Xena Warrior Princess: Tied Up and Locked Down, Crusader, Past Imperfect

Although Xena Warrior Princess peaked in season three, the next three episodes of the fourth season are pretty solid offerings, with knotty moral conundrums, some great scenes between our lead characters, and three significant guest-starring female characters.

Okay, “significant” is a relative term, as two of them are never seen again, and the other only gets one more appearance before she’s permanently written out. Furthermore, the writers take the easy way out when it comes to Thalassa, and though it’s difficult to say why Satrina didn’t pop as a character, the truth is she simply didn’t (it’s rather fascinating actually – on the page she’s intriguing, even compelling – but that just didn’t translate to the screen).

That leaves Najara, who is truly one of the show’s best antagonists, in one of the season’s very best episodes. Played by Kathryn Morris in her pre-Cold Case days, the character is like no one we’ve ever seen on Xena Warrior Princess before: a mentor figure who is in many ways an inversion of Alti, or a distorted reflection of Lao Mai, adding to the roster of complex female characters on the show.

Standing Tall #34

I can’t say this was one of my favourite giraffes, but at least the venue was nice: Mona Vale, an intercity garden park with lots of beautiful lawns and herbaceous borders. Wandering down its pathways and happening across a giraffe beneath a row of trees did make for a nice afternoon.

Called Kea Parrot Stay, it was designed by Alejandra Diaz, a Costa Rican painter who grew up around parrots and as such was inspired to decorate this giraffe with New Zealand’s most famous example of the species: the kea. According to my guidebook, the kea’s skill at solving puzzles and their ability to work together are traits also to be found in Cantabrians, which… is a bit of a thematic stretch, but okay.

A mint-green giraffe with stencil-like pastel images of keas and a few white ferns didn’t make this the most memorable sculpture on display, but as it happens, it’s now been over a decade since the 2011 Christchurch earthquake that claimed 185 lives. This entire art exhibition was brought about in the wake of the disaster as a way of injecting colour and creativity into the city as the rebuild went on, and I’m reminded of the experience of travelling around the city in search of these giraffes: a chance to talk with other seekers, to see places in the city I’d never visited before, to see Christchurch gradually coming back to life… maybe there is something in Cantabrians being compared to keas.  

Woman of the Month: Rei Hino

Rei Hino (火野 レイ) from Sailor Moon

I have slowly but surely been making my way through all the seasons of Sailor Moon, which is no small feat considering there’s about two hundred episodes in all. I was about eleven or twelve when Sailor Moon’s popularity kicked off in New Zealand, heralding the start of the anime industry becoming more mainstream in Western countries, so it’s been a real trip watching it for the first time since childhood.

For many nineties kids, Usagi Tsukino – or Serena, as she was called in the first English dub – was their first taste of super-heroism, made all the more unique thanks to the fact the show was unabashedly for young female viewers. The main character was a fourteen-year-old girl, the supporting cast was comprised of four more girls and a talking cat, and the most important villain was an evil queen.

And of course, there was Tuxedo Mask, a character with no personality beyond being mysterious, romantic and having the ability to throw roses as projectiles. Even as kids we knew it was more than a little insane, but it was still ours; a story that catered to our specific interests and tastes, in which a teenage girl could be a klutz and a dunce, but also a heroine and a princess and a superhero.

And naturally everyone had a favourite Sailor Scout, based on their personality, aesthetic or power-set. And let’s be honest, the coolest one in all those departments was Rei Hino. While Usagi was throwing her tiara like a frisbee or Ami was spraying bubbles over everything, Rei was blasting fireballs from her fingertips, generating burning mandalas, or unleashing a literal firebird on her enemies. And she did it all in red high-heels.  

She was the most spiritual of all the girls, working as a shrine maiden at the local Shinto temple, which provides an interesting contrast to her fiery nature. With innate psychic abilities, she’s able to perform fire readings, and utilizes ofuda scrolls, mundras and chanting to dispel evil spirits. Such things require a level of calm and mental clarity, which is somewhat at odds with her ongoing rivalry and incessant teasing of Usagi.

And as befits her planetary alignment, she’s the most war-like of all the Sailor Scouts, perhaps only second to Sailor Jupiter (who generates lightning) when it comes to the raw power she commands. Whenever the girls are up against a particularly dangerous foe, she’s usually the last one left standing.

Which is very much the crux of the show in its entirety: girls standing up and fighting for their ideals without getting a hair out of place. Decades before fandom was writing essay-length manifestos about the importance of Mary Sues and wish fulfilment and power fantasies to young girls, Sailor Moon was serving all of it to a receptive audience. In high heels.

Reading/Watching Log #83

It’s October, which meant I dropped most of the stuff I was watching in September and veered into witchy, creepy, ghostly, spooky material as befits the Halloween season (even though we’re heading into summer in the southern hemisphere).

This included the first season of the rebooted Charmed (which was recently cancelled after the actress playing the eldest sister with telekinetic powers chose to leave the show, necessitating the death of her character in an exasperating repeat of what happened with Shannon Doherty back in the nineties) and a slew of horror films, specifically what I’ve always thought of as the slasher genre’s “big three”: Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Believe it or not, I had never seen any of these movies before, despite knowing how important they were in the evolution of this particular branch of horror films.

I also delved into some witch-related books from my adolescence: L.J. Smith’s The Secret Circle trilogy and Cate Tiernan’s Sweep series. And truly, it was heaven! There’s just something about nineties (or early noughties) witches that fills me with nostalgic glee. I’m only sorry I didn’t have enough time to squeeze Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three in there as well.

On that note, I’ve also been working through the short-lived adaptation of The Secret Circle (which is profoundly different from the books) and the second season of Sailor Moon, but there was no way either one of those were going to get completed by the end of this month.