Do you ever just cry because of Gabrielle’s character arc? She started out so naïve and wide-eyed, saying that she wanted to grow up to be just like Xena. And while her admiration for Xena never diminished her understanding of what it meant to be Xena - to be a warrior like her.
The more Gabrielle traveled, the more she saw, the more she fought, the more she realized that Xena’s heroism was not without a price.
Fighting changed things, killing changed everything, and living on the battlefront sometimes necessitated terrible impossible choices.
After a while the prospect of giving up so many of her original ideals scared Gabrielle, so she ran away. Tried to give up the fighting and killing. Tried to walk a path of love and peace. But then there was always Xena.
Xena who Gabrielle couldn’t forsake even if she wanted to forsake the path that following Xena had set her on. Gabrielle couldn’t leave Xena’s side, even though she knew that anyone who traveled with Xena had to fight.
It came down to another impossible choice, so Gabrielle chose Xena and never looked back.
It was following that path, which Gabrielle called friendship, that led to the fulfillment of Gabrielle’s original wish - that she grow up to be just like Xena. To be a warrior like her. Year after year, season after season, Gabrielle gave up more and more and increasingly became a warrior.
That’s why the end of the show is so haunting - Gabrielle gets exactly what she wanted from the start, but ultimately it isn’t what she wants anymore at all. She is as capable as Xena, as skilled and even as ruthless and unflinching as her.
And, yet, all she could want in the world is to go back to being that naïve and wide-eyed little girl that Xena found in Potiedaea. The one Xena fell in love with all those years ago. It’s a shocking reversal and one that is so carefully wrought over so many years.
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