those of you who remember back then, I never hid who I was. I wasn’t a lurker. I would go in and I would say ‘this is who I am’ not because I wanted everybody to go ‘ooo’ but I would say ‘talk freely.’ I said ‘I will leave the room if 1 of 2 things happen: if 1. you start talking about episodes you want to see because I can’t ethically listen to that or 2. if I become the centre of conversation ‘cause that’s not the point.’ I said ‘if I do that, don’t take offence, that’s just my own little ethics.�� But I was able to listen in. And so I do remember that at the beginning of this I told Rob this was going on and he said something to the effect of ‘yeah, well, it’s good they’re talking about the show but, you know, we don’t really care what they’re saying there, we’ve got to keep focused.’ I’m like ‘okay.’ And like an episode would come back and he would come out and come into my office and he’d say ‘so umm,… what do the fans think?’ And again, I was kind of looking for this because of my background so I was a little more aware of what was happening. The early discussions among the fans of where this was going was extremely interesting to me and I tried my best not to get involved in it because I wanted everybody to interpret it the way that they wanted to. I’m always amazed by the Xena fandom. I’ve been on other shows that have fandom and certainly a lot of my friends have huge fanbases on their shows, and I’ve said this when I’ve been on podcasts for other shows: the Xena fandom is the most incredible fandom that I’ve ever been involved with for a number of reasons. And one of them is that at the beginning - keeping in mind this was obviously in the middle 90’s - there was still some contentiousness as if people were trying to protect the girls from being lesbian. It’s like ‘we have to protect them, don’t say that!’ ‘Oh, okay, good, you’re going to protect me from what? Being a straight white male. Oh, thank you very much.’ So it was a little bit of that going on and there was some fire that went back and forth. I remember a few of the transcripts that were just so amazing. I kind of kept track of them. And what I started to see though with the Xena fans - which I loved - is that the people who wanted to maintain their shipper stance became friends. They began talking about it with respect to each other as opposed to ‘no, you’re that camp, I’m this camp’ and then the major contention was ‘do we ship Xena with Ares?’ And I’m like ‘okay, so what you’ve done is you’ve defaulted to the idea that she’s already with Gabrielle and now you’re just talking about a jealousy thing.’ And I’m like ‘that’s totally cool. I love that!’”

So the characters evolved. Now had they evolved in a different direction, well, we’d be having a different conversation here. Going back to the studio, one of the things that did come up was the studio did say ‘can you somehow remind people that, you know, Xena still likes guys and Gabrielle still likes guys.’ But they never said that they can’t like each other. And I’m thinking to myself ‘okay, what you’ve described to me is either the ultimate bisexual or what you’ve described to me is’ - and I don’t have a word for this ‘cause, you know, straight white male, how would I know this? - ‘is many of my friends who are a lesbian but denied that identification and fought themselves, and then finally came out - liberated themselves.’ So I said ‘you’re kind of describing that.’ And I remember thinking to myself ‘and that’s going to be Gabrielle.’ That she’s going to fight a lot of this internally. And so, you know, when we got to the Perdicus episode - with the marriage … you know we all get together and we would talk about how we’re going to put it together and some of us would come up with little things that go into somebody else’s script and it’s always the original writer that really is the owner of the script, but we always contribute things. And I remember we got to that thing and I’m like ‘okay, I know where I’m leaning on this’ and I’m going to lean into the curve on this one because what’s happening with Gabrielle is that she’s gone this far with Xena and suddenly this reminder of what her hidden past was - what her past was when she - well… you could say ‘denied’ - there’s a time where - this is difficult for me because I’m not a gay woman so I can’t speak with authority from this. I can only say I’ve had friends that have gone through this - where their coming out process is so scary that sometimes they - what I call - ‘run home to mama.’ And mama is where they were - at least they could deal with it - it was familiar enough. So when Perdicus comes in,… she’s questioning a lot of things and she thinks ‘okay, and now I’m questioning where I am and why I’m here,… so I’m running home to mama because Perdicus represents my childhood, my past, my village.’ And that scene where Gabrielle and Xena have that discussion before Gabrielle goes off to marry Perdicus - again, I always remind myself I’m NOT that orientation, I’m NOT that gender, I’m NOT that - but that scene still sticks in my mind because it broke my heart because she’s looking right at the woman who is her destiny and she’s saying ‘I’m so scared of you because of what you’re going to reveal about me and so I’m going to run away to something I should never have been apart of.’ And I’ve seen people go through that so that scene still sticks in my mind. It’s literally in my mind. I see the entire image of that scene.”

HOST: “When you say that - obviously you’re not a gay woman but you know humans and you know people and at the end of the day those characters were very human and - I hate to say it, love is love - it’s very cliché, but it is, right? Of course, why wouldn’t you understand what those 2 character’s are feeling … Because you’re a human being who understands the concept of love. But I love what you said. It’s like, yeah, of course, Gabrielle knew what being married to Perdicus living in her old village would be like. Like you said - she could endure that. She’d been there. She understood it. If she stayed with Xena, it’s scary, it’s the unknown and it’s that great inner conflict in her. I hadn’t really thought about it but that scene is very heartbreaking and it’s got to be one of my favourites.”

STEVEN: “When she left the village that little girl was looking at adventure because she was bored. She had no idea what she was getting into on every level. Not just the action level, the adventure level, the danger level - but the emotional level. She had no idea. So then she got to a point where that all scared her. She was more scared of that than she was about the adventure and the danger. Warlords did not scare her the way that this scared her. And, you know, it was a huge turning point. Now whether you ship one way or the other way on this, it still works because she had to find her destiny. And I also make a little distinction in my mind that Gabrielle’s destiny was not to be with Xena. Gabrielle’s destiny was to be with herself and to love who she chose to love. It was to find her happiness and BOOM… it walks into her life. And that is the scariest thing that can happen to a person and it’s hard to admit it. So I’ve often described the relationship at the beginning as: because Xena was much more experienced Xena was much more focused on what she had won and lost in her life and she had a lot of repair work to do in her life. Gabrielle had a lot of growing to do. So when Xena and Gabrielle came together, I made this distinction: I said that Gabrielle loved Xena ‘cause ‘AWESOME! XENA! The legends, the things I’ve heard about you!’

So Gabrielle loved Xena… but Xena was IN LOVE with Gabrielle… from the moment they met.”

#xena warrior princess #celebration of #xena day #xena and gabrielle #xabrielle #xena #lucy lawless #gabrielle #renee o'connor #steven l. sears #podcast #she nerds out #transcription of the audio #wlw representation #queer representation

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