whither girl-bonding (bondage?)

I've been watching Xena, and it's been making me all melancholy about the current state of tv.

The Boy and I watched that wonderful Indiana Jones uber ep from season two, and he found it slightly off-putting because it was so camp. And in trying to explain it to him, I realized just how radical the proposition of appropriating traditional buddy/hero stories for women actually is. Because I think that's one of the reasons why Xena camps it up so much - the gigglyness softens the blow of it a little.

The end of that ep, when not!Xena and not!Gabby decide to take on the world, just the two of them, got me all misty. And I love my shows, but I wanna see more of that sort of thing. I mean, much as I love the Joss-hat, even Buffy didn't go to the place where Xena does. Men still had a central position in the Buffyverse, it was just that women did too. But Xena sidelines men in a way that I find utterly, utterly charming. More of that please, yes.

but would they get the broccoli?

I love my Boy thiiiiis much. He's working with a prof on his novel for a independent study credit, only it's more him explaining the novel to the completely non-geek prof.

Now, it's a slashy little book - we've been talking about it as a non-sexual love story for a long time, and that's just what it is. The nail from which the novel hangs is the pairbonding-type relationship between the two male leads. I think it's adorable. And while he's not writing it as gay romance, we've found that slash language works really well for us as a linguistic tool in talking about it. So I guess the Boy was trying to explain to the prof about that "we don't need words to communicate our love" sort of thing, and apparently he ended up talking about the Broccoli Test.

Punchline? The prof really liked the concept, and said that he'd been looking for a way to describe precisely that sort of thing to his fiction classes. The Broccoli is taking over the world, yo.

also, ( interests meme from marinarusalka )