The 12th Annual Xena: Warrior Princess convention took place in Burbank, CA over the weekend. Here’s a report from AfterEllen.com contributing writer Christie Keith:
On Friday afternoon, co-executive producer and writer Steve Sears did a Q&A with fans. Sears answered questions about the development of the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. He said that it would have been easy to just make Gabrielle a boring sidekick, but added, “Very early on … I felt there was so much richness in this particular character. The way I always looked at it was this: In a lot of ways … [Gabrielle] was the true hero of the series.”
According to Sears, Xena “made a decision to turn from evil, darkness into the light.” Gabrielle chose to follow “this woman who was her destiny and her soulmate. She made the choice to go from light into the darkness, and that’s a hero to me.”
Sears’s comments prompted a fan to ask the age-old question about Xena and Gabrielle: Just good friends, or something more? Sears acknowledged that the lesbian subtext was entirely deliberate, and said that it was left to the viewers to draw their own conclusions about the nature of the relationship. But then he admitted that was sort of a cop out. “To me there was no doubt. Did I write the characters that way? No … so it’s still ambiguous.”
Not in our minds, Steve. Not even a little bit.
For more on the convention, visit Christie’s blog.
