Xena is full of straight white middle aged cis men.
And yet they fucking NAILED both female representation and WLW representation.
They got it so right even if they didn’t realize they did.
Maybe that’s the key. To not realize it but desire it. To accidentally manifest it just by being real queer allies.
So many people say “it’s because they had Liz Friedman as a producer” but it really isn’t. I mean she contributed a lot but she wasn’t the one rallying for it.
You don’t necessarily need a writers room full of queers.
Just people that understand and respect queer stories.
Because I really have seen some absolutely horrid ones from queer people that couldn’t write worth a damn.
Didn’t know how to apply the representation to the storytelling and ended up with forced diversity crap.
I stay well away from queer TV show creators like that because even if they are queer, they’re shite at writing and providing queer stories. They focus far too much on the representation and not enough on the storytelling with that representation. Xena never had that problem because the queer characters were the lead characters.
Xena is probably the most genuinely extremely well-written queer show because it was never contrived to be queer. There wasn’t any representation anxiety. I think they were more concerned with getting the straight characters stories wrong than the queer ones because they were already on-board with all of that. Even though it was well balanced, you do get to a point in the show where you’re missing the straight stories which is really weird because every other show always makes those stories the most priority. Xena doesn’t.
Xena and Gabrielle are the narrative and they don’t let you forget it. Except maybe one episode which - I… mean those 3 are an absolute hoot together anyway.
It sort of was just a really happy accident that they just collectively decided “You know what? Let’s just go with it and see where it takes us. Just let the characters evolve without inference and see if it works out for us.”
And it did. It worked so well that it’s still beloved now and being discovered and rediscovered by so many.
Almost 30 years later and this TV show is still thriving as far as fandom engagement goes if not financially. The conventions are still going. It’s seriously insane.
And I know they’ll never have anything like it ever again.
That’s how special Xena is as an EPIC WLW love story.
