Xev

  • Zev vs Xev

    Originally posted on 8-22-15 at Lexxperience.com.

    Click for the complete Lexx series at Amazon.com

     

    Pix click to sources.

    One of cult scifi's hottest debates is Zev or Xev. Both in real life are cool European models/actresses. But this isn't real life, is it?

    This is Lexx.

    In a coexistent universe overlapping our own, in the same place, at the same time, Order was making a mockery of the human race across a League of 20,000 Planets. Human beings had been locked into a darker than Orwellian regime for thousands of years, and there was no such thing as freedom of choice, reality TV, or even shopping. Although all of humanity living under His Shadow played their parts in that rigidly controlled and regulated society, women especially were considered inferior, relegated by government to reproduction and slave service if they were unfit for other useful fields, such as bureaucracy and military. Make one mistake, and you could disappear into a judicial process that would repurpose your usefulness into parts for robotic drones. Everyone had a place.

    Zev's place was in a box.

    B3K- Lexx Wiki

     

    The wife bank was a huge government sanctioned processing center, one of probably several kinds of what we'd innocently call boarding schools, for parents in menial roles that didn't allow room for parenting. At least their girls in the wife banks would be housed and fed during their reeducation into the mundane roles of laborer, service, wife, and prostitute. There was no shame in the programming schools taking over for kids who came from lesser families, for kids who didn't fit in with the aggressive compliance that Order required from families higher up on the food chain (literally).

    ThePicBug

     

    At first glance, we assume Zev wound up at the wife bank because she was abandoned, but if we look at the hopelessness pervading all of humanity under the Shadow of Order, I believe her parents either did what they thought was right or were pressured into doing it, maybe both. Best let go early before the horrors of Correction removed her later. No doubt this also included children who asked too many questions and took initiatives that were not in compliance with Order, and were therefore in constant danger of disappearing, being swallowed up in Corrections and never heard from again. I'm sure parents openly questioning or protesting children being removed from their families or whatever social structure there was were met with equal retribution, quashing all thought of doubting Order. Thinking outside the box wasn't allowed. Problem solving skills came with hefty guidelines, and coloring inside the lines led to longer lives.

    ThePicBug

     

    So being turned over to the wife bank nearly from birth may actually have extended Zev's life. As we watch her emotionally mature through the series, we realize her natural questioning and initiative were already deeply rooted and she would never be able to accept living as a slave to Order, in any capacity, confirmed by her rapid decline into harsh sentencing after she automatically defended herself almost as soon as she had graduated the wife bank. I believe her parents extended her chances for survival when they submitted her to the wife bank, even if the whole scene seems lame and inexcusable from our point of view. What else could they do? She'd have questioned everything growing up and drawn attention to herself.

    ThePicBug

     

    It's very hard to imagine a society without concepts for family solidarity, holiday gatherings, or even the possibility of happiness. Such large scale repression made it impossible for families to thrive at all unless they wholeheartedly supported Order and used their every waking moment to excel in serving it, as we see in the scene of children being awarded Merits of Service. Their parents likely ranked much higher and were more deeply entrenched in loyalty, and therefore had access to opportunities and the perks that came with them. Under His Shadow, this loyalty undoubtedly went far beyond anything we think of as Big Brother, as we see good children being rewarded with special invitations to mass executions akin to Superbowl sized sporting events.

    We aren't privy to much of Zev's brainwashing, but we can assume some of it was pretty explicit so she'd be ready to be a good wife. Lexx fans have seen me dancing daintily around ignoring her matron coaching her on the "tower of power" scenes in the past, which immediately clue us in on how deeply sexist and layered society would be around her once she got out of that box. Lexx very clearly shows us both child and sex slavery in efficiently short scenes that leave us hanging with disturbing clues to how deeply controlling His Shadow has become over billions and billions of people that amount to him as little more than cattle in a breeding program.

    I wrote all of the above to contrast the 'smut in space' mentality some scifi reviewers have had for Lexx. Fine, if that sells the show, because that's one way to sell the deeper content. Of course it's smut in space, a love slave escaped on the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes.

    I Worship His Shadow- part 8- Zev Bellringer

     

    I could do an entire chapter on lusticons and what their impact would be on our own society. In Zev's world, however, they were little more than sophisticated DNA resequencers that forced women into such menial roles that they had expiry dates. They were remade to be used up and thrown away. Yes, they were remade into Beauty itself, the stuff of dreamers and poets, but along with that their minds were also stripped down to compulsive service and little else. To give readers some context, I'll cross the line of bad taste and simply ask- which would you prefer, your wife to be a real person like original Zev, or a mistress that's nothing more than a responsive doll? It's a trick question, because deep down we all want both, don't we? Be honest and admit it- we want to be able to use people without repurcussion and consequence, without guilt and self loathing. And Order makes this possible. No guilt, no conscience. Just a lusticon and a very smoothly running society. If you don't want to be made into a love slave, you do your time in a box and color inside the lines. Once you're a love slave, you're no longer a citizen. You are government property and allotted like merchandise with no regard to your feelings, your misery, your sadness, and leaving behind everyone you ever cared about or loved.

    It's really important to see this from the Lexx point of view to really get all the rest of Lexx. So many viewers admit confusion, especially by season four, when it's really quite simple. All broken people want is real love, forgiveness, freedom... If you've never been around that kind of broken, you probably won't get Lexx.

