Headscratchers / NIMONA (2023)

• When The Director deflected blame from herself in the Engineered Public Confession by claiming it was Nimona disguised as her, why didn't Nimona and Ballister just upload the rest of the footage which showed Nimona transforming out of her Ambrosius glamour? As far as anybody knows, Nimona can't clone herself, so she can't be in two places at once, so she can't be Ambrosius and The Director. Beyond that, why doesn't Ballister make her prove she can't create duplicates of herself to help reestablish trust between them?
  • How exactly would she prove she can’t do something? It’s pretty hard to prove a negative, you know. The audience knows that Nimona can pull off one person at a time but the in universe general public does not so even releasing the full footage isn't a silver bullet for this problem. It could work but if it doesn't The Director has a lot more latitude to enforce her will using the idea of Nimona replacing people potentially by the dozens to play to the fears of the public.
  • Ballister might not have recorded more than the Director’s confession (since the news only shares one soundbite) and even if he did, he didn’t have time to upload it in between finding out about the Director’s lie from Ambrosius, confronting Nimona, and then getting arrested.
  • Ballister never believed Nimona had played two characters at once, so there was no need for him to test her on that. He was swayed once Ambrosius showed him Nimona was the legendary monster.
• Why would the Director want to engineer the Queen's death in the first place, and what could she gain from framing Ballister for the deed?
  • Ballister was the first commoner knight instead of coming from a noble bloodline like other knights in the Institute, breaking traditions. This resulted in the Director swapping Ballister's sword to another one that then ended up killing the Queen during the knighting ceremony, making the Director frame Ballister himself as the murderer.
  • The Director thinks a commoner is unfit for defending the kingdom and doesn’t want others to be inspired by Ballister. By making Ballister look like a murderer she prevents him from becoming a hero to the people, and killing the royal responsible for recruiting him against dogma prevents more commoners from being promoted.
  • She "gained" the safety of the city, but only in her own interpretation of reality. Considering she was plagued by nightmares of monsters tearing down the wall and invading the city, and sincerely believed any deviation from their dogmatic way of life would lead to that catastrophe, her actions were all meant to remove the threat of change. She would gain the peace of mind of knowing that the order of knights remains nobles only, and that an establishment-changing queen isn't around to "catastrophically" change tradition.
• What were the Knights fighting for 1000 years if Nimona was the only 'monster'? Were there actually any other 'monsters'?
  • Nobody, they just have really good PR which is why they behave like a bunch of fraternity boys. The Knights probably started fighting ordinary people to bring them under the Kingdoms wing "to protect them" and chasing the occasional rumor of monsters. But over the last few hundred years they've had nobody to fight relying on good PR and an air of glory to remain in power.
  • They were fighting ordinary people. The early years of Gloreth’s kingdom would remember that Nimona could shapeshift and thus distrust anybody who was suspected of not being human. By the time Nimona’s shapeshifting faded from public memory, the kingdom had become extremely militarized and was sustaining that for its own sake, and quite possibly creating threats to blame.
    • But they have a whole society based around slaying monsters. How does one sustain such an advanced society for 1000 years over something that doesn't exist?
    • The same way witch hunts, inquisitions, and gay/trans panics happened in our world: accuse someone of being a monster, spread rumors and whip up the public into a frenzy, pass laws and militarize to out more “suspected monsters”, hunt the poor victim, then repeat with someone else. It’s pretty much just like how Ballister got framed.
    • Those things didn't form the cornerstone of society while lacking the subject of persecution as completely as these folks did.
  • If anything, the lack of monsters actually appearing would reinforce the existing order: There are no monsters because the Institute has done its job so well upholding the will of Gloreth. The public would still be kept ever so slightly in fear of monsters by the regular "Monster Attack drills" like we see happen early in the movie.
• Why didn't Ballister believe Nimona when she said she didn't set him up? He freaking saw her transform back from Amborsius's form when they got the confession, which means there was no way she could have impersonated the director at that time. Why would the director admit to something she didn't do?
