INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and I am extremely excited to welcome you to my first video about childhood, monstrosity, and queerness. This is a particular favorite subject of mine, for, I assume, obvious reasons, but it is also an incredibly relevant topic, considering how much discourse there currently is around the “appropriateness” of queer identities and even knowledge of queer identities for “the children.” What makes us so dangerous – so antithetical to the social construct of childhood innocence? And what happens when it is the child themself who is queer?

            These are big questions, and they cannot be adequately answered in but a single video essay. So, like I said, this is just the first video I am going to do on this topic. I intended this video to be all about the queer child shapeshifter, but it turns out that’s too big for just one video, too. Or at least, it is for me, especially when one of the examples I want to discuss is Nimona. I was also going to talk about My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and I Saw the TV Glow in this video, but once I was about seventeen pages deep into this script and was still on Nimona, I realized this was just gonna be a Nimona video. In my defense, there is both a movie and graphic novel to talk about here, and Nimona is one of my personal favorite monsters. So our other shapeshifters will have to wait until next video, and then after that, we’ll get to the queer child vampire. I am sure that I will be returning to this topic many more times in the channel’s future, as well, so if you have any good queer monster child recs, I very much welcome them in the comments.

            Spoilers for both the movie and graphic novel lie ahead, so if it’s been on your list, perhaps do yourself the favor of bookmarking this video, immediately immersing yourself in Nimona’s stories, and then you can come on back. But I am talking about some exciting future prospects for the channel at the end of the video, so make sure you don’t skip the conclusion. You can navigate there with the video’s chapters. But now, without further ado, let’s see if we can try to get to know that unknowable queer child.

“I’M A LOT OF THINGS!” NIMONA ON FILM

            When I was young and insufferable, I had a bit of an earned reputation as an adaptation grinch. If I liked a book, chances were I either hated or, more likely, refused to see the film. I have, in my elder years, tried to change these annoying ways, or at least not proclaim them so proudly anymore. After all, when it comes to monsters, adaptations are part of the deal. In my last video, I talked about how, according to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, monsters and monster stories change because they must: they take on different meanings to meet the cultural moment. That’s how you get versions of Dracula as different as Bram Stoker’s OG guy, Count Orlok of the 1920s Nosferatu, Count Orlok of the very recent Nosferatu, and Gary Oldman. In each decade, in each country, we’ve had particular fears and preoccupations that we needed to work out with these monsters; if they stayed the same, they would not be able to do their revelatory job. And, I mean, if we’re talking shapeshifters like we are today, it would be particularly ridiculous to stay the same.

            All of this is to say that I’m trying really hard to judge the movie on its own merits and now by how much more I like the graphic novel.

            To be clear! I very much do think the film has merits – lots of them. It’s just that I really love the graphic novel, and its messier characters and more ambiguous outcomes appeal to me enormously. But I do think it’s very interesting to look at how this story of a shapeshifter changed and why – and what that tells us about the queer child.

            So I’m going to work backwards and start with the movie. Nimona the film came out in 2023as a Netflix original. It tells the story of Ballister Boldheart, the first commoner to be accepted as a knight of the realm. Among his knightly cohort are the nobles who have trained for their position with the Institute their entire lives – including the delightfully named Ambrosius Goldenloin, his boyfriend. Ambrosius is descended directly from the line of the founding hero of the kingdom, Gloreth, who slayed a horrible monster in her day. On the day Ballister is meant to be knighted, his laser-sword starts operating seemingly of its own accord and kills the queen. Ballister is branded a villain and is left alone to try to clear his name.

            Alone, that is, until Nimona shows up, in the form of a teenage-ish girl. (Ballister initially guesses that she’s around ten, for which Nimona mocks him.) Nimona is intent upon becoming the new villain’s sidekick. She’s a bit disappointed to find out that he’s not actually a villain, but she takes this in stride, because clearing his name still means going up against the Institute and the kingdom, which Nimona very much wants to do, as violently as possible. She gets her chance to prove her sidekick bona fides after Ballister gets himself arrested trying to make the other knights see reason, and she busts him out of prison by turning into various and sundry creatures, including a rhinoceros and a whale. (The whale is surprisingly helpful.)

