In May 2015, Nimona by ND Stevenson was released. It would go on to win an Eisner Award and a Cybils Award, and eventually, it would be made into an Academy Award-nominated movie. Despite the original book technically having no canon queer or trans characters, it quickly became a classic of queer comics based on subtext alone. The 2023 movie adaptation made the queer content canon.

Now, ten years later, this story doesn’t just hold up—we need Nimona more than ever.

Before writing this article, I reread the book and rewatched the adaptation to have them fresh in my mind. As expected, I still loved Nimona. It’s such a spiky, unexpected story; it began on Tumblr in 2012 and has that unpredictable, ever-evolving quality that I love about long-running webcomics. What surprised me, though, was sobbing through the end of the movie. Often, book-to-screen adaptations disappoint. Rarely, they improve on the source material. But perhaps most interesting are the adaptations that offer a new perspective on the story, one that feels essential—but not sufficient—to understanding it. That’s how I feel about the Nimona book and movie: they are in conversation with each other.

In some ways, the Nimona movie makes the implicit queerness of the book canon. In others, though, it sands off the sharp edges of the original and makes it more palatable and therefore less queer—at least, in the queer theory definition of the term.

Let’s take a look at these two versions of the same story, how they approach queerness, and how they are relevant to our understanding of queer media today.

“I’m a Lot of Things”: Queer Relationships and Trans Subtext in Nimona (2023)

I may not have been following Nimona in its first iteration on Tumblr, but if I know anything about Tumblr in 2012, its early readers were already shipping Ambrosius and Ballister. In the book, these two have a complicated relationship. They’re nemeses and ex-best friends, and there’s more than a little gay subtext. At a pivotal moment, Ambrotius tells Ballister he has to tell him something important—but there’s no time!

In contrast, the movie begins with Ballister and Ambrotius already in a relationship, torn apart after Ballister is framed for assassinating the queen—and Ambrotius literally disarms him. While now on opposite sides, neither has given up on the other. Their relationship is the heart of the plot: “The whole movie is them trying to get back to each other,” Stevenson says . When they’re finally reunited and Ballister’s name is cleared, they kiss. They say, “I love you.” Even in the 2020s, it’s rare for an animated show or movie aimed at a young audience to have a central queer relationship.

At the time Stevenson was first creating Nimona , he was not yet out, to himself or others. It was before he came out as gay and before he came out as transmasculine. He wrote Nimona to be a gender-nonconforming character, but also as a power fantasy to escape his discomfort with his body: “I was very uncomfortable in my body, and I was moving through the world. I just wanted to be her. To be able to change at a moment’s notice to be a dragon, to breathe fire, all of these things.”

It’s not a coincidence that Nimona—in the book and movie— frequently takes on male personas. There was trans subtext in the story from the start, but Stevenson wouldn’t call it that:

“Subtext implies I knew what I was doing… calling it subtext is generous, because that implies that I was doing any of that on purpose. I really, really did not put it together.”

In other interviews, Stevenson says, “It’s (transness) something that I think is at the heart of the comic, but I didn’t know it at the time. It would be many years before I’d start to make any kind of sense of my own gender.”

In making the movie, Stevenson was able to see the queer and trans elements of the story that he didn’t recognize at the time: “ I was so not ready to feel that, and I didn’t know that was the story I was telling.”

It’s worth noting that Ballister is usually the person saying these invalidating things to Nimona. He is the closest person in her life, and their relationship is more developed than it is in the book—but that makes his betrayal hit harder.

In an interview with Stevenon for Off Colour , Sydney Turner says, “When I watched Nimona, I thought about how transphobia in the queer community is at large, how sometimes cis gays, like Bal, try to fit into corrupt systems and institutions that the trans community, like Nimona, can’t, no matter how hard they try.”

It’s a version of homonormativity: while Ballister is queer, he still upholds the dominant values of the society he was raised in, and he wants to conform. He resents Nimona for refusing to diminish herself. He calls her “too much.”

When Ballister insists on asking what she is, Nimona calls these sorts of inquiries “small-minded questions.” She explains that it doesn’t hurt to transform; in fact, she feels like she has “itchy insides” when she doesn’t, which can be read as representative of gender dysphoria. “I shapeshift and I’m free,” she says.

In Heather Wright’s Master’s Thesis, “’The Childish, the Transformative, and the Queer’: Queer Interventions as Praxis in Children’s Cartoons,” the author points out that “This question of Nimona’s ‘natural form’ evokes Judith Butler’s theories on gender”: it’s all performative and a construction. There is no one true form for Nimona; she is so much more complicated than that.

It’s not just Nimona’s fluid relationship with her identity and form that makes her story, especially in the movie, a trans allegory. She also faces similar bigotry to trans people.

In both the book and the movie, there is a class divide: in one memorable page of the comic, a man attempts to sleep under the statue of Ambrotius Goldenloin, only to be told by a knight to keep moving. In the movie, Ballister is the first commoner to be allowed to train as a knight—which the Director sees as a threat to the kingdom: the “first crack in the wall.”

