Nimona AU where Ballister and Nimona do leave the kingdom and go over the wall to find a new safe home. Years pass. The kingdom is more paranoid than ever because the queen killer and the monster were never caught and could presumably still live among them or return to cause more chaos.
The director decides one day that they need to take the fight to the monsters, strike first before they are stricken again. Knights are sent out beyond the wall to search the surrounding land and burn down the woods in order to “smoke the monsters out.” Destroying everything, trying to fight a monster that was never even there.
During one of these instances, Ambrosius and Ballister finally see each other again face to face for the first time in years since that fateful interaction at the institution. They’ve both changed, physically at least; Ambrosius’ hair is longer, Bal’s got some more grey streaks and a new arm upgrade. But underneath all of that they’re still the same, still got that lingering hurt and romantic feelings. Nimona is still the same as ever and hasn’t aged a day.
(Also idea that maybe there’s other small communities and people living outside the wall that Bal and Nimona ended up quietly settling down in. People who are far more open minded and accepting of others, and who are more concerned about the walled off kingdom with guns pointing at them than this nice guy and his cool daughter. That’s their neighbor and they’re not gonna let some knights storm in and cause trouble for him.)
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There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.
Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.
Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).
But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?
How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.
How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.
How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.
How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.
How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.
How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?
All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?
They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.
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List of queer books I read, loved & recommend!
(There isn't any particular order, I wrote these as I remembered them)
Master Of One - Jaida Jones & Dani Bennett (mlm, fantasy, very cool worldbuilding and magic system, funny, cool characters)
Legends & Lattes - Travis Baldree (wlw, fantasy, very soft & chill vibes)
The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon (wlw, high fantasy, cool worldbuilding, kinda reminds me of LOTR but with more dragons and feminism and lesbians)
Even Though I Knew The End - C.L. Polk (wlw, supernatural noir, cool 1930s detective story with angels & demons, I loved this one!)
The Love Interest - Cale Dietrich (mlm, science fiction, very cool concept)
The Darkest Part Of The Forest - Holly Black (side mlm, fantasy, cool fae lore)
The Weight Of The Stars - K. Ancrum (wlw, not quite science fiction but space stuff is involved, lovely and complex characters)
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz (mlm, fiction, very nice in general, there is also a sequel)
The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue - Mackenzi Lee (mlm, historical and vaguely fantasy, nice story but I preferred the sequel honestly)
The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy - Mackenzi Lee (wlw, the sequel to the one before, more fantasy elements than the first, asexual main character!!)
Gallant - V.E. Schwab (no romance, but in the background one of the characters(?) uses they/them pronouns, very cool dark fantasy vibe)
Stranger Than Fanfiction - Chris Colfer (gay main character, trans main character, coming-of-age, nice book)
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (yes it's the Love, Simon book, mlm, fiction, pretty nice)
They Both Die At The End - Adam Silvera (mlm, sci-fi ish but mostly fiction, cool ideas, but the ending is sad! Very amazing book though, I haven't read the prequel yet)
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid (wlw, bi main character, historical fiction, cool story, just a neat book in general)
This Is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (wlw, sci-fi, very cool time travel stuff!! and very beautiful, it felt like reading poetry most of the time)
One Last Stop - Casey McQuinston (wlw, background trans & pan & queer characters, sci-fi or fantasy idk, but time travel, I loooved this book, great)
The House In The Cerulean Sea - TJ Klune (mlm, fantasy, THIS BOOK oh my gosh you should read it!!, just cute and lovely and good)
Under The Whispering Door - TJ Klune (mlm, fantasy, this book is also sooo amazing, great character development and awesome relationships and stuff, it's been a while since I read it but it was so good)
In the Lives of Puppets - TJ Klune (mlm, ace main character!!, sci-fi, now THIS is found family, oughh feelings. argh, tj klune you’ve done it again, a human and his family of funky robots… I love them)
And They Lived... - Steven Salvatore (nblm, fiction, about gender identity and learning to love yourself, read it a while ago but it was very nice)
I Wish You All The Best - Mason Deaver (nblm, fiction, about finding your identity and people who care about you, very cute and sweet)
The Song Of Achilles - Madeleine Miller (mlm, historical, very good in general)
Carry On - Rainbow Rowell (mlm, background wlw in the third book, fantasy, it's a trilogy, basically Harry Potter if it was gay and also better)
Silver In The Wood - Emily Tesh (mlm, fantasy, very pretty, lots of fae stuff and lovely descriptions, it has a really good sequel too)
Pretty much anything by Alice Oseman (all cute and lovely and great, though I've only read Radio Silence so far I hear only good things, Solitaire is on my to-read list)
I Kissed Shara Wheeler - Casey McQuinston (wlw, fiction, it's been a while but I liked this book)
The Falling In Love Montage - Ciara Smyth (wlw, fiction, this book was so cute and funny and deeply emotional it made me Feel way too many things, I'd definitely recommend it)
What Big Teeth - Rose Szabo (a bit of queerness all around, fantasy, werewolves and monsters, this one was pretty cool!, lots of original ideas for the world/character building)
His Quiet Agent - Ada Maria Soto (mlm, asexual, fiction, about like spies but this book was so gentle and sweet I wanted to cry in the best way possible)
Some By Virtue Fall - Alexandra Rowland (wlw, historical fiction(?), theatre drama!! rival romance!! duels!!, a very good read in general)
Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend - Emma R. Alban (wlw, historical fiction, I’m not usually one for regency romances, but I really liked this!!, very cute and lots of drama, and there’s a sequel coming out soon!)
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