            Ballister is, to put it mildly, taken aback by his new sidekick’s abilities. He asks her, “What are you?” She answers, “I’m Nimona!” This conversation recurs several times throughout the film. The first time, Ballister follows it up with, “So you’re a girl and a rhino?” “I’m a lot of things!” Nimona says cheerfully. At other points in the movie, Nimona is equally – well, shifty – about who and what she “really” is. In her shark form – a favorite carried over from the graphic novel, that I was happy to see – she rebuffs Ballister’s request to just be “girl you” with “But I’m not a girl. I’m a shark!” Later, when she shapeshifts into an urchin boy, Ballister exhaustedly observes, “And now you’re a boy.” “I am today!” Nimona says.

            So like, the metaphors, they are not subtle. Not that they need to be. As my soon-to-be-wife and I frequently remind each other, subtlety is for chumps.

Despite having been trained to fight monsters like Nimona, Ballister slowly starts to appreciate his sidekick and to show genuine curiosity, instead of condemnation, about her shapeshifting. When he asks her if it hurts, she responds, “I feel worse when I don’t do it. Like my insides are itchy.” But when she shifts, she’s “free.” If she didn’t shift, she tells Ballister, she’d die – not “die-die,” but “I sure wouldn’t be livin’!”

Nimona appears to be completely self-assured and self-aware, unapologetic about her identity, until – a child sees her while she is once again up against the knights. The little girl cowers in fear. Nimona shifts down to a child form – not her usual youth self, but a young child, the same small size as the girl opposite her. This form has long hair instead of the older-looking-form’s undercut, so she is clearly presenting “little girl” here in both age and gender. But it doesn’t matter. The child rejects Nimona’s attempts to calm the situation, and she calls Nimona a monster. For the first time, the audience sees Nimona devastated by the outside world’s hatred and fear of her. She has so much fun wreaking the havoc everyone expects – until she doesn’t. Until she is not allowed to be a child.

Eventually, we see why this particularly rejection hurts Nimona so much. She is, apparently, immortal – or at least very, very old. So old, in fact, that she was an integral part of the founding of the thousand-year-old kingdom, with its knights and its Institute. She was the childhood friend of the hero Gloreth.

Which, well – childhood? Gloreth was a child, yes, but was Nimona? How old even was she a thousand years ago? The film doesn’t answer, because it doesn’t matter. What I love most about this backstory sequence in the film is that it shows Nimona in different forms seeking acceptance with various creatures – birds, deer, fish. Though she looks like them, it seems they can sense her difference, and all of them run away. But when she appears as a child to the child Gloreth, she is accepted for the first time. So what is Nimona’s true form? What is her core, her default? She doesn’t have one. That doesn’t mean that her forms are fake or deceptive; it means that all of them are real. Every form is her true form. She is a child, just as much as she is a whale or a rhino or a bird or a bear.

Unfortunately, it is in this last bear form that the adults from Gloreth’s village find her playing with Gloreth, and they assume that Nimona poses a danger. When Nimona tries to show them that everything is safe by turning back into a little girl, they are even more horrified. Out come the pitchforks and torches, and soon the whole village is alight – and Gloreth is against Nimona. And so one child became the founding hero of a kingdom, and the other remained the many things that she already was, alone.

In The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Kathryn Bond Stockton begins with the provocative statement, “If you scratch a child, you will find a queer, in the sense of someone ‘gay’ or just plain strange” (1). The child, as we construct that category in our society, is inherently contradictory. In previous videos, I’ve talked about how childhood is treated as a precious concept for two overarching reasons: the child’s innocence – that is, ignorance and moral purity – and the child’s futurity, the promise of a society – or race, or nation – that persists and improves over time. Innocence and futurity go hand in hand, in many ways; the former is seen as the guarantor of the latter. If innocence is preserved through childhood, then the child can grow into a good, moral adult – more moral, even, than the generation before, as long as we can avoid society corrupting them in the same ways. But innocence and futurity are also, by necessity, at odds with each other. Innocence is concentrated in the present moment; the future is when it is lost. The Child – and we’re breaking out the capital-C Child here, the Child as cultural symbol, not as real person – that Child is always being torn in two. It is a moment to be preserved, and a future to be fought for, but it can’t really inhabit both at the same time.

So that is one way in which the Child is queer. Queerness has an expansive definition. For identities, it’s the umbrella of the whole acronym. Anything that is not both cis and straight. In an academic sense, it tends to get even bigger: it is the nonnormative, a category of disruption to the systems of power as they stand within the status quo. It’s the thing that refuses to fit within the most powerful social constructions, the thing that shows us, uh-oh, our definitions might not all fit. So that covers a lot of ground, and I do think it always should be grounded in sexual and gender difference. But queer is a lot of things, all at once. One could imagine it as a shapeshifter. In writing about queer werewolves, Phillip A. Bernhardt-House writes, “Queer is an inherently comparative term” (160); you have to have a norm to have a queer that isn’t normative. But, despite childhood very much being governed by norms, we’ve also just seen that childhood also contains multiple social meanings, even when those meanings contradict themselves. So maybe queerness and childhood can be complementary categories?

