I ain't got to drive it since she brought that thing home
I have never seen Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001). I became culturally aware of the show during college, but most of my information about it has actually come from Tumblr, where gifsets of it are in constant rotation for their convincingly deserved queer lady value. So I'm not sure what to do with the fact that only on my most recent re-read of Phyllis Ann Karr's Chrétien de Troyes-inspired picaresque The Follies of Sir Harald (2001), by which I mean last night, did I realize the entire second chapter is a Xena crossover with the numbers very lightly filed off.
It was not this passage:
A mounted figure waited on the far bank, as if guarding the ford. Sir Harald started on seeing that it was a beautiful woman with long dark hair and piercing, steel-gray eyes, a haughty smirk, and a breastplate in the ancient style, who sat astride a buttercream steed with mane and tail like sun shining on milk, as proud as her rider.
Or this one:
The Lady Gavrielle of Wisten was a pretty, perky, chirky, cheerful-faced young blue-eyed blonde who wore a coronet of thin gold wires interwoven with many kinds of white and blue flowers to set off the honey-russet color of her hair. While not quite of a loveliness to rouse envy in the breasts of the famous beauties of King Arthur's courts, she could at least have held her own amongst them, if only by virtue of her insouciance.
It was the scene where Sir Harald, whose knightly honor has taken a (self-inflicted) beating in the first chapter, runs into someone comprehensively worse at knight-erranting than he is:
"Sir Jokesir the Puissant," the other made answer, drawing himself up proudly. His helmet, if helmet it could be called, was an old-fashioned leather cap with protruding earpieces, covered in overlapping iron plates of which several were absent and most of the rest dented. It would have disgraced a common foot soldier, and it covered none of Sir Jokesir's almost boyish face—a face that would have been more nearly triangular if it had been better fed: his nose narrow; his chin almost pointed; his cheeks almost hollow; and his wideset brown eyes, perched between high cheekbones and spare brows, wearing beneath the braggadocio an almost melancholy cast.
and the Ted Raimi penny dropped.
Karr does note in the novel's afterword, "While, to those readers who recognize the Warrior Woman of Part the Second, I can only apologize for failing to show her in action," so I must have known there was an in-joke from the first time I finished the book. I was just not culturally equipped to get it, as opposed to the Ivanhoe and Mozart shout-outs in other chapters. In my defense, I have spent a lot more time on Tumblr since then, in addition to acquiring reasons to pay attention to Ted Raimi's face.
I think what I'm trying to say is that,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants, Phyllis Ann Karr may literally have asked for Kay fic on Yuletide that one year.
It was not this passage:
A mounted figure waited on the far bank, as if guarding the ford. Sir Harald started on seeing that it was a beautiful woman with long dark hair and piercing, steel-gray eyes, a haughty smirk, and a breastplate in the ancient style, who sat astride a buttercream steed with mane and tail like sun shining on milk, as proud as her rider.
Or this one:
The Lady Gavrielle of Wisten was a pretty, perky, chirky, cheerful-faced young blue-eyed blonde who wore a coronet of thin gold wires interwoven with many kinds of white and blue flowers to set off the honey-russet color of her hair. While not quite of a loveliness to rouse envy in the breasts of the famous beauties of King Arthur's courts, she could at least have held her own amongst them, if only by virtue of her insouciance.
It was the scene where Sir Harald, whose knightly honor has taken a (self-inflicted) beating in the first chapter, runs into someone comprehensively worse at knight-erranting than he is:
"Sir Jokesir the Puissant," the other made answer, drawing himself up proudly. His helmet, if helmet it could be called, was an old-fashioned leather cap with protruding earpieces, covered in overlapping iron plates of which several were absent and most of the rest dented. It would have disgraced a common foot soldier, and it covered none of Sir Jokesir's almost boyish face—a face that would have been more nearly triangular if it had been better fed: his nose narrow; his chin almost pointed; his cheeks almost hollow; and his wideset brown eyes, perched between high cheekbones and spare brows, wearing beneath the braggadocio an almost melancholy cast.
and the Ted Raimi penny dropped.
Karr does note in the novel's afterword, "While, to those readers who recognize the Warrior Woman of Part the Second, I can only apologize for failing to show her in action," so I must have known there was an in-joke from the first time I finished the book. I was just not culturally equipped to get it, as opposed to the Ivanhoe and Mozart shout-outs in other chapters. In my defense, I have spent a lot more time on Tumblr since then, in addition to acquiring reasons to pay attention to Ted Raimi's face.
I think what I'm trying to say is that,
skygiants, Phyllis Ann Karr may literally have asked for Kay fic on Yuletide that one year.
no subject
It is absolutely impossible for me not to wonder now if there are in-jokes I'm still missing in The Idylls of the Queen.