Nimona creator ND Stevenson on how Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons inspired his work
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ND Stevenson has long believed that kids can handle more than what adults often give them.
"Things like death and fear and divorce and the terror of just being alive are things that kids do think about and are affected by. I think they need their own media that doesn't shy away from that stuff, but that also takes into account their point of view," says the cartoonist and producer who first brought LGBTQ characters and themes into the 2018 Netflix series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and is now bringing his inclusive graphic novel Nimona to the streamer in feature-film form with directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno.
Ahead of the movie's June 30 launch, Stevenson shares the works that have inspired him over the years.
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"It's existential and it involves the crumbling of this fantasy world, because they think that the person who imagined it is gone forever," Stevenson explains. The 1997 film scared the creative as a kid growing up homeschooled in a conservative family in South Carolina, but it's one he came to appreciate. "It's something that really stuck with me," he explains. "It made me think about things that I wasn't ready to think about yet, or I didn't even really know the ways in which it was going to help me process things and come to terms with things as an adult."
Simon Hayter/Toronto Star via Getty Images The 'Dungeons & Dragons' role-playing game handbook
Dungeons & Dragons
Stevenson started playing his first Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game campaign around the time he began developing Netflix's She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. "We were doing a high school-themed campaign, and I had the edgy goth Tiefling teen who was very 'no one understands me,' very 'me against the world,' " Stevenson recalls. "I got really into all the spells that I could do with a warlock. One of them was the teleportation spell, the Misty Step. My wife, [The Owl House writer Molly Ostertag], who was the [Dungeon Master], I managed to make her life a living hell with that spell by just teleporting into the third act boss battle in the first five minutes." This Tiefling warlock went on to inspire the creation of She-Ra's teleporting Glimmer, voiced by Karen Fukuhara. Like the Tiefling, Glimmer often gets herself "into situations without thinking it through or running out of power at inconvenient moments," Stevenson explains.
Everett Collection Natalie Portman in 'Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones'
Star Wars
George Lucas' space opera had a tremendous impact on Stevenson, but it wasn't Luke Skywalker the creative gravitated toward. Not Leia Organa or Han Solo, either. It was Zam Wesell, the shape-shifting assassin that tried and immediately failed to kill Natalie Portman's Padmé Amidala in the beginning of 2002's Attack of the Clones. "I was really compelled by this character," Stevenson says. "I just wanted to see more of the shapeshifting. I wanted to know how far you could go with that. If you could turn into any person, what does that mean? I think that's where my love of shapeshifters specifically started." It's not a coincidence that, years later, a shapeshifter is at the center of Nimona.
Everett Collection Tim Gunn in 'Project Runway'
Project Runway
Growing up, Stevenson was not exposed to much media that wasn't vetted by his parents. He didn't realize how much LGBTQ representation was on television for the masses compared to what he saw on screen at the time. But he was allowed to watch Project Runway. "I connected really hard with the gay male designers on the show and with [mentor] Tim Gunn," says Stevenson, who would come out as transmasculine and bigender in 2021. "I think that was the first moment that I understood what being gay was. I heard about it in scary terms, but then that was the first moment that I really understood that it was this whole new take on the world that I related to. It would be a long time before that came to any kind of fruition or before I let myself see myself in the gay people on TV or the gay characters in media."
Everett Collection Ian McKellen's Gandalf in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'
The Lord of the Rings
The world of Middle-earth was a big craze amongst Stevenson's fellow homeschoolers. "There was a lot of running around in the woods with stick swords and arrows," he remembers. "I've always loved genre. Finding the fantasy in the sci-fi and the sci-fi in the fantasy has always been a particular interest of mine." Stevenson likes his magic with a set of laws, like how Star Wars explains the miracles of the Force through the science of midichlorians. With The Lord of the Rings, "It's not just 'I wave a wand and whatever I want to happen happens,' " he continues. "It's more fluid, it's more freeform — but it still should always have its own rules."
Everett Collection 'The Prince of Egypt'
The Prince of Egypt
The first movie Stevenson saw in theaters was this 1998 musical with the killer Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey track "When You Believe." Val Kilmer voices Moses in the animated Biblical epic, about how the prophet came of age as a royal only to later free the enslaved Hebrew people by unleashing God's wrath on Ramses' kingdom. "It's the story of, 'I thought I knew who I was and I don't know who I am and I have a different destiny than what I thought I did,' " Stevenson reflects. "I think you see a lot of that in She-Ra." The film also helped evolve his greater philosophy as a future creator of children's entertainment. "The Prince of Egypt was scary," he says. "It starts out with a massacre of infants, and they don't shy away from it. It's the first thing you see in that movie and it just throws you straight in. I was certainly very scared of lots of the movies I was watching and the books I was reading when I was young, but those are also the things that stayed with me" — Winnie the Pooh included.
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