    All it took was one confused punch after being publicly insulted

     

    So Zev majorly failed years of repressed wife preparation and found herself slung into the heart of the mass butchering of other poor souls not toeing the lines, actually felt ripped off that instead of being put out of her misery she'd be stripped of the last of her menial rights and be forced to ride that tower of power the rest of her quickly expiring days, and not even against her will because even that would be taken away from her via brainwashing program, and how do you even process all that while you're bolted to a slab and nothing but machines and a robot around you? Zev grew up without the warmth of humanity, yet she so beautifully expresses that very thing through the rest of the series.

    So let's psyche eval Zev, the escaped love slave. First of all, surreal. Can you even imagine making it through the lusticon and suddenly the world around you has changed? The robot is broken, there's bloody cluster lizard mess and a giant (at least twelve feet long) decapitated cluster lizard on the floor, and whadayaknow, the bands are suddenly easy to pull away from their bolts on the slab. Zev doesn't seem very phased, because her entire life has been so boxed. She's simply in another box right now, a room with automatic equipment still going. And she's had a really long stupid day/week (we have no idea how long she was bolted to that slab for the trip to the Cluster), her crankiness has leveled up exponentially from the new cluster lizard DNA just incorporated into all her cells, and she's in no mood to waste time freaking out about anything. She's just pissed. And you know how funny ugly situations get when a person is a way past cranky. That's right, let's toss a robot head into a brainwashing program and giggle. Surreal.

    These come from ThePicBug and click out to larger.

      

    Seeing her reflection was a shock. Her struggle with Stan over who would be the human shield was pure instinctual reflex. The grab for the robot head to open the door happened in that hyper aware 'we're gonna die' state. Her dive through the doors and into fugitive escape with Stanley was coincidence. The world just kept flipping upside down over and over. We never see Zev (or Xev) go through this kind of pure flight response again. Everything she goes through after her initial flight response is calculated and consciously thought through, defying the fate that was originally intended for her as a mindless love slave. (I'm still facepalming over 'smut in space'. Really? How shallow are some of these reviewers?)

    ThePicBug

     

    By the time we reach season two, we've all fallen in love with Zev. She's way more than feisty and gorgeous, she's real. She's sad and determined and hopeful, and pretty much the tie that binds the crew into a gang with some semblance of a mission. Zev is a decision maker, despite growing up brainwashed in a box, and she very sternly draws her lines around right and wrong. In her heart of hearts, she knows what the good is that she longs for, because she's been so deep in the bad. She's a strong moral character even though she's still trapped in a DNA reboot meant to deconstruct morality into the control mechanism of Order.

    The Pic Bug

     

    And then she sacrifices her life to save an undead assassin and a traitor. I wept. I don't get very gooey over TV, but that scene ripped me apart. In the midst of being trapped in experimental medical torture fetish, she is the one who makes the moral decision to fight for the right, and since she never grew up being taught what was right, she got that from her own heart. The depths of Zev came out fighting in a greedy world with no hope left, and she died loving the loveless wanderers who had accidentally helped her escape Order. To see a Divine Assassin kneel and lift her slave bands out of her molecular remains was devastating to everyone but himself, because he could not feel it. But intellectually, that was a defining moment after billions had lived out thousands of years of slavery across a galaxy. The fandom went into shock.

    The Pic Bug

     

    And then the fandom split into camps of delight and outrage when a plant used a recombinant DNA process to reconstruct Zev's remains with the DNA of an astronaut from Potatohoe, and we get our beautiful love slave reborn, complete with memories, because Lyekka the plant felt sorry for Stanley's loneliness. Think about this- a living 'lusticon' function, a remanufacturing out of love, no brainwashing this time, and Xev is reborn and given back to the crew as a gift. It was weird and sweet and weird... And it's not our Zev, but it's still Xev, as she knows herself, but redefined. Kinda creepy, but still very beautiful. So... is she part Potatohoe-an? Sort of the astronaut's daughter? Did Lyekka impart any plant DNA into her as well? None of these questions seem to come up, but she's definitely still part reconstituted cluster lizard. (@bonenado adds "out of instant potatoes".)

    The Pic Bug

     

    We watch Xev struggle through the rest of the series with what is it she really wants. First we see her relive what seems like teenager/young adult years, except now she's no longer in a box and sparkling with the delight and joy of sexual discovery. As season two goes on, we watch her mature and take sides on right and wrong, tolerating abuse from Mantrid and then stepping up in Brigadoom to fight for a cause. By the time season two ends, Xev knows exactly what love is, and how deeply it will sacrifice itself.

    The Pic Bug

     

    Throughout season three we watch Xev go through the heartbreaking layers of being sweetly romanced by nefarious evil with ulterior motive. Xev starts out innocently believing she has finally found love at long last, only to realize she's been used for purposes that go against her strengthening moral principles. Considering that Xev came from deep in the heart of uncompromising moral deprivation, Prince finds she's not so easy to seduce, and even rivals his indestructible ambition with her indestructible cluster lizard tenacity, going so far as to outlast him on his own planet, outwit him at his own game, and even threaten him with her own brand of instinctual cluster lizard evil. She definitely has an edge over falling prey to the Prince of darkness, being only half human, a first for the planet Fire, which allows only human souls to pass into its realm.