Yeah, well, if you’ve spent any time paying attention to any ways in which these two categories are discussed together, you will know that a lot of people would not agree. Queerness and childhood have frequently been positioned as diametrically opposed, both throughout history and unfortunately very much today. This has to do with both the innocence and the futurity. Regarding the latter, a major part of futurity, as it is constructed and imagined certainly in the society in which I live, is reproductive futurity. The nuclear family unit, in its strict patriarchal form, reproduces itself biologically. To keep that chain going, heterosexual relations must occur. The persistence of this family institution is considered integral to the persistence of all other institutions, up to and including the nation. So like, the stakes get pretty high when a queer person comes along and doesn’t buy that version of what society’s selling.

And if queerness is a threat to futurity, then it must also be a threat to innocence, since these concepts are so closely intertwined, despite their contradictions. The opposition to queerness has always been deeply grounded in disgust. Disgust is a useful affect. It is highly persuasive. It’s the thing that keeps our bodies safe, after all – from bad food, from waste, from the things that get us sick. Moral disgust keeps us from acting in antisocial ways that would get us ostracized from society – and often, with good reason. Most of us – hopefully everyone watching – are disgusted by the thought of actually taking a human life, for example. The thought of the violence that we would have to do to a body to make it stop living gets tied up with what it would feel like to be responsible for the ending of another consciousness. It’s not just abstractly bad; it’s visceral. This also means that if an ideology or a system of power is able to hijack that disgust response, to induce it at the thought of a particular notion, that’s really powerful. And queerness is so rooted in the fundamentals of social identity. It’s sex and gender: hard to get older or deeper than that in terms of categories our species places importance upon when organizing a society. Of course, if something is disgusting, it pretty much by definition is not pure. Not innocent. Not for kids.

So the capital-C child is not supposed to have really any knowledge of sex, but they are also supposed to be a future straight person. They are supposed to have a concept of gender, but the one that conforms with what has been handed down to them within their nuclear family unit; it doesn’t require any input from the Child themself. The knowledge of queer existence can deal a fatal blow to both the Child’s present innocence and future reproductive citizenship. And again, this is all capital C Child: the Child is as much an idea, a construct just like normativity, queerness, the future, innocence.

But where does that leave actual real human kids? Especially kids who aren’t straight and/or cis in the present or future?

There are some, of course, who would argue that there is no such thing as a queer child, but those people are bigots and we don’t have to listen to them. But many people who participate in the preservation of the status quo – all those constructs that I just talked about – do so largely unconsciously, and there are plenty of people who live in a way that supports cis-straight norms who still acknowledge a) the existence of queer people and b) the fact that those queer people were once kids. It’s just that we hit a paradox there, because when does childhood end and queerness begin, if the two categories are not supposed to overlap? So from the perspective of that queer child, this is where Stockton’s idea of “growing sideways” comes in: “One can remember desperately feeling there was simply nowhere to grow. What would become of the child one feared oneself to be? For adults, then, who from a young age felt they were attracted to others in wrong ways, the notion of a gay child—however conceptually problematic—may be a throwback to a frightening, heightened sense of growing toward a question mark. Or growing up in haze. Or hanging in suspense—even wishing time would stop, or just twist sideways, so that one wouldn’t have to advance to new or further scenes of trouble” (3).

In other words, as a queer child, your present is at odds with your self, because what you feel is supposed to be off-limits to the innocence of childhood, and your future – the one for which you are being raised, and that upward growth is that central metaphor Stockton wants to explore – that future is a future you already know, in whatever vague way, you’re not going to fit. So you’re stuck in an impossible moment, neither present nor future, not going forward or up, but sideways.

I think that this concept of growing sideways is illustrated so interestingly in Nimona. Nimona temporally, time-wise, is not actually a child. She is ancient. But she hasn’t grown up. When she appears in a human guise, she appears as a youth – that’s the form she appears in most often – or as a young child. The only exception is when she’s impersonating someone else, like Ballister. When she is meant to be recognized as Nimona, the only identity that she continually asserts, she appears young, because what would adulthood even look like for Nimona? Her queerness, her difference, is so great that apparently she can’t even imagine it. She can’t arrive at the kind of future identity that is required by the rigid societies in which she has lived for a thousand years, so she grows sideways into a million forms, none of which are “grown up.”