  • This confused me at the time, too. Is it meant to reflect how, in the real world, people who haven't fully completed the work of deconstructing their biases will often fall back on the status quo even when they saw with their own eyes the evidence that what they're being told is wrong? As obvious as the deception is to us, to Ballister he's caught between accepting the full truth (that every little aspect of the society he's lived in and fought for his whole life is built on a lie) and returning to the lie (and in turn getting back his status, life and love). Remember, even when he saw the proof that the Director had betrayed him, he was convinced the problem was just here, not the whole system. Might just be a case of Truth in Television.
  • Ballister never accused Nimona of impersonating the Director, just of deliberately escalating all their public escapades and encouraging him to lie and cheat to make him look more villainous so he’d be stuck with her. Underlying that, yeah, he is falling back on his prior prejudices now that’s he learned Nimona was apparently the monster of Gloreth’s legend, so he’s looking at everything she’s done with him in the worst possible light.
  • perhaps he did the mental gymnastics that she could have been the director that switched the swords?
  • Ballister was angry, confused, and had been confronted with evidence that Nimona might be playing him but he didn't want to believe it. So he went to Nimona and asked for an explanation but in his anger he worded it the poorest way possible giving Nimona reason to think she was going to be betrayed which mesnt she didn't give an answer. Ballistor increasingly suspicious raised an alternative interpretation to Nimonas actions that would serve the idea of her as a bad guy hoping she'd prove him wrong. Nimona responded with anger that her friend was being bigoted as fuck toward her and Ballister fell back on his training reaching for his sword which shocked them both but before they could deal with it the Knights broke in.
• How the HELL has no one gone past the wall of the kingdom for 1000 years? This civilization has flying bikes, flying cars, all sorts of futuristic tech, and (probably) no "monsters" exist outside of Nimona...yet not ONE person was curious on what was outside? Or has gone outside on accident and seen that supposedly nothing dangerous is out there?
  • The vehicles may not be designed for “off-road” levitation. Also, more darkly, there are cannons on the walls, so going in and out of such a paranoid kingdom may not be so easy…
  • That does not track when there are knights stationed over the walls whose job is to look outside for incoming threats. They would have to see that there is nothing out there but untouched nature and what Gloreth said was wrong. It just seems improbable that the masquerade of the rest of the world being overrun with monsters lasted as long as it did.
    • Maybe one job of the Director/knights is to make sure people who go beyond the wall are Released to Elsewhere?
• In Nimona's true backstory, we find out that Gloreth was actually just a regular village girl and her fellow Villagers have founded the Institute. But then where did the idea that only Nobles could become knights come from? There weren't any nobles in that village as far as we could see. Where did those Nobles come from and how did take over the Institute?
  • A great many noble families in real life are descended from those who initially helped found a kingdom or performed some great deed for the royalty or existing nobility. But once enough time has passed, nobility becomes much more rigid and steeped in tradition, making it much harder for new nobility to be put in place. Many of those villagers could have started noble families themselves once the kingdom was formed or grew.
  • Except those nobles came to be nobles by being proffesional fighters. They formed warrior dynastees, gathered other lesser fighters around them - they became the proto-military. If there's no-one to fight, there'd be no nobles. Also, what are they even lording over if the "kingdom" is confined within a relatively-tiny enclosure and there're no lands to cut their fiefs out of? Also-also, with all the super-advanced tech and weaponry they have, the knighthood had to have died off long-long ago. What's all that brawn and shiny armor worth when a single frail woman can decimate an entire squad of knights?
  • Gloreth drove off Nimona as a child, but that doesn't mean she couldn't become a knight in the future. Her trauma from Nimona could have motivated her to be a knight and earned her nobility genuinely during a time when it was more feasible. The story of fighting the "monster" could have also been known, but was mis-documented as being a feat during her knight days and not in her childhood. Or, Gloreth's driving away Nimona would be a story that got exaggerated and twisted over time, which also would have helped her rise in social class and give her the opportunity to be a knight and noble.