    The Pic Bug

     

    After the shock of going through season three, season four feels a little confusing, but stay focused. Remember that Zev/Xev came from Order. She came from repression, matured through the kinds of moral ambiguity that break people, she discovered her strength against evil, and now she's finally reached a place in the Two Universes that has never been touched by the long arms of Order- Earth. We don't know if Earth humans are a surviving remnant that escaped the Insect Wars many millennia ago, much like Kai's people did for awhile, but Earth has developed all kinds of evils of its own, from governments to black market, and we get to see what happens when a genuine love slave created in the darkest heart of true evil does when she's kidnapped for porn, used to spike reality show ratings, fought over for unrequited love, captured for black market organ theft, handling a real job as a counselor, and most of all, finding out what Kai would have been like if he'd been born on Earth and how their relationship would have turned out.

     

    Original Zev is played by Lisa Hynes.

    Zev is played by Eva Habermann.

    Xev is played by Xenia Seeberg.

    Unlike many fans, I do not have a preference for one actress or another, and don't wish to see canon changed. The continuity works just fine for me, and I appreciate Zev/Xev in all her forms. Remembering that her character essence is what this show is all about means more to me than having favorite actors. I think they all did wonderful work and sincerely portrayed so many offenses against women with sweetness and strength of form. Following Zev's/Xev's journey across the Two Universes has deeply affected me personally, and if/when I come back to another post on Zev/Xev, I'd like to look more deeply into her role in the prophecies about the cycles of time.

    More reading from other fans-

    Zev and Xev Bellringer of B3K

    Zev&Xev

     

  • the making of Lexx

    :edit: 5-22-14 Another Xanga migration code integration update wiped all the videos out of my old posts. Fortunately, I had this post backed up. Enjoy.

    It's fun to see what goes into how a show is made. This is a collection of youtubes loaded by fans. If you love this kind of stuff and are interested in Lexx once again becoming a viable product, check out The Lexx Revival Project.

    Movie Television - "The Making of Lexx" - part 1
    Movie Television - "The Making of Lexx" - part 2
    Lexx-Extra Stuff(part1)
    Lexx-Extra Stuff(part2)
    Lexx-More Extra Stuff(part1)
    Lexx-More Extra Stuff(part2)
    Lexx-Even More Extra Stuff(part1)
    Lexx-Even More Extra Stuff(part2)
    making of Lexx season 3 part 1 of 2
    making of Lexx season 3 part 2 of 2
    Lexx season 4 wrap reel (Part 1/2)
    Lexx season 4 wrap reel (Part 2/2)

     

  • Why Lexx Is Personal

    Lexx means a lot of things to a lot of people. At first glance it's just another space show that's a little on the raunchy side, but viewers who get caught up enough in Lexx to see more than one season seem to develop much deeper feelings that border on fanaticism. Lexx has its own loyal cosplay fans and collectors, despite the lack of vendor support at conventions and the disappearance of distributor support for several years (thank goodness that last has changed).

    Someone on twitter asked me a few months ago which Lexx episode is my favorite, and after a little thought, this is what I wrote back.

    After that, I realized I have some pretty deep feelings associated with Lexx that I don't really talk about. I've been called a Lexx super nerd by a number of people and I've never said why I'm so attached to this show. So here it is, the way Lexx found and pushed all my buttons and why I think Lexx is good for the world. I don't like to talk about my 'stuff', and I'm sure I'll come across as a weirdo to some people when I say it. But fans of any show know that the characters and events that happen in a show can become symbolic of personal stuff, and as we displace our emotions into the stories, we unconsciously learn to deal with our own stuff. Stories give us situations to think about, characters give us relationships to relate to. As we become more involved in a show, we become more emotionally invested.

    The biggest obvious impact Lexx had on me was near the beginning of season two, during an episode called "Terminal". In this episode there was a terrible accident when Kai was incorrectly awakened and he automatically braced Stanley right through the heart. Kai and Zev got Stan into the cryopod to put him into stasis before he actually died and found doctors to fix him.

    I was completely stunned when that brace hit Stanley's heart, and very upset, almost wasn't able to continue with the show. I had been living with a heart condition called superventricular tachycardia since high school until well into my thirties, and by the time I saw this episode, a surgeon had been trying to talk me into surgery for nearly two years already because it was getting worse. My condition was becoming alarming, but I was terrified to have the surgery done since I was told I'd have a one in five chance of dying during surgery. Those are worse odds than Russian Roulette with a six shooter. A 20% chance might not sound like a big deal, but once it's your turn, that becomes 100%.

    As ridiculous as it sounds, just making it through that episode changed everything for me. I held my breath every time they showed Stanley wrapped in plastic, and I was so relieved when his heart got fixed and he was fine. But that wasn't the end of the show, not by a long shot. Although it was hilarious seeing 790 pilot Stan's hospital bed with Stan in his underwear, something else terrible was going on. Zev and Kai were taken prisoner for sinister medical experiments, and by the end of the episode Zev gave her life to save Kai and left me curled up bawling my eyes out.

    Within days I called my surgeon and set up the surgery. I faced the fact that this could be it and told all my family I love them. When I woke up, still very loopy from the anesthesia, I sang Kai's "I'm Alive" song to my daughter. I never would have done that if I'd been in my right mind, but drugs have a way of helping us express feelings more easily, and it was a very emotional moment for her, not even 20 years old yet, way too young to lose her mom.