This endlessly stretched present moment of childhood that Nimona experiences is full of pain. When Ballister discovers that she is Gloreth’s beast of ancient history and begins to draw his sword on her, she runs away and, besieged by memories of rejection, she once again takes that enormous destructive form. Design-wise, something that I really like is that this form does not have clear edges. Wisps of darkness stream away from her: she is both uncontainable but also losing herself. She is attacked like any kaiju-like creature – bombed, shot at – and she drags herself to the statue of Gloreth and lets loose a truly heart-rending scream as she prepares to impale herself upon the sword. Ballister stops her. He says, “I see you, Nimona, and you’re not alone.” She, Nimona, is this form, but she is also the battered youth that she turns back into to collapse into Ballister’s arms.

Ballister’s textual queerness is doing a few things here. Clearly, in the imagined world of the film, being gay is … well, not queer, in the sense that it does not disrupt any status quo within the kingdom. It’s fully accepted and unremarkable for Ambrosius, the descendent of Gloreth herself, to have a boyfriend, so the social constructs in this setting are clearly not the same as ours. But of course, the only people watching the film are people in the actual world, so while Ballister’s identity may not be othered for him, we recognize the meanings associated with it for us. His acceptance of Nimona, therefore, reads as a queer adult creating a space for a queer youth, despite the actual age of their characters. This, I think, is aspirational and affirming for the kind of dual age audience that I think this film is geared towards. Queer adults with memories of the graphic novel were drawn to it, certainly, as were children – queer or otherwise – who wanted to watch a fun animated film. (It isn’t for like super little kids, but it’s rated PG, and I do think its age appeal stretches younger than the audience for the graphic novel, but I’ll talk about that more in a bit.)

Ballister is also othered within the world of the film for his class, so the character does still have that experience of being a hated outsider – a failure and a threat to the future. Literally, the Director of the Institute admits that she saw Ballister’s non-noble knighthood as “the first crack in the wall” that would destroy the preservation of the kingdom. A big part of his character development in the movie is realizing that the kind of future the Director has in mind is not actually worth fighting for. It is literally enclosed, to the detriment of the people within it. It takes a monstrous shapeshifter like Nimona – someone who quite literally does not fit within boundaries – to alter the course of this future, to allow Ballister and the whole kingdom to grow sideways, beyond the walls.

The screenplay for Nimona was written by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, and it was directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane. However, the original creator of the characters, N.D. Stevenson, was an executive producer and did provide some screenplay materials. So while the story was changed significantly, Stevenson was very involved with the adaptation process. Many people may know Stevenson from his work as the showrunner of the rebooted She-Ra, another piece of queer kids’ media that I’ll probably talk about at some point in the channel’s future. Stevenson is transmasculine; according to Wikipedia, he came out as nonbinary in 2020 and then transmasc and bigender the following year, along with his new name and he/him pronouns. The “ND” stands for Nate Diana; Diana is his birth middle name, and he kept it to indicate that dual nature of his gender identity. Stevenson started working on the webcomic that then became the graphic novel Nimona considerably before these personal revelations. Nimona began its life in 2012, when he was a twenty-year-old college student. As someone who wrote a whole entire gay werewolf novel manuscript while I still thought I was straight, all I can say is solidarity, brother. Stevenson commented on how Nimona’s history intertwines with his own in an interview when the movie came out. He said that her shapeshifter abilities came from a feeling of being “something more than my body,” a feeling he said made more sense to him once he transitioned, but also that he believes is something that everyone has experienced to some degree. He went on: “This was a character that came out of a lot of pain, and that is reflected in her. She has pain, she has darkness. She feels alone and unloved, and to see so many people see themselves in Nimona and love her and accept her, in some ways I feel like it is reaching back to who I was then and just offering comfort and offering acceptance.”

Keeping that origin story in mind, I want to take us now back to the graphic novel. Who was this little shapeshifter in her first iteration, and how can we love her best?

