Xena in a Strange Loop.

This Xena fan art is based on story of one of the episodes of TV series Xena: Warrior Princess (XWP) titled Been There, Done That (Ep2 of Season 3).   

The story 

The plot of this XWP episode can be seen as the parody of 1993 film Groundhog Day with a twist of Romeo and Juliet. 

The 3 protagonists: Xena, Gabrielle and Joxer, are trapped in a town in which the day is repeating itself over and over, and Xena realizes that she is the only one who's aware of the situation. Gabrielle and Joxer simply don't remember what happened yesterday or the days before.

Xena is also aware that she has to find out the reason for this excruciating time loop in order to break it. In the end, Xena figures out that the cause is a "Romeo and Juliet" type of tragedy: a young man and a young woman from two feuding families fall in love. Without any hope of being together, the girl decides to take her own life. The boy doesn't want to lose the girl so he pleads with Cupid (God of love). Cupid cannot revive the girl, but grants a wish to the young man -- tomorrow (the day the girl dies) never come. So the girl's last day starts to repeats.

Xena then manages to save the girl with her chakram, and the time loop finally breaks. Tomorrow is a new day! 

The impossible waterfall  

For my fan art, the key point is the time loop in the story. Hence, the core element of my fan art is the "impossible waterfall" -- the paradoxical waterfall that keeps flow in a circle. The waterfall is not part of the XWP story and does not appear in the TV show. I just use it as the visual metaphor for the time loop (the repeating day). 

I borrowed the waterfall design by CJ Edwards from website https://www.moillusions.com/impossible-waterfall-optical-illusion/. 

A simplified version of
a impossible waterfall.

It's a simplified version of M.C. Escher's famous lithograph Waterfall (which in turn is inspired by Roger Penrose's Impossible Triangle).

Waterfall by M.C. Escher

With such a pre-exist design of vision illusion, it becomes easy to visually describe a time loop. "Time is like a river." One thing common between time and a river is the one directional flow, thus a contradictory loop of waterflow is perfect match for an absurd loop of time. 

I titled this fan art Xena in a Strange Loop. 

Strange Loop is a concept proposed by Cognitive scientist and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter. In his famous book Godel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter gives many examples of the strange loop, including Escher's artwork Waterfall. He further elaborated the concept in another book I am a strange loop.  

Hofstadter's books cover broad topics including music, art, Zen etc., but I think the discussion are mainly about mathematics, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. 

My understanding of Hofstadter's ideas are very superficial. However, I am curious whether the "repeating day" in the stories of Groundhog Day and XWP Been There, Done That can also be considered a strange loop. In such a plot, the strangeness come from the  protagonist's memory.