    There are other things in Lexx that speak to me deeply every time I see them. In Supernova we learn that Zev was raised in a box by holograms and trained for the wife bank. How many women in Earth's history have gone through the humiliation and degradation of never being more than that? Or being sex trafficked into slavery? It still goes on, all over the world. Zev is the unloved child that parents gave away, the love slave who actually escaped and wound up with the key to the most powerful weapon of destruction in two universes. She could have run away with a doctor and become a queen of terror, but she chose love and loyalty to Stan and Kai, the first people who ever treated her with kindness, even if it wasn't perfect. As a person, Zev was pretty clearheaded about reality, where she fit into it, and what she wouldn't tolerate in an amoralistic society. She could be girly and still command respect.

    I grew up in an ultra conservative household where girls could never earn the status boys have just for being born boys. I was never given to feel worth my presence in this world no matter how hard I worked, nor forgiven for being born the way I was (I'm ASD). I grew up emotionally neglected and bizarrely treated, so when I saw Zev, it totally clicked. Many girls grow up feeling ugly or like they can't earn the love missing when their parents have their priorities mixed up, and then they feel pushed to perform 'wifely duties' and other behaviors attempting to earn that love. Growing up with a Mennonite father might be the same as growing up in any religiously repressed household where women have a 'place'. What very little we see of what happens to Zev in the first and second movies screams loads about third class citizens under the thumb of His Divine Shadow, and speaks loudly to repressed women watching the show. That so much could be implied in so little film time for her character is overwhelmingly poetic. All the sadness she grew up with, I have felt.

    I just got this tweet as I was finishing that sentence.

    I'm sitting in a public library bawling because of that. Was managing to hold it in till then. No idea if anyone is looking at me, staying focused on my writing.

    Moving on.

    It's not real often I run into a show where all the core characters have so much meaning for me. I'm not trying to hog the fan feels, in fact, I've kept all this in for many years. This is the first time in the years since Lexx first aired that I'm talking about this next bit to anyone in context of how it affects me personally.

    Everybody loves Kai. The girls, the boys, the robot heads- everybody either wants to love Kai or to be Kai. Kai is just that cool. My initial reaction to Kai was repulsion. I couldn't explain it, still can't. It has nothing to do with sex or looks or that he was a killer or that he's dead. None of that. I think it's his conundrum between being able to intellectually know something and being unable to emotionally feel it. While other fans mooned and anthropomorphized, I just very simply got it. I'm stuck, too. I've had a pretty big challenge most of my life making the leap from processing information to feeling something about it, especially to being aware of having feelings and what to do with them. Michael himself has talked about the mandatory autistic nature of his character in interviews, especially during one scene in season three where Kai tried to bury himself and Xev asked him what he's doing buried in the dirt. I've gone weeks and even months not contacting family and feeling very content just to be left alone. It doesn't mean I don't like people, I actually like people very much. But I suffer an emotional disconnect that I don't see demonstrated very well in fictional characters, and I guess this hit pretty close to home for me. So much of my life I have simply just not reacted to people or events happening around me, and I come across to others as strange, cold, or uncaring, when really everything is going through an intellectual filter first. Much of the reactions I've learned to mimic are contrived for the sake of not being willing to die alone. I've been working very hard on social interaction and communication skills for several years, and I'm getting better and better at it, but in an eyeblink I could just turn into a statue and stare if I weren't self monitoring. I do a lot of thinking during those moments. I've wondered a lot about the reanimated state of Kai's physical brain, how the protoblood affects his actual synaptic processes, the locality of the 'me' point of view still being present either by simple function or by intellectual reaction to self observation. I have a sociology degree and aced classes in social psyche and brain studies, so the whole Kai experience thing really intrigues me. While other fans shipped him into fanfictions, I tore every scrap of that character apart in my mind trying to figure out the meaning behind his being, if there is any, and whether that kind of existence is horrifying. To never be able to turn all your memories off, to know the horrors of your body being severed into pieces and put back together like toys, to live with the idea that your body was raked out and rebuilt with foreign parts- who would want to own that? Would coming back to life somehow bring unbearable pain to all that scar tissue? For the life of me, I could never figure out how in the world people couldn't see that he had to reach through all that maddening static to interact with the others. To keep it all together in a dead brain and still be a 'nice guy' of a sort is a real icon for living with depression, when everyone around you still gets to enjoy food, enjoy sex, enjoy anything. I wonder if that's why so many fans might be subconsciously attracted to Kai, because in spite of his whole world being utterly black, he still finds a way to make a choice (through others) to do the right thing. *wow* He's darker than Batman could ever hope to be.

    I love Stanley Tweedle. From the first time I saw him, I recognized the whole rebellious wimp thing as my favorite character type, because you never know what guys like that are going to do, and sometimes they pull through in ways you don't expect in the face of really big crap, and the way they do it may not always be cool, but it becomes cool. Stanley never gave up, even when everything sucked and everyone was against him, and that's what I'm like when everything sucks, I get cranky and rebellious and turn my crap day into something cool, because I want to. I hate depression. I've lived with ridiculous amounts of depression nearly my whole life, and as a way of life I like to twist it into a pretzel and throw it back at the universe. Stanley Tweedle is my all-time favorite scifi character because the twisted irony that swims through spacetime around that guy makes me laugh and want to hug people for all the suckiness they go through, even when I'm feeling crabby. If anyone could finger His Shadow, I'm really glad it was him, because he's like the rest of us, stumbling through our days and stubbornly hoping for the best even if the only way we can get it is to make it up.