“I WAS ALWAYS LIKE THIS”: NIMONA ON THE PAGE

In the graphic novel, Ballister is not Ballister Boldheart at all, but Lord Ballister Blackheart. He is already an established villain with animosity towards the Institution when the story begins. Nimona claims that she’s been sent by “the Agency” as his new sidekick; apparently, this is a real governing body for villains, but she wasn’t actually sent by them. She’s just “a huge fan” of Blackheart’s work: “You’re Ballister Blackheart, the biggest name in supervillainy!” This Ballister did train with the Institution, but his dreams fell apart differently than his film counterpart’s. Here, both he and Ambrosius grew up in an Institution orphanage, as revealed in an extra Christmas comic at the back of the book. But Ambrosius was chosen as the golden boy – probably has something to do with that long, flowing blond hair – and was set up to sabotage Ballister. The Institution chose Ambrosius for their champion – and chose Ballister for their villain, because what point does a knightly institution have if you don’t have a villain? And in fact, as a villain, Ballister has communication with the Institution; this is all part of the role. Ambrosius and Ballister were set to joust against one another, and the Director provided Ambrosius with a weaponized lance. At first Ambrosius did not intend to use it, as he and Ballister did, in fact, have a relationship with one another. It’s not as explicitly romantic in the graphic novel, but like it’s also not not. The Director cruelly needles Ambrosius about it when he refuses to kill Ballister, and the implication is clear that they were romantically involved. Anyway, Ambrosius started to lose the joust because his balance was off with the new weapon. So … he activated it, and in doing so, he destroyed Ballister’s arm. Ballister’s robotic prosthetic is part of what visually marks him as a villain, in a conscious play on a lot of old disabled monster tropes which I’ve talked about in previous videos. In the movie, Ambrosius still cuts off Ballister’s arm, but only to try to disarm him when the laser sword starts going off. But here, Ambrosius makes a horrible choice out of pride. For years, he insists it was an accident, but he eventually admits that it wasn’t. By this point, Ballister has had plenty of time to bitterly grow into his villainous role.

So already we have a darker story here, with our characters more willing to do the wrong thing. But Ballister still isn’t into killing; he tries to tamp down on Nimona’s gleefully murderous impulses in favor of pulling heists that reveal the hollowness of the Institution. He and Nimona discover that the Institution is gathering jaderoot, a powerful poison, for their weaponry. This runs the risk of poisoning the entire populace, which Ballister seeks to expose. So Nimona has no need to convince Ballister that the system is rigged; in his original iteration, he already knows this. Neither does Nimona have to convince him to accept her shapeshifter abilities. When she first turns into a shark, he realizes that she might be useful as a sidekick, after all. In fact, he is even interested in the scientific properties of her abilities, and whether they can be tested – but Nimona shuts that down immediately. She is no “lab rat,” she says, in a way that makes clear that she has been one before.

This brings us to Nimona herself. She is still the fabled beast of Gloreth’s time here, but we don’t get the whole backstory that we’re given in the film. Instead, Nimona’s animosity is not just towards those who have not accepted her, but specifically at those who have tried to “help” her in the past. She is less concerned with children, as well; she takes her child form not to connect with other kids, but to startle adults into not attacking an “innocent.” She takes advantage of this social construct with pleasure. Look at her! She’s so happy! However, she still clearly enjoys having a close relationship with Ballister; the companionship is clearly unfamiliar to her, and she values their friendship. The last thing she wants is to be changed by anyone else, particularly someone she cares about.

Unfortunately, the Institution manipulates this care that she has for Ballister and traps Nimona trying to rescue him. The Institution wants to use her just like they’re using the jaderoot: to make themselves a more powerful and dangerous nation. They discover that “Every time she changes form, every single cell in her body is destroyed a new ones are generated in their place. She’s not molding herself into new forms; it’s like every time her whole body dies and a new one grows in its place” (192). This is such an interesting take on the shapeshifter: simultaneous destruction and creation of the self, over and over and over again. Very much not the trajectory of “growing up” that is expected, where one’s identity moves along a nice even track from innocence to normative adulthood and then stays there, unchanging and unbroken. So really, how could Nimona be a child at all? She must be something else, the product of someone else’s influence and monstrosity.

At least, that is what the Director thinks. She refuses to believe that Nimona was not “made,” despite Nimona’s protests: “No one made me. I was always like this” (196). The Director counters, “I know an abomination when I see one” (196). I probably don’t need to point out that “abomination” is a loaded term when it comes to queerness, as this is the English translation of the word often used in Biblical passages that has been weaponized against us. The insistence that Nimona must have been “made” also calls to mind the long history of accusations that queer adults recruit or groom children into queer identities. Since queerness is constructed as incompatible with innocence, a child has to have been corrupted into queerness; they can’t embody it independently, just as a feature of their own humanity. We’ve seen this rhetoric in Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign from the 1970s, in which she successfully rallied a political movement against equal employment rights on the grounds that if gay people were allowed to be teachers, they would nefariously recruit little innocent children to their ungodly ranks left and right. Zero hyperbole in that sentence, by the way; that was Bryant’s exact line of argument. But that shouldn’t be surprising, because like a regenerating monster itself, that rhetoric has new, vicious life in the contemporary era, in which social media accounts like Libs of TikTok lead the charge against any vestiges of acknowledgement of queer existence around children, with any such activities being cast as predatory grooming. So the queer, non-adult body of Nimona is perceived as having been corrupted by an outside force; she has to be unnatural, to be monstrous, or else all of our social constructs would be wrong.

