I Can’t Remember If It Was In Any Of The Extras, But I Desperately Want To Know What Mortals Thought

allen is better than me because if that many people apologized or expressed remorse for trying to kill me and/or fucking me over royally and then continued to try to kill me/fuck me over, I would have a body count. I’d be swinging. all the time.

just started a Xena binge, and every time she launches herself onto Argo, my first though is “ouch”

a pet peeve I have in media is when the writer(s) try to write a strong female character and instead the just write a masculine woman. Of course woman can be masculine and strong (together and separately), but often I don’t feel like they write women who are masculine, they try to write a strong women and they can only conceive masculinity as strength. Also, I’m not sure if I’m phrasing this poorly, but it doesn’t always strike me that they write masculinity in the way a woman (or maybe a genderqueer person, though I haven’t had the pleasure of reading many original media featuring these characters prominently) might experience/express it.

one thing I appreciate about Xena as I’m rewatching it as an adult is that it feels like they’re women who have masculine traits/are masculine. Like, even beyond the fighting aspect, Xena often sits in stereotypically masculine way and takes charge/fulfills roles that are shown to be taken by men within the world they occupy. Additionally, I know that later, Gabrielle is joked to be “father” to Xena’s daughter, but I’m not that far yet, so I don’t know how far that’s taken.

idk, it just feels different to me. If anyone else has input/polite pushback I’d appreciate it/conversation! Or any other pieces of media that do this/explore women’s masculinity/gender expression/afab exploration of masculinity.

demon underling: we found out who’s been raiding the territory! It’s polyamorous Lou Binghe.

demon canon fodder: that little fuck! I want him dead! I want his wife dead! I want his wife dead! I want his wife dead! I want his wife de— *repeats ad nauseum*

allen: what’s with all this “chosen one” bullshit? Chosen by who? Why me??

allen, upon regaining his memories:

allen: son of a bitch

Jiang Cheng: Is there anything you’re actually capable of doing?

Wei Wuxian: Putting up with you.

I think I remember him being better in later episodes, but by god do I hate season one Ares. He gives clingy ex vibes. Or maybe toxic father.

Xena: Gabrielle and I are courting!

Aphrodite: We already knew that?

Gabrielle: But we started courting two days ago?

Aphrodite: What the fuck were you doing before then?

I haven’t read the alma karma arc recently, so I could be entirely off base, but does anyone else think that the second exorcist experiments might have been trying to recreate what happened with past!allen? like I don’t remember if there was a given reason/inspiration beyond “need more soldiers, why not revive old ones,” but the basics seem rather similar to me.

a person is revived after being killed (or as good as) in the body of a child with no concrete memory of who they were before (or so I assume in allen's case but that could have happened later).

injuries are unnaturally healed by using the helix of life—in the second exorcists’ case by taking it from their future/lifespan and for allen using someone else’s life.

I think the timeline might match up, too. I don’t know exactly how old allen starts out as, but we do know that present!lavi is older by like 3 years. I think allen looked between 5-8 (terrible at estimating…), so if we go short, that’s ~8 years for the final result to be revealed to apocryphos. And kanda’s been alive for 9 years chronologically, which would put allen’s age at like 6-7. That seems like adequate time to get weird fantasy sci-fi experiments up and running.

and with the way apocryphos was looking at that light cocoon allen was in, I wouldn’t be surprised if he took some inspiration, one way or another.