    And what about the Lexx itself? It all started for me with the big bug on Showtime. I saw the interview promo about a spaceship designed like a bug, a biomechanoid that was genetically designed and then grown to a monstrous size. As a living ship this space bug could carry a city-sized amount of crew and materials and interact in a simple way to a commander who had direct control over it via a 'key'. This key was a bio coded interface program that enabled conversation between bug and captain, and that was the cutest thing I ever saw in a space show. I grew up disgusted with bugs but have come to see them differently since I first encountered Lexx. Now I see them as tiny little bio machines that follow simple genetic codes, with simple feelings and thoughts like Lexx had. I don't know whether that's true, but I think it's better than hating bugs just because they're bugs. Lexx is also terrified of spiders, like I am, but I seem to be dealing with my arachnophobia a little better since my view on bugs has changed.

     photo lexxinspace.jpg

    I could write a whole book on the characters and stories in Lexx, but this is already pretty long, and all that can go into more posts later. One last thought- Lexx has a real Don't Fear the Reaper feel to it, and I guess that's why I love it so much. No matter how awful everything gets, no matter how real and big and dark, the Lexx crew struggle with the real and big and dark and come through intact, themselves, knowing who they are and what they want.

    :edit: 5-23-14 Another code integration update during this lengthy Xanga migration to new servers wiped all my videos from my posts, and since I can't remember the one I had here, I'm replacing it with my two fave Zev/Xev vids. You're welcome. Carry on.

    Find Lexx.
    iTunes - TV Shows - Lexx, Season 1
    Watch Lexx Online | Netflix
    Watch Lexx on Hulu
    Watch Lexx Online - TV.com
    Echo Bridge Entertainment - Lexx
    Amazon.com: lexx: Movies & TV
    U.S. Netflix Outside the U.S.

    :edit: Tuesday, April 2, 2013

    I found this saved on my private blog, must have double posted it. I originally had it posted on my old Lexx fan blog, all that stuff is gone now, including the Xenia picture I used, so it's now missing from this post. I can't find it online any more, but it's an almost identical picture. :edit: 6-26-13 You know what, I found that picture at http://www.norajean.com/Biz-Archive/LEXX-Home/LEXX-001a.htm, huzzah! laughing 

    Thursday, August 31, 2006

    I have my own little Xev.  She could care less about Lexx and thinks I'm crazy to watch it.  She has no idea who Xenia is.  Xenia has no idea who she is, either, so they're even.  I just ran into that Xenia picture down there.

     

    Ok, this is 2013 again, she's much older now. I wanted to add this to why Lexx is personal for me, because it's important.

    'Twink' (my online nickname for her, after she scolded Scott one day about something, saying before she was even a twinkle in his eye), is my step daughter. I met her before she turned two, married her dad a little before before she turned five, and have pretty much been full time parent for her nearly all her life. Any step parent will appreciate how stressful it got at times since we live next door to her gramma and had somewhat regular contact with her mom. I come from a very different lifestyle background and the first five years in this house were challenging. One of the key things I learned was 'child first', and I made it through some tough emotional roller coaster years because I firmly believe in that.

    A really eye-opening year was when the third season of Lexx aired. Both Xev and Twink had changed. Twink was just hitting her teens about the time Prince woke Xev up out of the cryopod, and the timing was so perfect for me. When an adolescent not of your own body lives in your house and you feel like the whole world is against you being the parent figure, a marriage can rock completely apart. Ours didn't. In fact, I suddenly felt a renewed compassion for my Twink, thanx to Xev that year. For one thing, Twink suddenly looked like one of my fave science fiction characters, a strong woman of misfortune, beautiful and committed to finding real love in her life. That character represented so many things I admire in strong women, like solid friendship through thick and thin, not being intimidated by what others think, knowing herself and sticking to her guns. I was able to transfer those feelings onto a step child who really needed a break. Life sucks when you first hit your teens, and you don't need other people's emotional baggage dragging you down. Because Xenia played Xev in the third season of Lexx, I was able to love a child through a very difficult year.

    I come from people who don't believe in putting ourselves into spotlights for attention, and think striving to be 'pretty' leads to being sinful. I don't agree with this. I think people need to feel pretty in many ways, because feeling pretty means feeling like someone likes and accepts us. 'Pretty' is a metaphor, the opposite of 'ugly'. We feel ugly when we feel unwanted. The prettiest person in the world feels ugly if something is wrong in their emotional life, and there is nothing you can say to convince them otherwise.

    My Twink is a very pretty person, especially on the inside, and I'm very proud of her. Be Lexxy with each other.

  • You Can't Handle Watching LEXX

    I ran into this old post archived on my private blog on August 31, 2006. I'm pretty sure I wrote it quite a bit earlier, possibly back to 2005. I didn't save anything else that I know of before I kaboomed my old Lexx stuff, so this is a rare blast from the past. Images click back to original sources.

