Last night, I opened Netflix and was looking for something to watch. My 13-year-old daughter said there was a movie she wanted to see. In her words, "It's an animated movie about a castle guard who gets falsely accused of a crime and a girl who helps him clear his name."
"Is it Japanese? It sounds like an anime."
"No. It's called Nimona."
I looked it up. Rated PG, drawn in a style similar to Don Bluth's. Alright, why not? It turned out to be entertaining, surprising, funny, cute, suspenseful, and sad. It was also perhaps the most pernicious, soul-rotting piece of trash I've ever seen. If A Clockwork Orange had been a Pixar film marketed to kids, it might come in second, because at least in Clockwork, you had a sane writer telling a story about a sociopath. It's was meant to be shocking, because the writer himself saw it as shocking. In Nimona, though, the sociopath is telling the story from their own perspective.
You know, sometimes it happens that you search for the answer to a question only to feel crestfallen when you finally find it. For me, that question was, "What motivates school shooters?" Mental illness wasn't invented in the 1990's, and kids had much more access to much heavier firepower in previous generations. Prior to 1934, you could order a machine gun through the mail with no background check. In fact, clear up into the 1960's, a kid could walk into a hardware store on their own and pay cash for a handgun, and nobody would raise an eyebrow. I knew, then, that whatever changed to make school shootings suddenly become a commonplace phenomenon where, previously, they were unheard of, it wasn't an issue of guns being more available or more powerful. There was something different about the young people who were pulling the triggers.
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| Shooting used to be considered such harmless, family fun that carnivals would hand over a loaded gun to any stranger with a nickel to spend. And no massacres resulted. |
I've similarly heard people ask, often rhetorically, why there are so many more transgender children now than there ever used to be. The response is typically that the number has always been the same, but before society was as accepting as it is now, those kids had to keep their gender identities hidden. Now that they feel safe coming out, they're much more visible. This explanation doesn't withstand even the lightest of scrutiny, however. Transgender youth have an incredibly high suicide rate; the explanation for this by trans rights activists is that these kids kill themselves because they don't feel accepted. It stands to reason, then, that the suicide rate among closeted trans kids should have been much, much higher than among trans kids who feel accepted and safe enough to publicly transition. At the same time that transgender identities became common in American schools, there should have been a corresponding precipitous drop in child suicides. But there wasn't. The explanation is a smokescreen. More kids now identify as trans than ever did before. Like school shootings, it's an idea that caught on with a generation and became part of how they see and interpret the world.
I've witnessed as many males who identify as women or non-binary express anger towards and even commit acts of violence against women, particularly those women they describe as "TERFS"--Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Now I understand why. Let me hasten to add that when I say, "I understand," I don't mean that I sympathize. It's merely that I'm now aware of what's going on in the minds of the perpetrators. I know why they think they're justified, even though I maintain that they are not.
I know why the BLM protesters in 2020 felt justified in burning down buildings and attacking police. I get why there are so many unattractive Instagram models and the like whose whole lives seem to revolve around taking pictures of themselves and then getting involved in drama when they get something other than praise. I get it now...but it doesn't make me feel any better.
Our victim culture has created a generation of narcissists who see a person's worth as deriving from their victimization. Having been instructed by older generations to be inclusive and tolerant, they've misconstrued that as meaning that if they're different, that makes them special and everyone owes them acceptance and approval unconditionally. They feel that if anyone ever rejects them or judges them in any way (even deservedly), they have been wronged. They feel that when they are wronged in this way, they are justified in taking limitless revenge, all out of proportion to the perceived slight. To them, there is no greater crime than someone making them feel bad. So if someone mocks them, judges them, rejects them, or simply unintentionally uses language that causes them to be reminded of their own shortcomings, these kids feel that such a grave crime has been committed against them that all should rally to their defense, and that there is great virtue and cause for celebration in destroying the offender as completely as possible.
There's only so much destruction one offender can absorb, and sometimes, a kid's rage is bigger than that, so they lash out at anyone who seems like they might be remotely supportive of the offender. And if even that doesn't leave them feeling satisfied, then they'll lash out randomly at the general public, or at a broad demographic (usually the same as the offender). Think of the mass shooters who targeted women, Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Christians, or everyone at a particular school or workplace. You might be thinking, "But those are all marginalized groups." Doesn't matter. The assailant got their feelings hurt by some member of that group, so now everyone in that group is the villain in their story.
