XENA fans: would the show have been better if the X/G relationship had been explicitly sexual?

I only saw that show once, so I voted Yes. Yes because, ahem, that show was so unbelievable bad, like watching a 70s Saturday morning kid’s show, almost as bad as those stupid monster TV movies The SyFy Channel makes, that the only reason it should have existed was as an excuse to show softcore porn. :smiley:

Dude. A lesbian four-way. That would be so HAWT!!!

A female lemon party!

Xena was kind of hit and miss with the level of acting and relative “goodness” of the episodes. Some were bad and campy, some funny others just fun adventure and quite a few were deadly serious and emotionally heartbreaking.

Apropos of nothing, here’s “Callisto,” a filksong by Tom Smith.

Skald, am I correct in understanding that your question is not about whether we think the show would have been better if it had included X/G sex scenes, but rather whether we think the show would have been better if it had been made totally clear by any means (possibly just dialogue) that the characters did have sex?

Oh, and are you asking whether we think it should have been made clear that they were a monogamous sexual couple and/or had sex on a regular basis, or just whether we think it should have been made clear that they’d had sex on at least one occasion?

As for the former, by the end of the series I think it was pretty clear that Xena and Gabrielle were meant to be understood as having a serious romantic relationship. There was even an episode where, no joke, Xena reads an actual love poem by Sappho to Gabrielle. What’s more, within the context of the show this poem is presented as being one that Xena commissioned as a gift for Gabrielle. So on the one hand I consider that a very obvious indication that they were a romantic couple, but I guess it’s not a totally unambiguous sign that they had ever had sex. There’s still a teensy bit of wiggle room where someone might watch the scene and think “How touching that they’re such good friends.”

As for the latter, Gabrielle was said to be a virgin in the first season episode “The Titans”. She accidentally wakes the sleeping Titans by reading a magic spell, and apparently only a virgin could do this. The Titans keep referring to her as a virgin, and she gets embarrassed and tells them this is personal information. This was early in the first season (episode 7 of 24 that season), so I don’t think there were a lot of subtexters at that point. Some viewers probably had ideas from the very first episode (Gabrielle does want to run away from an arranged marriage, and even says she can never be the kind of girl her parents want her to be!), but I don’t think there were deliberate hints on the part of the writers until a little later. In episode 19, “Altared States”, there’s a scene that looks like it’s going to be an X/G sex scene but isn’t.

Anyway, by season three a priestess of the goddess Hestia is shocked to hear that Gabrielle isn’t a virgin. Gabrielle says that she was married when she lost her virginity (she was briefly married to a man during season two; Callisto killed him). However, she also indicates that she’d find it difficult to give up sex to become a priestess so her sex life presumably didn’t end when her husband died. It’s not clear who, other than Xena, Gabrielle could have been having sex with since then, but they don’t actually tell the priestess that this is the case. So again there’s a teensy bit of ambiguity where the viewer might assume that Gabrielle has been occasionally hooking up with guys they meet on the road or has a “friends with benefits” arrangement with Iolaus or something.

There’s also room to wonder what the characters meant by “virginity”. Traditionally, and to an extent even today, a woman could be considered a virgin if her hymen was intact and/or if a penis had never been in her vagina. So it’s possible that X&G were having all kinds of sexy fun together but that Gabrielle was still a “technical virgin” prior to her marriage.

Well, which is better: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, or 1988’s Akira?

While it might not have been that extreme, a more explicit X/G relationship would have made Xena different, perhaps even too different to directly compare.

On the other hand…y’know, lesbian sex. I believe I’m legally required to claim that that improves anything it’s added to.

Joxer, size 8 1/2 inches- as Vonnegut said, you never know who’s gonna get one.

I think that they took it as far as was possible for the time, and went further than most would have expected. And it’s not like the show was overly torrid with the heterosexual pairings. And it’s not like it wasn’t self aware…

Not to blab, but it wasn’t Iolaus.

Joxer would be the most obvious candidate for a “friends with benefits” relationship, if only because he was always hanging around, but his behavior makes it clear he never got far with Gabrielle.

That said, for such a doofus he did pretty well for himself. He eventually married Xena-lookalike Meg, and before that seemed popular with the ladies of negotiable virtue at Meg’s “tavern”.

Sounds like the King of Thieves is trying to drop a really big hint here!

Apart from the obvious joke, why shouldn’t it have been Iolaus?

Imho, the relationship added or detracted nothing from or to the show. To me, it was an action-comedy show spinoff of the Hercules (Kevin Sorbo) franchise. I watched both for the fighting. The comedy was hit or miss (which I also categorize the subtexts.)

Sadly, it was the death-knell for serious action TV shows like Marshall Law, Highlander, Mortal Kombat: The Series, etc. and new shows started leaning on the comedy, not the action, which lead to the dreck we have today.

And speaking of Kevin Sorbo, I do believe if Dylan Hunt and Tyr had a nice understanding on the Andromeda (as CLEARLY was a possibility if you read in between the lines)…I do believe I would need a new pair of panties a week.

I seem to remember an interview were Lawless explicitly stated that the writers had chosen to keep it ambiguous, and that she did not see them as more than friends. She considered them more like heterosexual life partners.

I think they had the perfect balance, where people who were homophobes (sadly including me at the time) wouldn’t notice, or could fanwank wgat they did.

Anyways, since I’ve already given you one TVTropes link, I might as well link you their page on the show. I think they do a pretty good job of explaining this in the appropriate tropes.

Xena liked men. Early on, there was a romance between her and Hercules. She had other male lovers during the series.

Was she bi-sexual? They never showed her muff diving. I guess what her and G did in the woods stayed in the woods. :wink:

Not exactly. Throughout the run of the show Lawless and others involved with the series said it was deliberately ambiguous, and that viewers could decide for themselves what exactly the nature of X&G’s relationship was. I don’t believe Lawless ever said she considered them to be heterosexual, and I suspect she’d have been discouraged from saying so publicly even if she did think that.

After the series ended she did say that the finale made it clear to her that X&G were essentially a married couple and that there was no longer room left to think that they were just good friends or that they fooled around sometimes but weren’t really serious about each other romantically. This interview doesn’t seem to be online anymore in its full form, but it’s quoted in the Wikipedia article on the show.

I’m the son of Hermes, grandfather of Odysseus, and taught Hercules how to wrestle. Don’t let the mustache and razor-sharp wit fool you; Iolaus ain’t got shit on me. Besides, rumor has it he’s gay.

Cite:

Do you mean syndicated action shows? Because Jack Bauer would respectfully disagree that there’s no action left on TV.