    In my opinion, Lexx is the only scifi show that never wimped out. All the rest deal with humanity against evil, and I was always disappointed in the endings. Stargate truly wimped out when the Ancients AND Anubis all turned out to be humans. They had me hanging on to the edge of my seat until then, and suddenly it was just ordinary again. Babylon 5 stuck with their aliens, Vorlons and Shadows, but in the end they were just lonely children and made up and left the galaxy after a few words. All that tension built up, and they just reconciled and went away. Same with all the Star Trek shows. It's always humanity against some other race, or Q, and humanity always reasons its way to the side of right and good. Battlestar Galactica, yeah, humans created their own problem and now it's turning on them and they are barely surviving. Boring, boring, boring.
     

     
    Lexx was never afraid for the bad guy to be truly TRULY evil, so awful that humanity was losing for millenia, and not only losing, but going along like sheep to the slaughter of the masses. And the humans that were evil, were evil, no reasoning with them, no fighting them. Mantrid actually destroyed an entire universe. Throughout Lexx there is no compassion for the ones who lose, no whimpering and moaning about what it's doing to humanity, no noble attempts at morality and happy endings. The more minor evil characters are still really evil, into cannabalism and perverse tortures and selling their prey to the highest bidder. That our main characters survive at all is hair raising, and then accidently making things worse as they go is the perfect ironic twist. Actually meeting Prince and discussing the afterlife (seeing Stanley fail to escape from Prince!) was a step above and beyond everyone else's false gods and technoweenie explaining away of human myth and religions, and then coming to earth in the 4th season and being absolutely real with just how nasty human nature can get (Xev nearly losing her organs to the black market, for crying out loud!), and still everything goes horribly wrong but somehow they survive...
     

     
    Is it any WONDER that Kai and Stan and Xev are latched onto as the ulitmate 'heroes'? They are so real, like us. They are up against everything all by themselves, with no guide of any kind, no Federation to fall back on, no Q to reset the balance, no one to tell them how they are doing in all of this. In the end, they are the only ones they can count on to get each other's backs against two whole universes.
     

     
    Anyone who doesn't like this show, in my opinion, is afraid of facing the sheer high cliff of hopelessness and making the decision to go on anyway. This show doesn't hand out answers to the problems in life, just slaps you around with them and makes fun of it all, and then dares to throw you right off the cliff when it's done, case in point, what happened to Kai in the last show, hate to spoil it if you've never seen it. If you are a wimp, you can't handle watching Lexx.
     

     

  • Lexx- wallpapers, icons, pix

    This is a LEXX 'poster' page and will be updated any time I make something LEXX until it gets hard to load, then I'll make another post for more. All are made by me, hosted by me, and anyone has permission to direct link, just click the pix to get the address or grab for your own download. New ones will get stacked at the top. Thumbnails will click out to full size.
     
    4-9-13
     
    I was named honorary "Snarkalec" several weeks ago and temporarily added to one of their member twitter lists after I hacked their logo onto Kai and joined in a live tweet Syfy watch party. Although I'm not an official member, here are a few links that are fun to check out. You can grab this pic with a highlight rollover for cut and paste.
     
     
     
    2-5-13
     

     
     
    1-9-13  Arch Heretic

     
     
    12-27-12 Have a super sparkly day.
     

     

     
  • Lexx on Netflix

    Netflix says it's not too late to give Lexx for Christmas. 

    http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Lexx/70157361

     

  • Holiday Lexx

    cool Lexxy holidays!

    Cartoon by Emerson Art, copyright on this set of caricatures purchased by Lexx Zone.

  • Why Lexx Is Important

    Images click back to original source at The PIC Bug.
     
    Escapism is becoming a global concept that drives media sales, and I'm full on board with it. At first you think video games and tv shows are just ways that people avoid real life, but that's not true. In the really old days of mythology, people used stories full of heroes and villains and dire situations and sparkling rewards not only to entertain, but to structure a belief system to model their lives on. Escapism provides that same opportunity to investigate the possibilities of making choices and taking actions, exploring beliefs in the moralities and motivations of characters, opening our minds to much more than the redundancy our lives sometimes feel like.
     
     
    Lexx as a story introduces us to the same kinds of horrors we've heard of before in both our world history and in our libraries full of thousands of years of stories, but on a scale that instantly transports us into a new way of looking at the human condition. The story of the Lexx does not originate on Earth, and is not tainted with any of our preset belief systems or histories. Humanity is stripped of all earthly assumptions and is reconstructed into an entirely new mythology asking the viewer what would really happen if... How would characters really behave if... What is so refreshing about Lexx is that it not only dares to strip away our presuppositions, but dares to do so with a combination of grimness and flippancy that will change the way you look at human history on Earth.
     

     
    The first season of Lexx is four movies, set in the Two Universes over a 6000 year time span, and largely centers on the Cluster, the home planet to His Divine Shadow who governs the League of 20,000 Planets. His Shadow makes Darth Vadar look like a cute little kitten with a ball of yarn. His Shadow makes Hitler look like a 14 year old novice. His Shadow is so evil that I would dare to quip even Satan is envious and aspires to be like him. Basically, the first season of Lexx is like Orwell on steroids. If you like dark *anything* in literature and other media, be it dark humor or dark situations or dark characters, it is here on the Lexx. But be warned- you cannot come into the Lexx assuming these humans have ever known your viewpoints on life. They haven't. They will not behave in any expected way that humans behave in any other media. Lexx as a four-series story often mystifies audiences because they don't understand that these characters have never known life as we've known it here on this earth. There is no such thing as psychological health, basic human rights, freedom of choice, or even just shopping. These things have never existed, and I know it's difficult sometimes for the audience to realize the depth of that.
     