  • Nobles do still exist in the real world—look at England. England's a bit less of a paranoid police state than the kingdom here, but its nobility still enjoy a great deal of unearned reverence for being the great-umpteenth-grandkid of Duke Whatever who defeated the traitorous Worcester on a blood-soaked field in King Henry's wars (when in reality, the current Duke Whatever much prefers a quiet crossword). A similar thing seems to have happened with nobles here, except instead of being repurposed as "source of wedding venues because they have to maintain a Big Fancy House without tenant peasants", they're more like famous professional athletes. The "Night to Knight Knights" is basically the NFL/NBA/etc draft, and it seems like they get income from sponsorships and similar things (e.g. the big video billboard of himself that Todd hurtles into).
• If the inciting incident was just a minute-long brawl with half-a-dozen people and a moderate fire, all happening in a single village, and Nimona didn't even go full-Kaiju, how in the world could it blow up to such huge proportions and have such a lasting impact? Why would anyone even believe these few people, let alone go along with their crazy idea of founding a knightly order, investing vast resources into defending from the enemy who is not there and stiffling their expansion for a millenia for no reason whatsoever. At some point paranoia had to have given in to greed, curiosity and overpopulation.
  • The turning of the rumor mill, and each person who heard the story adding more details to presumably make it more exciting. For another example on a smaller scale, in The Penderwicks, a bull who lives in a farm pasture steps on and destroys the expensive camera of a tourist who gets too close to him. The first person who hears the story thinks that sounds boring, so they add a detail about the bull scratching the tourist's leg, the next person describes the scratch as a gouge, and so on and so forth until the story involves the tourist getting his stomach ripped open and having to be treated by three doctors.
• Why didn't Ballister just email Ambrosius the video of the Director swapping the swords, instead of showing it to him in a big public confrontation where he could get captured again, and where the squire's phone could (and did) get damaged before anyone saw the footage?
  • It's a military organisation, it stands to reason that all email would be perlustrated by the IT security.
• If apparently being completely vaporized doesn't kill Nimona, why did she think that being stabbed in the heart with a statue sword would?
  • She only survived the vaporization because she took the form of a Phoenix.
  • Nimona being a shapeshifter has active control over her bodies properties, including her vulnerability. For Nimona it is actually a very different thing to be killed then to allow herself to die, because the latter is a lot easier.
• Why the hell did Nimona spend a thousand years in a kingdom where society is based solely on demonizing her specifically, when she could have left any time she wanted?
  • Who said she did? By all accounts, there've been no record of monster sightings in the kingdom nor of shapeshifting, and Nimona needs to transform for her own mental wellbeing. Given how badly the collapse of her relationship with Gloreth traumatized her, she could have been actively avoiding the kingdom for centuries on end before she finally made her way back and started looking for friends again.
    • Of course that also brings up the question of why she came back, this Kingdom can't be the only civilized place out there.
    • Given that she doesn't seem too surprised by the change in technology by the time she appears on screen, it's possible that she's made brief visits now and again; maybe she was looking for a new friend, but retreated every time she saw how things were getting progressively worse. Perhaps Ballister was the first possible friend she thought was worth giving a shot, if only because she believed he would accept her as a fellow "villain". As for going somewhere else, we could chalk that up to literal or emotional distance: the Kingdom would have to be isolated from outside influences in order for the Institute's doctrine to go unquestioned for so long, so it might just be so far removed from other nations that Nimona hasn't seen any of them... or perhaps her past traumas have left her unwilling to stray too far from her current patch of wilderness.
  • Regardless of whether she's been present the whole time or just recently turned up the following holds true. Nimona is bored and extremely lonely, humans are the species she's come closest to befriending while all others leave her out of disinterest or fear. Given what total isolation does to sapient beings, human and otherwise, odds are good she's around to have someone to talk to.

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