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Oooh, do we get to compare Robin to Xena? *grins from ear to ear* I was getting all set to apologize for not responding last night, but this is sooo much fun. Unwise, you're awesome.

I think all these responses are really interesting, because I haven't had enough information to make up my mind about Robin yet. I'm not averse to spoilers (for some reason, knowing what's coming actually makes things deeper and more interesting for me, rather than the reverse), but I haven't seen Robin living his life for long enough to decide whether I like him or not. I haven't even made up my mind about Robin/Marian yet. At first I really liked Robin, and so I was all set to ship them if Marian had the depth and courage to be a good match, and then I saw Marian as the Nightwatchman and decided she was awesome...and then I saw how Robin treated her, and now once again I'm not sure. You all make very good points that it seems like Robin treats her as his property -- that he thinks he's entitled to her affection and still sees her as the doe-eyed girl rather than as a woman in her own respect. I know I'm not jumping on that ship until Robin stops condescending to her, and it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.

Or, Jag put it better than I could have, anyway:

When he left, Marian was really still a girl. She hadn't started her Night Watchman's activities until well into the second year of his absence. So when he first comes back, he has no idea what she's been doing or is capable of. But overall, I don't think he's really a neanderthal towards women in general. It's just his lingering perception of her as the young doe-eyed girl in love with him.

I'll reiterate: right now there are still a couple of reasons for me to really like Robin. I like the idea of unresolved trauma from the war (one more aspect of my angst addiction, I guess) -- so far the war flashbacks that I've seen have been my favorite parts of the episodes. And there's something indefinable about Robin's situation that appeals to me. Having -- in one very real sense -- the weight of the world on his shoulders, having everyone expecting him to make everything better when he really doesn't have much more power to make changes than any other man.

If we're comparing RH and Xena, there's something else I thought of. We've often spoke about how, in X:WP, even though the setting is supposed to be ancient Greece, and sometimes the world does feel like ancient Greece, the attitudes of the characters are all very modern. Gabrielle waits until she's married to Perdicus to have sex at all, for example, and then expresses disappointment that he didn't also wait. And that was good -- I liked the dichotomy, because to me the series was never about the historical attitudes of people in ancient Greece. It was about how people would respond -- did respond -- should respond to the situations that come about in a mystical world. How to deal with rage, and vengeance, and despair -- who cares how people in ancient Greece actually did deal with these things. RH seems much more about the actual attitudes of people within the culture where it is set. And I think that's interesting too. The epic feel of this series so far comes about (at least in my opinion) in the way that there are just so many situations to which there is no good answer. All that struck home when I was watching Parent Hood, and the fight between Robin and Marian, where Marian says that working within the system is best, and Robin says that it won't always get the job done or the people fed. They both have valid points -- and realistically, they're both living on the very edges of getting themselves killed or getting other people killed for the things they're doing. The system is rotten from the core, but it's too big for one person to overthrow, and everyone's trying in his or her own way. There's no TGG to be found (sorry, The Greater Good) -- only lesser degrees of evil. I think that's interesting too. And I'd be okay exploring it if all the characters had modern attitudes...but they really don't. The Sherriff is always criticizing Robin for being weak, and Marian for not being married -- I really wonder how much of her real self that he sees.

So for that, I can excuse Robin for condescending to Marian and for sometimes slipping and thinking of Much still as a servant. (Marian on the other hand, handles it much better than I could have. I was cheering for her when she said that Robin's charms had stopped working on her years ago. It looks as if she's trying not to fall in love with him -- that she doesn't want to be tied to any man, almost as if that would hinder the work she's doing, and she's made that conscious choice. My respect for Marian just grows and grows.) I haven't yet seen him be really horrible to Much yet. I'm not looking forward to the moments you mentioned, if that's the case! I really like the dynamic between Much and Robin so far. A kind of big brother/little brother complete with teasing and inside jokes.

LadyKate, awesome banner -- I can't believe I hadn't noticed that yet, that you managed to get both Xena and Ares, and Guy and Marian on the banner.

I find it more difficult to get past Robin's flaws is that he's so in love with himself, whereas Xena, for all her arrogance, isn't. Xena is a much better person than she thinks she is, while Robin is not nearly as good a person as he thinks he is.

That's a very good observation. When I look at Robin, though, I see a lot more insecurity than he would want me to see. Part of it might be a girl/guy thing, too. Xena, for all her other flaws, I don't think cares one little bit about her reputation (unless she's in charge of an army, where showing weakness could be fatal) -- and why would she, she's already been so far into the darkness and done so many things to make people think badly of her. She had to build a kind of emotional armor against people's hatred of her, because otherwise she couldn't live with herself (that's one of the reasons I think she tells Gabrielle that the unexamined life is indeed worth living -- she can't bear to remember). Robin doesn't have that armor. People's hatred of him hurts him a lot more than he lets on...except in the first couple of episodes, his whole band of men had already picked up on it. So I think he masks that by acting happy-go-lucky and overconfident, and talking like he's in love with himself. He's almost in the same situation as Xena was at the head of an army -- everyone's looking to him to be his or her savior, and so he has to maintain the goodwill of the people (so he tells himself, for selfless reasons...when yeah, the truth is that people like Marian were doing this long before Robin came back, and he's not as altruistic as he'd like to think.) Okay, how about this? Robin is what Xena would have been if Xena hadn't had her own self-esteem so totally broken. He's less confident about showing the things he really thinks and feels, he puts more masks in place against the pressure, he buries pain more deeply, and he still sees himself as totally as a crusader / savior for the Good because he hasn't ever seen himself as something totally opposite -- he's still covering up his fear of finding out that he's not as good as he thought, rather than having faced down that fear and moved beyond it.

Or maybe I'm reading way more into Robin than is actually there, but this is an awful lot of fun. I wish Robin were a real person and I could sit down and ask him why he does the things he does. Since I can't, I imagine all this.

LadyKate,

Incidentally, Gisborne is another character who (I think) is a much better person than he thinks he is, but I can't imagine him in Xena's place in that exchange either, because he's way too insecure to actually say it outloud (except perhaps to Allan when very drunk ).

And how often does everyone get plastered? You know, don't tell me, that's one spoiler that I will wait to see in the episodes itself. (I still seriously doubt I could see more drunk people doing stupid things on RH than I did this summer at Brooks, though...oy!) We need a thread on Guy too.