     
    The second season of Lexx is pretty much everything you wanted to see go horribly wrong in Star Trek or any other scifi show you might have watched. There is no happy ending, good doesn't triumph over evil, selfishness can sometimes be the only salvation, but it is awesomely funny and awful and cute and dark. This season is like a Lexx comic book on video, and I think it's probably vital to see it that way if you don't understand or appreciate the 'point'. The point is always our core four on the Lexx, nothing else. This is their story, and like our own lives, their stories don't always have a moral. What I get out of season two is that the characters lives are like my life, and the lives of people I see around me- random and chaotic, happenstance and chance, and what meaning we draw from our experiences is our own and very personal. As we follow Stan, Xev, Kai, and 790 on their journey, we feel drawn into them because they are more like our real selves than any characters we've ever known.
     

     
    Stan is the Everyman, the average person who winds up caught in the stuff all around him everywhere he goes. He'd *like* to be the hero, but he's a normal person with normal flaws, and it's easy to see how we might also be just like him. Stan feels jilted by circumstances beyond his control, and takes them personally. He accidentally winds up commanding the most powerful weapon of destruction ever built in the Two Universes. He's not an evil man, but he's a nearly broken one who survived what other people didn't. Throughout the show we see how his simplest sadness has blown up into a wretchedness that must still be lived with somehow, as we get the hint that his one special love (possibly never realized beyond the crush stage) died as a result of his failure in the war against His Shadow. (If you're a Lexx fan and didn't catch this, you need to go rewatch the whole thing *right now*.) If we don't know these things about Stan, it's easy to blow him off as shallow and cranky, and I think some men can really empathize with that.
     

     
    Zev is that sweet dream that never quite comes true, a love slave who missed her programming, beautiful and strong and yet sadly alone, smarter than she should be but seduced by her own weaknesses, and ultimately the product of the society around her. A lot of people can identify with feeling caught in this kind of flux, at odds with their physical and emotional needs and duped at every turn by users. "Life is not fair. I know that well." Raised in a box and schooled by holograms for the wife bank, absurdity of being takes on a unique glimmer in Zev/Xev. All she wants is to love and be loved, but alas, she cannot love Stanley Tweedle, although their relationship grows into something more like brother and sister during their journey on the Lexx. They do care about one another, and are the only family each other has.
     

     
    Kai, well, he's had his life completely stripped away and is forced to commit horrible deeds, then has to 'live' in an animated state with the terrible memories and no way to feel passionately upset about it. The conundrum of feeling intellectually disgusted or upset with no emotions is a very difficult one for many fans to grasp, and it's very hard not to anthropomorphize one's own feelings onto his character. So many of us feel drained of our wills in the machine of society, forced to carry on without the dreams we once had or the feelings we once cherished, any noble efforts dashed down without our being able to stop it. Kai is a glaring reality, a souvenir of the Cluster, someone who triggers spontaneous empathy in others simply by being a walking scar, and there is no way to save him. What I especially notice about Kai is that he evokes the same kinds of imagery used in Native American and Asian storytelling about heroes who become tragically separated from their people and are forced to wander alone.
     

     
    As for 790, who wouldn't want a sassy robot head zooming around the house on his little cart? I'm not a big fan of robots in general, in spite of all the scifi I watch, but I ~love~ 790, he's awesome. He has a scrap of human brain in his noggin, but we're not clear whose (possibly originally female in a vague teaser extra), and since it is only used to interface his programming instructions to a body he no longer has, we're never sure whether his growing inclination toward jealousy and evil near the end have anything to do with somehow being human. 790 robot drones are used on the Cluster and throughout the League of 20,000 Planets to carry out a variety of jobs, most noticeably escorting humans through procedures, rituals, and trials. They operate machinery and pretty much do all the mundane menial stuff humans can't tolerate long or well without causing problems. Such as executing death sentences... They have no minds of their own because their heads have been replaced with robot heads, but still retain human bodies, which are probably easier on upkeep and maintenance and can be recycled back into the protein bank. Our 790 is the perfect human joke back on His Shadow, if you want to take it so far as noting that even a tiny shred of human brain slipped through the cracks and helped create havoc for His Shadow.
     

     
    The third season of Lexx goes all Dante and magnificently carries scifi into an artisan world of philosophy and even religion. I don't think any other scifi show has dared to take on anything this deep and still stubbornly retain its integrity through its characters, and manage to stay true to its original underlying theme. The Lexx itself doesn't lose any significance as the star of the show while our characters are faced with all new challenges and *finally* a real question of morality and ethics, which I think is a natural progression when we remember they came from such an utter lack of fortitude and grace in philosophical thinking. The Cluster allowed no education in Thought or the development of critical thinking, so Xev and Stan are almost like intellectual babes up against the very essence of evil incarnated, and all his cruel and subtle trickeries. This season is almost painful to watch in a good way, if you have the sort of mind that enjoys gnawing the bones of philosophical debate. Fortunately, this season is also easy to digest, the intellectual being so layered into our characters' foibles and desires. I am enamored of season three's astonishing level of storytelling, and the characters were all played so well, to me watching season three of Lexx is like the best of theater and commands a deeper level of respect.
     