The Institute has trapped Nimona in their container for jaderoot, which she cannot escape, but they take some of her blood for testing. At this, Nimona gloats her triumph: “You really don’t know anything, do you? I mean, you just really didn’t do your research at all. If you had, you’d know that this has all happened before. And you’d know what happened to the others who thought they could break me. … The breaking’s not the hard part, though. Humans are so easy to break” (198). In answer to the Director’s question of “What are you?”, Nimona says, “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You went looking for a monster. Well, here I am” (198). With that, the blood sample transforms into a giant, fire-breathing beast.

For many people, there are only so many times that they can hear they are a monster before they believe it. But while this internalization of monstrosity can, of course, be harmful, there are also many who have found refuge in the monstrous. One powerful piece of writing that exemplifies this move is Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” She writes, “Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart” (249). This rage is her right and a protective force, an affirmation of how she has had to live in the society we have. She explains, “I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself” (246). That is a fine needle to thread. Nimona also protests that she is not a weapon: certainly not one for the Institution to use. But still there are wounds.

Ballister and Ambrosius argue about what to do. Ambrosius wants to go after the rampaging beast, but Ballister wants to rescue the part of Nimona still in the cage. Earlier in the story, Ballister and Nimona had come across a device that can temporarily prevent her from transforming, and he admits of the existence of this device to Ambrosius – thinking to buy himself some time to rescue the other part of Nimona and calm her down. They use the device to freeze the beast form, but that also means that she can’t heal from the wounds she is being dealt.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, the other half of Nimona has turned into her child self. In the one scrap of true backstory we get from the graphic novel, we learn that the possibly actual child Nimona fought off raiders to her village by transforming into a beast. Her parents turned her over to authorities for experimentation, claiming that she was a changeling, a replacement of their real human child. We as the reader are not told if this is true or not; it appears that Nimona herself may not know. She just wants her mom and dad. Instead, she is taken and ripped to pieces.

Once again split in two, Nimona reverts to this scared child, and she tells Ballister that while she is split, it is not safe to transform into any body that could more easily protect herself: “I’m not supposed to split myself like that. It makes me … unstable. The strong part stays and the rest disintegrates” (229). Which: what a heartbreaking sentence! If queerness and childhood are, again, seen as incompatible, that means that actual queer children have to give one up. Childhood is typically a time of rapid growth and learning, and that’s difficult and can be scary. Children deserve to have adults in their lives to help them experience all these new things with joy and excitement and trust that there is someone who will take care of them when times get tough. All people of any age deserve that, but children especially need that continually reinforced, due to all of the cognitive and physical needs that come with being a new person. And I’m obviously thinking about the kids I have in my life right now – particularly, my niece and nephew – and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t make me really emotional to imagine kids like them having to fear that they could lose all of that if the adults around them discovered that there was something about who they are that would cancel out that category of “childhood.” That could make the people in positions of power over their lives say, like the Director says, “I know an abomination when I see one.” But the other choice is giving up the queer part instead, and that’s a) impossible and b) another kind of death, another kind of splitting of the self. So which part gets to stay, and which part must disintegrate? That’s what Nimona is faced with, and that’s what real kids are faced with, when they aren’t allowed to embody both childhood and queerness at the same time.

And sometimes even we well-meaning adults get it wrong. Ballister brings the child Nimona back to her beast self, but she can’t fuse because of the device. When she realizes that Ballister brought the device that can trap her, she says, “You’re just like all the others.” Ballister pleads with Nimona to let Ambrosius, who her beast self has gravely injured, go free, and then he will turn off the device. But, in my absolute favorite panel of the entire story, Nimona – both of her – says, “No” (237).

This double refusal, from the monster and the child, is everything to me. Nimona refuses to sacrifice any part of herself. Both the child and the monster take protective stances towards the other, like each can guard herself against the world. Is it right to keep hurting Ambrosius? Shouldn’t she let him go? We as the readers at this point know that Ambrosius is a complicated person who wants to make up for the mistakes of his past – but he’s still hurt Nimona. Why should she pose less of a threat to him when he tried to destroy her? Does that make her monstrous? Sure. Yeah. Don’t create the conditions for monstrosity – draw boundaries too narrow for people, for kids, to fit into – if you’re not prepared for the consequences.