Even after Ballister is framed for regicide, even when he learns it was the Director who framed him, he insists that the Director is just a bad apple instead of acknowledging the problems with the institute as a whole. Nimona pushes back, saying now is the time to question everything.

When discussing the science fantasy, futuristic medieval setting of the movie, Stevenson says, it “feels very true to our world today, where it’s like we have all this advanced technology, but in some ways, you know, we’re still kind of bound by this medieval way of thinking.”

It’s this medieval way of thinking, and the system that reinforces it, that is the real villain of the story. Kids in this kingdom grow up on breakfast cereal commercials that encourage them to slay monsters. Nimona’s childhood friend, Gloreth, initially accepts her shapeshifting, but she is persuaded by her community to turn on her and label her a monster.

Nimona has grown up in a society that labels her a monster, isolates her, and considers self-defense justification for attacking her in the first place. That traumatization comes to a head when even Ballister betrays her, calling her a monster and moving to draw his sword on her.

In his interview with Off Colour, Stevenson says he sees now that transness is at the heart of Nimona’s story, but in the course of making the movie, “I don’t think any of us expected how timely it would end up being.”

Trans people are being villainized now more than when Nimona was first created. Unfortunately, many trans young people can empathize with being ostracized, hated, considered a threat—or even being labelled as monstrous.

In that same interview, Stevenson compares the movie’s fear-mongering about monsters lurking everywhere to recent anti-trans legislation.

It’s this systemic bigotry that overwhelms Nimona in that climactic scene of the movie, and as she transforms into the monstrous, shadowy figure she feels others see her as, she attempts to end her own life on the sword of Gloreth, the person who first betrayed her, rejected her, and called her a monster.

Because of the science fantasy setting and imagery, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s happening in this scene: a character coded as a trans young person is attempting to kill themselves after society and family rejection.

Suicide rates are much higher among trans young people than their cisgender peers. As Heather Wright points out, this isn’t because they’re trans. It’s because of the bigotry and abuse they often face: “calling ‘queerness’ itself a risk factor is covering the source of abuse: social abuse and disenfranchisement based on the outsider status of the queer child.” Trans young people who are accepted by at least one person in their life show much lower rates of suicidality.

We see this acceptance at the end of the movie, as Ballister realizes he was wrong. He holds out a hand to Nimona in her shadowy form and says, “I see you, Nimona. And you’re not alone.” It’s this moment of acceptance that brings her back to herself.

The binaries the book targets most closely are good/evil and hero/villain. In the movie, Ballister rejects the label of villain. He was framed and has never really done anything wrong. In the book, though, he has embraced the villain label. He lives by his own moral code, but he does things—like non-fatally poison people to make a point—that certainly aren’t heroic.

Ambrotius’s character may be the most changed between the book and the movie. Book Ambrotius is selfish, eventually admitting to severing Ballister’s arm in an act of jealousy while colluding with the Director. In the movie, Ambrotius also cuts off Ballister’s arm, but only because he believes Ballister has just killed the queen and is a threat.

Nimona, too, is a gentler character in the movie. It’s aimed at a younger audience than the book, so that makes sense, but it’s worth noting that book Nimona does murder people. Ballister has to convince her to not casually kill people when acting as his sidekick.

Near the end of the story, she is captured and experimented on. When she breaks free, she is consumed with her anger, and Ballister fears what she might do in this state. As a Time article describes this moment, “when Nimona is pressed to her breaking point, she splinters into two beings: a child that embodies all of the pain and betrayal she’s experienced and a creature of shadow and flame that personifies a blind rage toward the way she’s been treated.”

Ballister’s fear of Nimona at this moment and what she’s capable of isn’t irrational. She tells him, “I’ve killed people before. I’ve killed LOTS of people.” We see child Nimona kill the invaders who attacked her village. We see present-day Nimona incinerate the Director. In the end, Ballister—the closest thing Nimona has to family—kills her creature self and leaves her child self behind as the lab self-destructs. Ballister spots her alive in the final few pages of the story, but their relationship is still severed, and that’s the last time he sees her.

It’s a bleak ending, but it was originally even darker. Stevenson says that this ending changed “for two reasons. The first was that I told my sister the ending and she threatened to never speak to me again if I didn’t change it. And two, I was also starting to get to the place, personally, where I was able to listen and say, ‘you’re right.’ The ending I had planned hasn’t felt right for a while. I think that the ending I had planned was an inability for me to imagine a happy outcome for myself.”

In Nimona (2015), nothing is simple, clear-cut, or binary. All the characters are deeply flawed and hurt each other. We cheer for Nimona, but she’s also a murderer. We want Ambrotius and Ballister to reunite, even if Ballister did something unforgivable. We want Ballister to get a happy ending despite betraying Nimona.