On top of all that, because being seen as marginalized now grants one great status and authority, all the kids want to be seen as marginalized. If you're a white kid, and not an ethnic or religious minority, not disabled, not abused or otherwise traumatized, then a transgender identity provides an easy way to get in on the victimization. Otherwise, you've simply got no street cred and need to distinguish yourself through old fashioned achievement and excellence. What a pain that is! So now, we've got a bunch of straight, white, young males who couldn't compete against their male peers (or felt that they couldn't) because they're not as strong, brave, handsome, skilled, extroverted, etc., who feel that if they just paint their fingernails purple and go by they/them, they're suddenly entitled to be treated as special and entitled to whatever accommodations they wish, because in victim culture, the rejects are automatically the good guys and entitled to compensation, while the people who rejected them are automatically the bad guys, regardless of the reason for the rejection.
We've planted in these young people a value system in which they derive their self-worth by seeking pity, and the way they get it is to depict others as bullies for not showing them unconditional acceptance, even when they behave in unacceptable ways.
It plays out something like this:
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Minority: *steals something from a store*
Store manager: *sees them* Stop!
Minority: *looking offended* Excuse me?
Store manager: I saw you steal that. Put it back, or I'm calling the police.
Minority: *gasps in shock* How dare you!
Store manager: We've got you on video.
Minority: So? It's just stuff. Stealing's no big deal. It didn't even cost a lot. Quit trying to change the subject. The real crime here is that you're a racist! You're just singling me out because I'm [fill in the victim group]
Store manager: I don't care what [color/ethnicity/sex/etc.] you are. You committed a crime!
Minority: *loudly addressing everyone within earshot* Y'all see what this racist piece of shit is tryna do? He say our kind ain't allowed in here. Our money's the wrong color or some shit. I shop here every goddam day, I ain't done nuthin'! This ugly-ass cracker's a racist! You betta get up out my face before I have to start something.
Everyone in the vicinity: *whips out cell phones and starts recording video*
Middle-class, white, liberal bystander: (Ooh, here's my chance to use my privilege and score some salvation points against my time in Privilege Purgatory!) *addressing store manager* Hey! You need to sit down and shut up. It's not all about you. This person is speaking their truth. You've had 400 years to tell your side of the story. You need to be questioning your participation in a system that makes it necessary for this person to take what they need when you should be working to remove inequalities instead.
Minority: *feeling encouraged by the crowd, physically assaults Store Manager*
The phone-holders cheer and cry for more. The beating continues until Minority feels better or gets tired. Police arrive. Now their arresting the assailant is decried as a great injustice by both the assailant and the crowd of phone holders.
Middle-class, white, liberal bystander: *going for extra credit, pulls out YouTube law degree and addresses police* She doesn't have to identify herself! You can't arrest her without her consent! Do you have a warrant? Show me your warrant. You have to have one. That's in the Constitution. What's your badge number? I want to talk to your supervisor. You can't ask her questions until she has a lawyer. That's a violation of her pursuit of happiness. You didn't read her the Miranda warning. You have to let her go now.
Cop: Shut up and back off, or you're going with her.
A fight breaks out, someone gets Tased, the video goes viral and all the liberals in the country think the cops were the bad guys, while all the conservatives on the internet argue over which caliber of gun the store manager should have used to murder the thief.
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So what's all this got to do with this cartoon called Nimona? (Spoilers follow.)
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Nimona starts off by giving us the background. There once was a brave and noble woman who defended her community against monsters and founded an order of elite knights to carry on that tradition. Fast forward a thousand years. The setting is a futuristic, sci-fi city with flying cars, but the order of knights is still central to the society. The new graduating class of the knight academy or whatever is about to go through their ceremony where they're knighted by the queen in a big stadium in front of thousands of people.
But this year is different. For the very first time this year, one of the new knights, Bal, isn't of noble birth. He's a commoner, and literally every single person in the civilization except the queen and Bal's boyfriend (yes, the protagonist is gay, and that's what most of the critics on the internet are hung up on--and why Disney dropped the film) hate the idea of allowing him to become a knight. That was the first red flag for me. Not "it was highly controversial among the townspeople." Nobody but his lover and the queen were in favor of him becoming one of these guardians. Not one. Everyone in the stadium (save for the queen and Bal's boyfriend, who was another knight being inducted) was uniformly against him.