Ballister says that he can help Nimona, but she responds, “You’re not the first one who thought you could HELP me … or FIX me … or SAVE me … You’re not the first one who thought you could CARE about me until you found out how bad it really was. They called you a monster too. But in the end you still took their side” (238). Ballister protests that she’s not a monster, but that’s not the right move either: “YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ME!” Ballister is forced to defend himself against her, and he incapacitates her and leaves with Ambrosius. The two former knights escape just in time to not be killed in the jaderoot meltdown. Ballister assumes that Nimona is lost.

The Institution is defeated along with Nimona, but Ballister does not feel triumphant. At the hospital, watching over Ambrosius, he snaps back at a doctor who calls Nimona a “monster.” But then, moments later, that doctor reappears, and is confused when Ballister believes she was just there. She sees that someone has filled out the patient chart with a drawing of a shark. Ballister goes running and gets one last glimpse of Nimona in her most familiar form, who gives him a small smile and wave before disappearing. In the epilogue, Ballister muses, “I can only hope I reached her in some small way. I can only hope that if she does come back … She’ll know me for who I am. A friend.” These words appear over Ballister walking away arm in arm with Ambrosius, the Institute no longer standing between their own queer relationship.

The graphic novel is a much more bittersweet story than the film, but not without hope. Knowing the positioning of this story in Stevenson’s own journey, I find that rather powerful, and it also makes me appreciate the more unambiguously happy ending of the film as a bit of a statement that sometimes things do work out. I think it also makes sense because the graphic novel’s intended audience, as I mentioned before, does skew older than the film; I’d say like PG-13. I still am so drawn to the ambiguity of the graphic novel – the uncertainty, the remaining inability to fit all the pieces together. That in-betweenness is where so many queer kids live, and Nimona can remain there. She does not have to be one thing. The monster and the child will be there for each other, until she can finally truly trust that someone else can be, too.

CONCLUSION: WHAT ARE YOU?

            I tend to conclude my videos with some real life examples of how ideas about monstrosity and childhood, as revealed through these stories about monsters, impact real kids. For this one, it was hard to know where to start. I decided to go with the most recent example I could find, a CNN article written less than an hour before I wrote this part of the script on October 6^th, that bears the headline “Supreme Court to decide if states may ban attempts to ‘convert’ gay and transgender youth.” So-called conversion therapy is the pseudo-psychological practice of attempting to change someone’s sexual or gender identity. A lot of these programs are religious in nature, although actually not all of them are. It has clinically been proven not to work, and it is deeply traumatic. I think that this is also a good example to think about with regards to Nimona’s experience of experimentation at the hands of those who wanted to “help” or “fix” her. Those words imply a restoration, but in practice it is actually destruction: destruction of the child’s whole self. No wonder Nimona sees offers of help as violence.

Half of the United States have banned the practice of conversion therapy, but their ability to keep those bans is what the Supreme Court will soon preside over. The argument that the defense for conversion therapy plans on making is that a ban in their case is an infringement upon the freedoms of speech and religion. Now, this court has upheld states’ rights to ban things before – unfortunately, one of those things being gender-affirming healthcare for minors. Infringement upon kids’ freedoms did not seem to be a concern there, and I have, I think, pretty founded concerns that they will not be centered in the upcoming case about conversion therapy, either, despite that fundamentally being what this is all about.

            But how do we imagine children’s freedoms in the first place? To what extent are freedom and our construct of innocence even compatible? I think innocence lends itself to notions of freedom as freedom from: freedom from worry, freedom from responsibility. But what about freedom to? Freedom to choose, freedom to express oneself, to change? To transform? Far too often, it seems that we cannot imagine the ability to do those things and remain “innocent” – in either the sense of ignorant or pure. The only change allowed is the freedom to grow up. Freedom to grow sideways has historically never been an inalienable right. And the fear that a child might do so is so politically powerful, in ways that the current American presidency, congress, senate, and court systems have been all too happy to exploit.

