More than the pics I'd think it would be the friends who thought his Mom was HOT that would be weird. Having said that, inspite of the general "less is more" attitude to Aphrodite's clothing, there is also a cheerful wholesomeness (tho' she also has her spoilt side of things) that the actress imparted to her character. I think it's a cool mixture to bring to the character of Aphrodite. In some ways, she's played as a child-woman.
I hate to bring another medium into it but currently Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente are doing great work on The Incredible Hercules in the Marvel comics format. Here, Hercules is much more frivolous, ready for beer or brawl and so on. One of the things that the writers have stressed in the comics (sometimes subtlely and sometimes in beat-you-over-the-head manner) is how the immortal greek gods keep making the same mistakes again and again. Reason being they don't "need" to grow up. They are immortal, nothing hurts them and they can just keep going on and on. What's the point of "learning life's lessons" or "growing up" if you're immortal? I think Aphrodite's character in XenaWP and HercTLJ had a little bit of that to it. She was cheerfully spoilt and self-serving with an attitude of "why not?". I found her endearingly cute and tiresome and attractive at the same time.
In other words, she was HOT!!
To weigh in on who's better - I think Kevin Sorbo's action sequences seriously lacked the visual jazz that Xena could bring to the thing. As Hercules, he had like 2-3 things that he would do to hit the baddies. Xena (possibly because Lucy had great natural aptitude and dancing ability) always tried to do more with their fight scenes. Xena series tended to be willing to go more extreme than Herc, I thought. There was a lot of Xena online fandom but the shows never were so involving that I wanted to join the online fandom for long. The dark arcs tho' did get me hungering for what happens next.
Re - the Xena season finale, I didn't mind it as much as the other fans. It was visually stunning (another thing that I'd say Xena did better than Herc was the visuals - I particularly remember the ones where some characters are crucified in the snow (to be vague and non-spoilery) ). I think over the years they had shown Xena's "Evil" nature prior to her conversion to Good and she had enjoyed killing far too much. A reckoning was needed - while many eps had a reckoning even prior to this one, I was fine with the direction the ep took. And I liked the fact that the torch gets passed and so on.
Of course, what that ep needed was Joxer!
Just kidding...