Persecution complex much?
So Bal gets knighted, the crowd (inexplicably) cheers after a long pause, and as Bal is receiving his sword back from the queen, a laser blaster opens up out of the pommel, fires all on its own, and kills the queen, right in front of the entire stadium. Everyone, including Bal, is stunned and horrified. Bal's boyfriend draws his sword and cleaves off Bal's sword arm. Bal is arrested and thrown in jail.
And, just because I haven't mentioned it yet, the queen and all the knights but Bal are white [correction: only in most scenes with the main characters. In a scene where the knights are all lined up, we see that they're all various colors and shapes, male and female], while Bal is kind of olive-skinned and has what sounds like might be a slight Spanish accent. Also, all the other knights are ultra-masculine, jock douchebags whose armor is gold and white or silver, while Bal's, for some reason, is black and gray. Netflixy enough for you? The underdog hero is a minority in as many ways as they could think to make him one, while the whole rest of this knight order and government just scream "white supremacy." And that makes Bal the good guy and the others the bad guys--except Bal's boyfriend...but maybe not except him, since he cut Bal's arm off. Maybe he's bad, too. We're supposed to be uncertain about him. But everyone else, you're supposed to hate, even though Bal aspired to be one of them (but not enough, apparently, to follow the same uniform guidelines when it came to his armor).
Netflix these days is kind of like the old Westerns, where the bad guys all wore black hats to indicate that they were the bad guys, and the good guys wore white hats to tell you they were the good guys. Now, the colors have flipped, and it's their clothes and skin instead of cowboy hats. The dark ones are the good guys, and the white ones are the villains.
So our swarthy protagonist is sitting in jail wondering what on Earth just happened, when, just as strangely, a girl shows up out of nowhere and breaks him out of jail. Then she starts shapeshifting into different types of animals to effect their escape as they're fleeing the castle with many white-clad knights hot on their tails.
This shapeshifting girl, Nimona, wants to be Bal's wisecracking sidekick. But, aside from the magical shapeshifting and her over-the-top, colorful personality (I smell a narcissist), the thing about her that's really, unusually striking is how casually--no, eagerly--homicidal she is. She thinks it's fun to murder and also thinks it's cute to play up how much she wants to murder. Her approach is basically, all smiles, "Hey, everyone hates you, too! We can be besties and be villains together, murdering everyone we see." Bal wants to solve the mystery of the queen's murder and clear his name so the knights will accept him again, but Nimona is intent on helping him get revenge and encouraging him to embrace his new role as Public Enemy Number One. She hates humanity, yet is inexplicably perky and bouncy. It's like if you fused Harley Quinn and Wednesday Adams, then kicked up the cuteness to the level of Power Puff Girls, and we're supposed to be charmed by this unapologetic blood lust.
From that point on, though Bal remains the technical protagonist in this plot, the movie really gives the spotlight to Nimona. It's all about Nimona and Nimona's personality, Nimona's feelings, Nimona's back story. It's even named after her. Indeed, except for Bal's brooding and uncertainty, she's the only character in the whole film who isn't a flat, one-dimensional NPC.Fast forward--it turns out that another politician, the "Director" (or the knights, I think) switched the swords to kill the queen and have Bal take the fall for it. She felt that letting Bal become a knight threatened everything the order and their whole society was based on. But she also reveals that Nimona is the original monster defeated a thousand years ago by the order's founder.
Now here's a sticky part--it's true that Nimona is the monster, and yet she faults Bal for believing it. She is the monster, yet she dares Bal to say so, as though it's a trap where, if he vocalizes the truth, that makes him the bad guy. Even when he tries to relate, and asks questions about what it's like to shapeshift, she berates him for being "small-minded" for asking such things. Basically, she flips reality on its head, and he's supposed to just accept it all unquestioningly, or he's the bad guy for offending her, even while she's doing her level best looking for opportunities to get offended. And the film depicts her as clever and witty for doing so, and for making Bal look foolish.
