I love that Xena has all different religions and beliefs and even when Xena knows hers is true, she doesn’t deny others their religion. (Which, in fact, they are all valid within the Xena-verse)
I love that Xena has different types of love, family, and friendship and never says that one kind is more valuable then another.
I love that Xena is shown to be inhumanly strong even though she is, in fact, mortal. So many shows have men doing impossible stunts- to have one with a female doing the same is wonderful.
I love that Xena has all different types of people with all different kinds of strengths, from physical to intelligence, and even a kind heart. Each one is important and all of them worthy of being a “hero”.
I love that Xena is a redemption story. I love that things come up from her past and she still stands up for what’s right. That she doesn’t run or hide or make excuses.
I love that Xena is a super tough fighter but she knows how to do things like embroidery as well. As the warrior princess herself says, she has many skills.
I love that Xena is in charge of her own sexuality. That Gabrielle is considered sweet and innocent, but having sex doesn’t suddenly “steal” that innocence away from her.
There is just so much to love about this show. It has it’s flaws, sure, but it does so much right.
She tries to take back her families business only to find that it’s been taken over by a cult of Evil Cowboys
are you kidding i’d watch the fuck out of this
Her love interest is an Actual Cowboy from the Old West who was the greatest gunslinger of their age and who won countless duels, but they still aren’t as good at it as she is because of Reasons
Reason being she has the Guns of Pecos Bill.
*internal screams of joy*
Do not do this to me my husband is a historical reenactor and weapon historian I know so much about this shit.
My brain is over flowing. Like like i love and hate the idea of it being Pecos Bill because on one hand I can think of 4 real humans I would want it to be and on the other Pecos Bill is BRILLIANT because he is a myth and tweeking things are less likely to hurt historians in their souls.
Also if it’s Pecos Bill she would also have his lasso.
You guys. Don’t do this to me.
The Lasso is too OP and you know it!
As someone who knows very little about the Wild Wild West other than that it was the inspiration for a terrible Will Smith film, I am curious to know more about this because I do not know who Pecos Bill is or about his guns/lasso
Pecos Bill is an American folklore hero in the same vein as Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. Among his feats included being raised by coyotes, using a pet rattlesnake for a lasso, using said sneklasso to wrangle a tornado, and snacking on dynamite. He fell in love with a woman he met while she was riding a giant catfish down the Rio Grande, but his horse got jealous and sabotaged the relationship.
In other words, he’s the perfect legendary figure for Quickdraw (as I now dub our Asian reverse Iron Fist) to inherit her powers from
*shrieks happily* Yes yes yes I need this.
Quickdraw feels kinda generic for a super hero name. I’d say using the naming conventions of Iron Fist I’d name her something like the Raging Gun.
Iron Six.
Can refer to the six shots on a revolver, her having six guns (each with their own name, naturally*), or her nearly-supernatural abilities to follow her enemies and show up behind them (”on their six.”)
Pecos Bill might be an old man or even a myth-spirit in the way of Discworld gods (dependent on belief, fading away without it), the elderly mentor who devotes himself to training a hero/chosen one/heir to be better than he ever was. She can represent the future of the art while the old white guy represents the past, as an inversion of both many martial arts movies and many westerns where Asian and Native American characters, respectively, pass their torches to the white dude.
*The guns are named things like Golden Sunset and Deep Canyon and Silence After Battle, poetically referencing both the vibrant geography of the Old West and the weapon’s function of ending lives.
This got better
Did you mean
I need to look this up immediately.
This is empirically better than Iron Fist (though that’s not a high bar)
K, the younger ladies are awesome but the older ladies absolutely steal the hell outta this show. (PS Nice to see the uniforms and decorations aren’t completely off the wall)
seriously though the life of Ada Lovelace is some next level Mary Sue bullshit
oooh I’m the daughter of Lord Byron, I’m a countess, I get Dickens to come to my house to read me bed time stories in person, I’m learning mathematics from De Morgan, I know calculus, I take tea with Charles Darwin, I’m the world’s first computer programmer, I display a depth of understanding that won’t be reached in the software industry for another hundred years, la de fucking da
lady, chill
Hi my name is Ada King-Noel Byron Lovelace and I have long brown hair with natural ringlets and dark eyes and a lot of people tell me I look like Queen Victoria (AN: if you don’t know who she is then get da hell out of the empire!). I am related to Lord Byron but I wish I wasn’t because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a countess but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a mathematician, and I have a special tutor named Mary Somerville (I am seventeen). I’m a genius (in case you couldn’t tell) and I associate with famous intellectuals. For example today I was meeting Dickens for tea, arguing with Babbage, and having dinner with Darwin. I was walking outside Ockham Park. It was dry and there was no rain, which my Difference Engine was very happy about. A lot of proper Victorian housewives stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.
So whenever i would watch movies and see The Badass Female Character fighting in various ways, something about it always bugged me. I just assumed it was internalized misogyny that made me dislike characters like black widow and Tauriel and tried to make myself like them.
Then I was rewatching Mad Max Fury Road the other day and I noticed that nothing bothered me about watching Furiosa fight and I realized the problem wasn’t watching women fight in movies that got on my nerves.
Watching the stereotypical Badass Female Character she always has these effortless moves and a cocky, sexy smirk on her face as everything is easy. Watching Furiosa, she grunted and bared her teeth. Her fighting was hard and it took effort and it hurt like fighting is supposed to. For once her fighting style wasn’t supposed to seduce the audience it was to be effective.
I wasn’t disliking these characters because they were women I was disliking that their fighting was meant to remind me they were women. High heels and shapely outfits and not showing effort or discomfort because it’s more attractive to effortlessly lift a long leather clad leg over your head rather than rugby tackle someone.
It’s the same with the Wonder Woman movie too. Fighting is hard and it takes effort, blocking bombs and bullets with a shield makes her grimace and bare her teeth with the effort it takes. She’s not flip kicking bombs she’s yelling and straining, not because she’s weak or bad at fighting but because that’s what it would be like.
I really hope we’re moving into an era of women having fighting styles designed for realism and not how hot it looks for the men in the audience.
I’ve taken martial arts most of my life, and the way women fight in action movies has always bothered me. They overreach; they swivel too much; and their hair is always down. For a long time I wondered whether this was an effect of stage choreography. As a kid I briefly wondered (with horror) whether that was what women just looked like when they used martial arts. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels short, sharp, and forceful. You stay grounded. You control the distance between you and your opponent so you don’t have to lean way out. It’s practical, not pretty.
But then I finally (only recently!) saw a couple of examples of Action Women who looked like they actually knew how to fight, and it has healed me.
my fave greek history story to tell is that of agnodice. like she noticed that women were dying a lot during childbirth so she went to egypt to study medicine in alexandria and was really fucking good but b/c it was illegal for women to be doctors in athens she had to pretend to be a man. and then the other doctors noticed that she was 10x better than them and accused her of seducing and sleeping with the women patients. like they brought her to court for this. and she just looked at them and these charges and stripped in front of everyone like “yeah. im not fucking your wives” and then they got so mad that a woman was better at their jobs then them that they tried to execute her but all her patients came to court and were like “are you fucking serious? she is the reason you have living children and a wife.” so they were shamed into changing the law and that is how women were given the right to practice medicine in athens
RandomFandom 