Naomi Nagata

not a lot is known (or available) about naomi’s childhood [ i am working on a reread of the whole series so i will be making notes of stuff if/when it pops up to fill in the blanks ]  she was born in the belt, has always been in the belt, has never set foot on a planet (season 4 not withstanding).  what we do know is that she was an extremely talented coder and hacker and that she worked her way through and tested out of the majority of two remote learning engineering degrees.  she had received offers of scholarships to a few of the elite martian and earther run colleges but turned them down, working her way through on her own.  by the time that she was eighteen, she was in love with a man named marco inaros and they were married, and had a son together, felip, and was a member of an opa cell that was run by marco.  [ more about this under the cut at the bottom of this post because of major spoilers ]

by twenty, she found herself alone, her son lost to her, and nowhere to go and noone to turn to.  she signed on to a crew and headed out into the stars.  with her credentials, and with a few years experience on her belt, she could’ve moved up the ranks, gotten a job with one of the elite freight companies or security companies, but she preferred to stick to the fringe.  out of sight.  out of the way.  on her own, where she could do her job and be left, for the most part, alone. eventually she would come to be chief engineer of the ice hauler, the canterbury, where she would meet james holden, garvey shed, alex kamal and would hire on amos burton to work under her in engineering and serve as ship’s mechanic.  despite his rough exterior and his brusque demeanor, she saw something in him that compelled her to give him a shot, and she’s never regretted it.

after the destruction of the canterbury by uknown forces, she, alex, holden, shed and amos end up stranded on a mostly malfunctioning shuttle where their distress signal is picked up by a martian ship.  they are taken on board and face the possibility of arrests and being charged with sedition and or being the ones responsible for the canterbury, and of being opa or opa aligned, etc.  the donnager, the ship holding them, is then attacked and fairly quickly decimated by the same forces that attacked the canterbury.  the martian captain sends her lieutenant and the surviving crew to a martian warship to ensure they survive to get the warning out and to clarify to the galaxy that it was not a martian navy ship that attacked / destroyed the canterbury.

a long chain of events follows, including the discovery of an alien organism which is simply dubbed the protomolecule that has been discovered and weaponized, mixed in to human dna and at one point released station wide onto a belter asteroid citadel to see what would happen.  tensions between mars and earth continue to rise, the belt is in upheaval, even more than usual and all it might take is a single hair to tip it all out of balance. 

in the interim, it is discovered that the protomolecule was sent by an alien species millennium ago to absorb and transform single cell life to continue ‘the work’ - gathering materials necessary to build another series of ring gates, which they learn connect to thirty, forty entire other systems that they would never have discovered in their lifetimes even with the rate of travel they are currently capable of.  

some tensions ease, especially with now entire systems to explore and find places to call home that don’t require being reliant on mars or earth or corporate entities to provide air, water, protein bars, etc. now, though, the focus becomes: who will control the gates, how to regulate them, who gets to lay claim to what’s on the other side.  -- this delves into the season four story line, which i’m happy to explore, but might be a bit restrictive for plotting.  (belters claim a planet, a corporation says they don’t have the rights to it or the ore that they want, the rocinante gets sent to play peacekeeper but the belters blew up the corporate ship/landing pad so things are already going to shit by the time the roci gets there.  naomi gets to set planetside for the first time ever, but doesn’t adjust well and ends up having to go back to the ship.  things go bad planetside, as other life forms get stirred up by the awakening of some of the alien artifacts beneath the planet’s surface.  the population ends up starting to go blind, death slugs find their way above ground - it’s all very messy.)

WHAT WAS THE MOST TRAUMATIC MOMENT IN YOUR MUSE’S LIFE?

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE HER SENSE OF STYLE?

       I don’t have any icons handy of her in the s3 yet where we see what I think is more her own personal preference but for the most part I would describe Naomi’s sense of style as …. practical chic? Practical punk? As a Belter, born and raised, Naomi has always been a necessities first, luxuries later if ever kinda gal.  Food, air, water, whatever is needed to keep her alive and breathing is what money would go to first.   And I think most Belters have a habit of living a very portable life.  Never know when you’re going to have to pack and dash because the station is under attack or it’s just time to move on or hey the air filters are broken in a section of the station have to pick up and move somewhere else temporarily and don’t want to leave their valuables behind etc. She is perfectly content in the jumpsuits and tank tops / t-shirts, combat boots or mag boots whatever.   She does get a bit of pinache as the seasons go on and she gets a bit more in the way of resources; her scarlet jumpsuit in s3 is especially eyecatching and she has new tattoos, her hair is more styled and more product is used etc. indicating she can and does have good taste and an aesthetic that she likes, but it isn’t at all a necessity for her.

HOW WOULD SHE DESCRIBE IT?

WHAT IS THE ONE THING NAOMI MOST WISHES SHE COULD TELL HER SON? WOULD SHE LEAVE THE ROCI/BEHEMOTH FOR HIM? IF SHE FOUND HIS FATHER, WOULD SHE LASH OUT AT HIM?

            That she loves him.  That above all else is the one thing that she will never believe she said enough, even if she said it a thousand times a day.  Even if she says it a thousand times a day onward after they reunite, if they ever reunite, it will never be enough to make up for all the times he needed to hear it, should have heard it, should have known it, and didn’t.  

           In a heartbeat, I think.  She would leave anyone, anything, for the chance to make things right with her son.  (I know they meet at least once in the books but I don’t know under what circumstances, what happens, etc. so this is based…. solely on my own interpretation and personal experience.)  Ideally, of course, she would be able to get him away from the father’s influence who, given how he got ‘custody’ of Filip, seems like a pretty manipulative bastard, a right wing fanatic aspect of the OPA and I can’t imagine that the environment the child was raised in was happy or healthy.  Ideally, she would not have to choose, and would be able to bring Filip onto the Roci, or the Behemoth, or wherever she was when they met up, and she could try and show him how she lives, her friends, her family, the people she cares about and the life she lives, the life he could live.  But if she had to choose, I cannot see her choosing to leave him again.  The only way I could see that happening is if he outright refuses to have anything to do with her and is in a situation where she actually can’t follow him because of where he’s living / where he’s berthing etc. and she doesn’t actually have a way to force or influence her way into that environment.  And even then you can bet your ass she wouldn’t let him just slip away.  She’d do everything she could to keep up with where he was, what he was doing, who he was with, all of it, trying to open a line of communication with him to try and get to know him.