Everybody Wants to Change the World, But No One… No One Wants to Die (Nimona)

A Charity Commission for Tiffany Babb

I should probably note somewhere that this is a delightfully funny book.
(I know you wanted the shark, but the early chapters
aren't as well drawn as the later ones.)

There is some difficulty when it comes to me writing about Nimona. This is not a difficulty shared by everyone, but rather one due to my influences. In many ways, the web comic about a supervillain working to overthrow a monstrously cruel system (that doesn’t go into specifics of its cruelty beyond the tropes of the fantasy genre) along with his overly murderous sidekick who has been through a lot of trauma is a reflection of the work of two critics I have been following for many years: Jen Blue and Jack Graham. For those unaware, Jack has written a number of essays looking at the role of the villain in the context of genre fiction, noting that they more often than not want to overthrow an system of cruelty. (He notes that villains like Voldemort desire a worse status quo, but her retorts that doesn’t change the fact that the villain is fighting for a change while the hero fights for things remaining the same [note also how JK Rowling treats SPEW and the Quibbler].)  Jen, meanwhile, writes about the nature of the apocalypse within superhero fiction, how the hero acts as a deference of the apocalypse while fighting for a status quo that’s not always that great, the relationship between said status quo and the other, and queerness. It’s little wonder she hasn’t been asked to write about this comic, especially given her project is looking at Noelle Stevenson’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

(Before you ask, no I’m not going to commission her to write about this comic. Even if I had the funds to commission her to write about something, I’m going to go with The Property of Hate because holy cow, The Property of Hate is so good and thematically appropriate to her project.)

So my dilemma is that the themes of exploitation, villainy, the apocalypse and its relationship to revolution… all of these are already covered by critics smarter than me. And I was stuck. (It’s not like I didn’t have an out. Tiffany gave me an alternative. I just don’t feel like writing about the Black Bolt series and its themes of isolation, broken childhoods, and the inherent cruelty of prisons.) And then, I reread the book and inspiration struck. But first, let’s talk about our main character: Lord Ballister Blackheart.

Ballister is a villain, in the most traditional sense. (Allegedly) Wounded by the champion of the city, Sir Ambrosius Goldenlion, and forced into the role of villainy, Ballister fights to overthrow the kingdom. However, if one looks at his schemes, they don’t really seem all that successful or even all that original. His plans feel like they’re out of a pantomime, a kids show idea of what evil does. Kidnap the king, rob a bank, clone the princess. For all his talk of overthrowing the system, Ballister doesn’t seem to be trying. (If anything, it’s him trying to get close to the hero because he has complex feelings about loving him and being hurt by him.)

That is, until Nimona comes into play. Nimona is a shapeshifter and an agent of disorder. Which is to say she flips the chessboard and offers plans like “burn everything to the ground” and “kill the king.” Ballister does not want to kill anyone in his scheme. Not that he’s above hurting people (he is a supervillain after all), but killing is messy. It’s a horrible thing to kill someone. To see them wither away before your eyes. And it rarely, if ever solves anything. Look at the history of war and tell me killing solves systemic cruelty.

But Nimona’s presence does make a change within Ballister’s schemes. No longer the camp theatrics of children’s fiction, Ballister and Nimona opt to use the corruption at the heart of the system, which calls itself the Institution (and oh boy are there implications to that phrase), against it. Though at peace, the Institution is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, among them Jaderoot, a deadly plant that kills everything. A new kind of plan formulates, one not of showy theatrics but of subtler games of subterfuge and mass poisonings. He gets very close to winning, even turning the public against the government.

But then, to save Nimona, Ballister kills someone. A guard trying to subdue them by any means necessary. But he’s a person. Ballister never wanted to kill anyone. Because people are people and the system hinges on him being a villain. And villains kill people. But, as Jack Graham would note, most revolutionary figures within fiction are villains. The revolution, as Jen Blue notes, is the same thing as the apocalypse: it’s just that the former looks like the latter from the position of those with something to lose.

And when the apocalypse does come, tearing down the Institution of cruelty from the king to those who run the system, many people die by fire. Ballister wanted a clean, non-violent (or, at the very least non-deadly) revolution, an uprising of the people. But that’s the thing about revolution: it’s always going to be violent. Even the most non-violent of revolutions still has to deal with the system attacking the protestors working to undermine their system. No revolution involves logicing the leadership out of office. At the same time, there’s no social revolution without a massive death toll. Those are just fairy tales.

And here I am, writing about a comic book about villainy and systemic cruelty and revolution, while outside there’s a world very much like the one in Nimona. One where the corrupt reign supreme, offering little help to the disadvantaged. Where the homeless are treated as parasites who are messing up the image of the city. Where there is a plague afflicting and killing people. Where people are being ordered to their deaths to keep the system alive and well.

Where children are put into cages and tortured for no other reason than being different.

And like in Nimona, the world outside is in need of a revolution. But at the low estimate, such a revolution would kill a state’s worth of people. A large state’s worth. People fighting for a better world, people trying to keep the world as is, and those caught in the crossfire. And that horrifies me. Like Ballister, I don’t want that to happen and I suspect I would react to such death and violence as he did: try to save as many as I can. I’d like to hope I would. Because at the end of the day, we’re all hurting in this collapsing system. It’s falling apart all around us and it’s going to fall. (That’s not a threat, everything falls. Pick someone up from the late 19^th century and tell them Kings aren’t a thing of power. They won’t believe you. But that’s the second law of thermodynamics for you.)

But given the political landscape, the nature of the apocalypse doesn’t seem as optimistic as that of Nimona. There, when all the leaders were dead and the system collapsed, the people came together and worked to rebuild and make a better world. In our world, the rich are planning to fly off into space, leaving us a ruin of a planet. The poor are divided over stories told to them about their inherent superiority to other poor people. And the revolutions are, at best, homeopathic in nature. Just another story to keep us at bay. I wish I had an answer to all of this. I wish I could find a way to get out of the horror of the modern world and the complexities of revolution. Alas, I do not.

Maybe I should have written about Black Bolt instead.