            A lot of times, when we think about queer monstrosity and childhood, we think about the specter of the queer adult preying upon the child victim, and that is a central facet of how this metaphor of monstrosity and the construction of childhood are used in tandem to exert power over queer people and attempt to squash us out of social life. But we can’t be squashed out of social life, for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that we don’t recruit. Kids turn out queer regardless of adult influence, because the human condition is vast – vaster than most human societies have ever really wanted it to be. We’ve always been “a lot of things.” So those kids who are queer are seen as victims until they’re not; until they’re officially monsters, too. Graphic novel Nimona’s parents declare her a changeling: a monstrous replacement of the child that was supposed to exist. Practices like conversion therapy are, somewhat ironically given the name, imagined as a means of preventing change and changelings, or at least causing a reversion instead of a conversion: turn back into the child, don’t turn into a monster. Keep those categories incompatible. Stay in the shape that society has outlined.

            But, again and again, the monster and the child say no.

            Like Ballister, I want every Nimona to know me as a friend. They need friends right now. One thing that I can offer is a space to read and learn from and create their own stories. So what I am aiming to do in the new year, as I alluded to all the way back in my channel intro video, is start up a program of book clubs and mentorship services for teens. In these programs, we will read monster stories, have a space to discuss them with peers, and then participants will develop independent activist, creative, and/or academic projects that they can share with their communities. I will provide mentorship throughout the completion of these projects, assisting with brainstorming, writing, revising, and communicating with community partners.

            Now, to be clear, not all of the people who sign up for these programs, like, need to be queer. But I did run a monster book club for high school students as my doctoral dissertation project, and it turns out that a lot of the young people who sign up for such a thing are the ones who already relate to monsters – so the majority of the kids I worked with on that project were queer youth, just by virtue of the topic. It was an incredible experience that I will be talking more about in future videos as I get closer to starting up these new programs. But the short version is that I want to make educating about monster stories and working with young people to use this monster metaphor to tell their own stories my career.

            Which is where perhaps some of you might come in. I obviously want the programs I run to be accessible to young people regardless of socioeconomic circumstances, but I also live in a world where things cost money. So I am going to be starting a Patreon, and I also have super thanks enabled on my videos now. I’m going to do a short launch video for the Patreon later this week, so you’ll see that in a few days, but if you want to get a jump on that, there will be a link in the description, because it will be live by the time this video goes up. In the meantime, the most helpful things you could do if you’d like to support my future projects is to subscribe to the channel and share my videos. The more known an entity my work can become, the more inexpensive and accessible youth services I’ll be able to offer in the future.

            I have also visions of future Discord servers in my head with broader versions of the book clubs, as well. I can only realistically mentor a limited number of people at a time, but if people are just interested in the book clubs, then I can definitely foresee running multiple chapters of those through Patreon (and not necessarily only for teens). So those clubs are not set up yet, but if that is something you may have interest in, let me know.

            I know I’m still a brand new baby YouTuber over here and my channel is quite small, but the influx of support over the last month has been unbelievably appreciated, and I’m so grateful to all of you for watching. It feels amazing to write things that matter to people, and this past month has made a future of monster education seem like it may actually be in my reach.

            With that said, the next full video is going to take a little bit longer! In my defense, I have a very good excuse: I am getting married this Saturday. So instead of my usual two weeks in between video essay, it’s going to be three until we continue this conversation about queer shapeshifter children, but rest assured that I will be doing the very gay activity of wedding a woman in the meantime. Thank you so much for watching, and please give this video a like if you enjoyed it – I certainly enjoyed making it. If you have not yet subscribed, please go ahead and hit that button and ring the bell for notifications. When we return to our shapeshifters, I shall be a married monster. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon on The Monster & The Child for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• Nimona, by N.D. Stevenson (2015)
• Nimona, dir. Nick Bruno & Troy Quane (2023)

References:

• Bernhardt-House, P.A. (2008). The Werewolf as Queer, the Queer as Werewolf, and Queer Werewolves. In M.J. Hird & N. Giffney (Eds.), Queering the Non/Human (pp. 159-184). Ashgate.
• Cohen, J.J. (1996). Monster Culture: Seven Theses. In J.J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (pp. 3-25). University of Minnesota Press.
• Fritze, J. (2025, Oct. 6). Supreme Court to decide if states may ban attempts to ‘convert’ gay and transgender youth. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/06/politics/supreme-court-chiles-conversion-therapy-colorado
• Gayety. (2023, Jul. 6). ND Stevenson Reflects on the Creation of ‘Nimona’ [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbUY3Fv3XtE
• McKinnon, S., Robison, S., & Reynolds, R. “I could tell I wasn’t like everybody else”: Toward a History of Queer Childhoods in Australia. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 13(2), 268-287.
• Stockton, K.B. (2009). The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke University Press.
• Stryker, S. (1994). My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. GLQ, 1(3), 237-254.