This isn’t “good queer representation” in the way it’s usually defined. These characters aren’t role models. They’re something more unusual, and more important. They expose the uncomfortable messiness of being a person. Sometimes, we can be monstrous. We can be deeply flawed. We make mistakes that can’t be fully repaired. And even then, we’re worthy of love. As Stevenson says , “…that is really important to me: No one is lovable all the time. Everybody needs that understanding. And [Nimona] expresses that in a way that the rest of us can’t, not being able to turn into fire-breathing dragons.”

Nimona (2015) shows us characters we root for even when they’re selfish, wrong, or monstrous. It offers a possibility of loving ourselves even in our rage, even when we’re monstrous.

In addition to the complex and flawed characters, the book also has an unpredictable plot. This is partly the freedom that webcomic as a form allows: each page is episodic, and the story is written over a long period of time, allowing it to evolve over time and zag in unexpected ways. The movie, in contrast, follows more predictable story beats.

If we look at just the ending, the two versions of this story approach it in very different ways. Nimona is self-sacrificing instead of rageful. While I was moved by Ballister reaching out for Nimona and telling her he sees her, the next scene was frustrating.

The Director has aimed a giant gun inside the city walls to destroy Nimona, which would also kill many residents. After Nimona returns to herself, she transforms into a phoenix-like creature and flies towards the gun, absorbing the impact, saving the city residents, and breaking open the wall to reveal a beautiful landscape behind it.

In the aftermath, the residents construct a memorial to Nimona, calling her a hero. In the final scene of the movie, we see Ballister react to what seems to be Nimona’s return.

This is obviously supposed to be a happy ending—at least, a happier ending than the book. But given how Nimona is coded as trans, or at least as The Other, it was uncomfortable to see her sacrifice herself to save the same people who terrorized her, who called her a monster, who rejected her, traumatized her, and drove her to want to end her life.

Of course, Nimona being functionally immortal makes this sacrifice less final, but it still feels unfair that the only way she could convince the general population to accept her as worthy was to risk her life for the people who hated her.

(This is basically the plot of “Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer:” the outsider is rejected until they save the day, and then everyone accepts them and the outsider holds no grudge for their previous cruelty.)

But 2015 is a different time from 2023 (or 2025). As Wright says, “It might be that 2023 does not have space for the nuanced, messy, and very personal telling of Nimona that 2015 had.” The message has been simplified, its jagged edges smoothed: by the end of the movie, Nimona has flipped from being seen as a villain to being seen as a hero, which doesn’t deconstruct that binary.

The graphic novel’s ending is ambiguous, purposely frustrating and messy . It’s bittersweet. It’s understandable that in this political climate, that ending was changed to be kinder to its characters—and to the audience who see themselves in these characters.

I highly recommend both the book and the movie, so you can get both aspects. But while they differ a lot from each other, there’s something they share, and I think it’s the magic of this story. It’s Nimona, of course. Nimona is less murderous in the movie, but she’s still herself. While I have discussed the trans subtext in the movie, I have to make it clear that she’s not simply a stand-in for queerness or transness. Sadly, queer and trans people cannot shapeshift into pink rhinos or cereal-spewing dragons or birds made of pure light (unless I missed that day in orientation).

She’s not just a metaphor. She’s complex, multi-layered, and impossible to pin down. Ballister keeps asking her, “What are you?”, and Nimona refuses to give a simple answer, to reduce herself to something he (or anyone) can comprehend. We get multiple origin stories for Nimona, some obviously made up, some that may be true—or may not, or may be only part of the story. None of them satisfactorily answers the question “What are you?”, because that is a small-minded question.

Nimona isn’t simply misunderstood. After all, she does kill people. She is more complicated than that. She rejects any pat way of understanding her. In fact, understanding her is unnecessary and likely impossible.

Many of us can relate to feeling impossible to completely understand: “We are all, in our own ways, a question without an answer. I think a lot of us feel that way, and I want to tell stories about that.”

In this time of increased villainization of trans people, when politicians drum up a moral panic against trans people to get votes no matter the cost, it’s this message that is most powerful, and it persists through the book and the movie: you don’t need to understand someone to accept them and love them.

While the story has transformed over the years, and some elements have been smoothed over, the reason it persists is Nimona. She is the most boundary-pushing element—her refusal to be simplified and fully understood. She is defiant, uncontainable, rebellious as a matter of course, and we need her more than ever.

Nimona knows how to always question authority, rewrite dominant narratives, and be ungovernable. In a time of rising authoritarianism and fascism, she’s the hero (or villain or sidekick or none of the above) we could all stand to take some inspiration from. She’s the reason we fell in love with the graphic novel ten years ago, and we need her more than ever today.

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Psst, did you know the Nimona 10th Anniversary Edition comes out May 20th? This isn’t sponsored; I just thought you might want an edition with a new cover illustration, decorated edges, and bonus content. It’s limited, so grab one before they’re gone.