     
    The fourth season of Lexx is difficult to quantify, so my favorite way of defining the whole season is "omg, they found Earth". And it is super weird because the final situation in season 3 carries over and modifies what happens to the Earth, bringing the inhabitants of Fire and Water with them. The philosophical theater of season three erupts into political vaudeville on Earth, with morals and ethics exploding into a comical mockery. I think this is the perfect way to end their journey on the Lexx, if you consider that our heroes escaped from despicable evil on the Cluster and somehow still retain a certain naivete about despicable evil happening around them on Earth, even when Xev becomes overwhelmed by her Cluster lizard DNA and starts eating people. Nothing is sacred as our heroes take on everything unholy Earth has to offer.
     

     
    One key element to the entire series is that the Lexx escapes from evil, outruns evil, blows up evil, defeats evil, runs into more evil, is used by evil, and dies during a war with evil- through everything, Stan, Xev, and Kai never experience a real relief from evil. They face it head on everywhere they go, and deal with it only as denizens who have escaped from His Divine Shadow can. I don't think they ever questioned the existence of evil, it's just everywhere you go, and you do what you've gotta do to survive it. Somehow that puts the human ingredient back into scifi storytelling for me. I don't know about other scifi fans, but I think that's such a nice change from the way other shows take the time to draw the line between ~metaphorical~ good and evil with rules and regs. Forget political correctness, forget tiptoeing around, forget the intellectual elevation above basic instinct. There is no rule book with Lexx. They blew it up.
     

     
    Lexx is available through Echo Bridge Entertainment- Lexx
     
  • Lexx ecards

    Years ago I used to be able to find Lexx ecards, and wondered ifanyone out there still hosted this service.  Here we go.

    Hi Janika!
    Janika (janikabanks@aol.com) has sent you an eCard:

    hello

    This eCard was sent to you through SciFiUpdates.com the home of all things Sci-Fi.

    If you'd like to check out sending Lexx ecards for Christmas, go to Media and Download Sections to the Lexx Gallery, choose the image you want, then in the upper left menus (they are tiny) choose 'item actions', and 3rd up from the bottom is 'send as ecard'.  Easy peasy.  My Hanukkah-Christmas-Kwanzaa-whatever holiday, birthday, or non-holiday present to you. It's all good on the Lexx.

    You're welcome.

     

  • Da Lexx- Rapdicted

    Thanx to TheBloggess putting up a link, I can see what my Lexx blog looks like when you search it through Gizoogle. Stanley Tweedle on the Cluster will take on a whole new meaning... You *will* see a lot of really hilarious rough language, so if you're not up for that, just shut your eyes and think of ladybugs or something.
     

     
     
    If you want to see Lexx posts Gizoogle style (rapdicted, it's awesome), you have to paste over each page address separately into the Gizoogle search bar. I would do it for you and create a whole new index, but Gizoogle directs everything back to its generic http://www.gizoogle.net/index.php, so there are no real page links, sorry about that. The easiest way to do this is to go to my Lexx Index (plug http://grandfortuna.xanga.com/767742511/the-lexx/ into Gizoogle, you'll love it), scroll down to whatever link you want to see rapdicted, open that page, grab the web address out of the bar at the top your your page, go back to Gizoogle, and plug it in. I swear, it's totally worth the effort. For example, you wanna check out I Worship His Shadow- part 3- Stanley Tweedle, so you grab the http://grandfortuna.xanga.com/768668567/i-worship-his-shadow--part-3--stanley-tweedle/ out of the bar, plug it into Gizoogle, and you get the page for I Worshizzle His Shadow- part 3- Stanley Tweedle. Or you wanna check out Lexx and psychological health, perhaps, you grab http://grandfortuna.xanga.com/769801907/lexx-and-psychological-health-perhaps/ out of the bar and plug it into Gizoogle and get the page for Lexx n' psychological game, like.
     

     
     omg, my pop up box even got rapdicted.  
     
    So psyche playa is finally gettin somewhere wit mah take on sexuizzleitizzle, thanx ta Lexx. None of it turns mah crazy ass on, n' he calls mah crazy ass tha porn biatch of Lexx, unphased wit what tha fuck I be bustin ta tha fans. (Years ago, mah most wildly ghettofab post was called 'Tied Up'.) I know itz unimaginable fo' his ass dat entire Lexx sex survey post aint much different from any other action sequences I peep up in sci-fi shows, except up in content. I know itz unimaginable ta hustlas dat I would muthafuckin ludd tha sheezy so much without one whispa of sexuizzle stimulation up in mah dome afta all tha work put tha fuck into dat by tha creators n' hustlas. I was never sold on tha sex of Lexx. Itz just simply a buckwild show, regardless, n' tha irony n' sadnizz embedded tha fuck into all tha sexuizzle innuendo is part of dat brilliizzle, cuz dat is straight-up real thuglife fo' a shitload of gangstas. Our sex lives is ironic n' sad. Da human condizzle be absurd fo' realz. And I is ghon be explorin all of dat up in detail.
     

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Laptop screencaps used in not for profit blog episode and character reviews and film study at grandfortuna.xanga.com and lexxperience.blogspot.com Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

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My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.

My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.

Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.

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