The
cells of Nimona are largely simple
and high in number considering the page size of this book, but I know this was
originally a web comic. The first two
pages clearly illustrate the back and forth of dialogue between Nimona and Ballister. Later, the cells are larger and there’s more
diversity, but one of my favorite techniques is on page 96. Ballister and Goldenloin meet in a bar and
just as Goldenloin delivers the final insult that pushes Ballister to start the
fight, the cell is split between them.
Mainly where their faces line up, a white gutter runs between them,
showing a disconnection between them that leads to violence. Later, on page 184, Goldenloin finally
apologizes, over the physical barrier of Ballister’s prison. I liked how each moment between them with
strong emotions had these similar elements of barriers, real or felt.
From
the beginning, Nimona disrupts. She
disrupts Ballister’s life, challenging the quaint rules of his gentlemanly game
with Goldenloin, to insert a new, more vicious brand of evil. On a larger scale, she disrupts genre. She’s an unexpected character in a comic that
relies on our mythologization of medieval life.
The Lord of the Rings is responsible for
a lot of fascination with medieval lore, and its dominance in fantasy writing
that continues to this day, so it’s easy to assume a lot about this comic when
we see a character that looks like a knight.
We accept Ballister’s plan to threaten, but not kill, until Nimona
suggests otherwise. Unlike a lot of
villains in fantasy, and in classic comics, Nimona is happy to kill
people. Despite this, she’s also very
likeable, when compared to Ballister and Goldenloin, even if she is often used
to show how good Ballister really is.
It can be
dangerous for a genre to get too ingrained in its ways, something that fantasy
and newer fairytales can easily fall victim to.
I think that’s why Game of Thrones
has been so successful, it takes a familiar genre and breaks rules we didn’t
even know we had become accustomed to.
In Games of Thrones it feels
as if the heroes die, the knights are serial killers, and the princesses are
never saved. Nimona gave me the same feeling.
The person I like the most is homicidal, the villain is a sweet,
fatherly figure who hates to hurt people, and the brave knight is a sneaky
liar.
Nimona shines a
light on the roles and obstacles the other characters give themselves and
offers a chance at change. She is change
itself, after all. She also seems to
zero in on inconsistencies and short comings of the characters around her. When she gives Ballister a crown and he says
he doesn’t want to be king, she interrogates his short sightedness. Just like one dimensional villains in comics
that run for a long time, the villain here has no real long-term goal or
ambition that they have truly considered.
Later, when
Ballister is truly living up to his fatherly vibes and trying to shepherd
Nimona in her child form to the other part of herself, it’s easy to fall into
expectations of a man saving a little girl.
I knew this couldn’t happen, that Nimona wouldn’t let the story revert
to fairytale clichés. Instead, two
knightly men abandon her to save themselves and she is able to unite her forms
successfully on her own. She never stops
challenging what is “supposed to happen” and hijacks a simple story to be
something larger than any of the other characters can handle, creating a story
that questions and goes beyond the neat, well contained amusement of the
child’s fairytale.
-Iris
Hi Iris,
ReplyDeleteI love your analysis of tropes in this post! I personally think it is a wonderful, refreshing thing to see people becoming aware of tropes in storytelling, and using these tropes in new and interesting ways, such as subverting or inverting them. I also Love how, in Nimona, Stevenson made the decision to subvert of the tropes of the fantasy setting as well, by including aspects of a futuristic, tech savvy world, playing with the continual grouping of fantasy and scifi as genres in a very concrete, almost snarky way. For me, I think the embodiment of this would be the sequence when Nimona is trapped within the potion bottle shaped holding tanks, unable to break free, while a small part of her on the outside mutates, leading to very Star Wars battle scene with the Director. Stevenson even going so far as to have one cell in which the Director is depicted in a way that directly evokes Princess Lia. I especially love this considering Star Wars is, in and of itself, more of a fantasy that takes place in space, rather than true science fiction.
I love that you noted the disconnection between Blackheart and Goldenloin and how Stevenson used gutters and a cell barrier on the page to illustrate that. One thing I thought about when you brought up how Nimona disrupts things and even highlights how good Blackheart actually is, is that in this story, we're shown ways that the roles and tropes the characters inhabit are different from the characters themselves (i.e. Goldenloin is the "hero" but lies and is a dick, Blackheart is the "villain" but doesn't want to kill anyone no matter how evil they are).
ReplyDeletein some ways, Nimona is the lesser of two evils when compared to the Director since we're given Nimona's backstory in which we learn that she's mistrusting due to how she was betrayed and experimented on in her past while the Director wants order & power and doesn't care who is hurt in the process and is thus a kind of dystopian world-leader.
Thinking back to Hannah Jane's post, do you think that the story is being told from Blackheart's perspective or Nimona's? Why do we sympathize so much with Nimona and how would this story be different if it was told from Goldenloin's perspective in which we get a "hero" who slowly finds out that the government he's the champion of isn't actually as concerned for the well-being of their people as he thinks they are?
yes yes...nice and i wondered if you related Nimona to KShay at all--all that attitude?
ReplyDeleteThis is really fascinating.
ReplyDeleteI have a question, and your post made me think of it. Don't feel like you have to answer, but --
When we use traditional tropes as a device that we then subvert, as writers, do we end up creating a system of new tropes?
I think that's how t.v. shows got the whole "token minority" character in media. A family wasn't traditionally comprised of mixed races on television (I just found out that Lucille Ball and her husband Ricky Ricardo were the first mixed race couple on American t.v). Anyway, this might not be a craft comment I'm making -- or is it? -- but I worry about the intimate relationship between Ambrosius and B.B. as somehow becoming a "token" of that stereotypes that knights are tough. When you swing a pendulum completely in the other direction, you kind of land in the same place, only on the opposite side. I hesitate to express this, because it's important work, but I think it's probably important to consider how it is working in a larger way.