As I was watching this, I thought, "Shapeshifting is a metaphor for transgenderism, isn't it? This narcissistic psychopath perfectly fits the psychological profile of a transgender person." And I wasn't wrong. There are little moments all through the film, some subtle and some more explicit, where someone expressed fear or shock or something other than instant, warm acceptance of Nimona's shapeshifting, and it made them the bad guy, and made Nimona justified in going on an indiscriminate, homicidal rampage.
In fact, there's one scene where Nimona is going full-Godzilla on the city, just smashing it to pieces and killing everyone in sight, when some kind of vehicle goes flying towards a little girl. Nimona slams down her tail to block the vehicle, protecting the girl from being squashed. The girl, though, is terrified. Trembling, she reaches down and picks up a sword, which she then points defensively at Nimona. And Nimona's feelings are hurt.
Let's go over that again. A terrified child is the bad guy for being afraid of a monster that's smashing her city and killing everyone she knows, and the reason that makes her the bad guy is because it hurts the monster's feelings. The monster is supposed to deserve acceptance and trust because she performed the exceptionally heroic act of...not idly standing by and allowing a child to be killed...by events that Nimona set off herself.
There's also a flashback scene where we see Nimona as a young girl. She met another girl in the forest, and they became friends. The friend was initially alarmed by the shapeshifting, but she quickly saw the fun in it, and the two had a great time romping around. But then one day, the townspeople saw the girls playing while Nimona was in the form of a bear. They feared for Nimona's friend's safety, so they took up their weapons and chased the bear away. Nimona fought fiercely, and this frightened her friend--who then, trembling, picked up a toy sword and pointed it at her defensively. This broke Nimona's heart and she ran away. Her friend who rejected her went on to become the founder of the order of knights who protected the town from monsters.
The whole point of that scene was to preach to the audience that Nimona wasn't originally to blame. Her friend hurt her feelings and rejected her, so a thousand years of terror was perfectly justified.
Do you see? It might be a made-for-Netflix, whitey-hatin' movie about a gay knight named Bal, but it's really about this blameless, charming, loveable, transforming mass-murderer and her attempt to get back at a society for not trusting her completely and without question. Never is the idea entertained that she should have some sort of responsibility to not freak people out by turning into a bear around little children. Instead, we see her feeling vulnerable before revealing her ability. "You have to promise not to freak out," because the other person being freaked out is somehow them being the bad guy and wronging her, instead of her being the bad guy for freaking them out.
I wonder how many people who eat that up uncritically also spout off about how people shouldn't be allowed to open-carry guns in public because it might make someone feel nervous. "Your right to exercise your Constitutionally-protected right to self-defense doesn't take priority over my right to not feel creeped out!" But if anyone feels creeped out by Nimona turning into other animals, they're the bad guy for feeling creeped out, and Nimona is blameless. Pick a principle and stand by it.
I said above that I wasn't wrong about the whole thing being a self-absorbed whine about the sense of unjust persecution that a transgender person feels after going to great lengths to freak people out. I did some reading on the background of the movie. Disney rejected it because Bal and his boyfriend kissed at the end and had a couple hand-squeezes and affectionate looks at each other through the film, and they felt that was too overt to make them money at the box office. But then I also found who wrote it. Nimona was written by Nate Diana "Indy" Stevenson, whose birth name was Noelle Diana Stevenson. Nate/Indy/Noelle is female but identifies as non-binary and "transmasculine," according to Wikipedia. Nimona was originally a series of graphic novels that was later turned into a movie. She is married to Molly Knox Ostertag, who draws LGBT comics targeted at teenagers and middle-schoolers.
They'll dedicate their careers to chasing down your kids and flying their freak flag in their faces with queer comic books published by Scholastic and made into rate PG cartoons, but don't you dare get weirded out about it, or they might just have to smash your city for a thousand years.
After the movie was over, before reading anything about its background or author, I told my daughter, "I'm going to tell you what this movie is trying very hard to tell you the opposite of. Nobody owes you unconditional acceptance. If you act like a jerk, and people reject you because of that, that doesn't make them the bad guy. If the only thing that stops you from going on a homicidal rampage is getting your own way and being told what you want to hear, then you're not actually a good person just because you don't go on a homicidal rampage. Sometimes, people will reject you for very good reasons. And even if it's not a good reason, you're not going to be everyone's cup of tea. And that's okay. Not everybody has to adore you like I do, but that doesn't make them bad people, and it doesn't justify being mean to them."
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